Very interesting, particularly the following:
"IF ANYONE CAN untangle that ancient history, it’s Reich. David Anthony, who continues to work with him to find the original speakers of proto-Indo-European (the Yamnaya are thought to have spread the language, but not to have invented it), describes him as “a remarkable man."
Also this:
"Reich is not resting on his laurels. As the data accumulate, and the tools become more sophisticated and powerful, he has begun revisiting some of his own prior interpretations of human prehistory, and coming to terms with what he describes as “weird signals in the current data.” Mitochondrial DNA shows that modern humans and Neanderthals are much more closely related to each other in the maternal line than either is to Denisovans. The Y chromosomes of modern humans and Neanderthals, passed only in the paternal line, are also much more closely related to each other than to Denisovans. “But then if you look at the whole genome, on average, Neanderthals and Denisovans are more closely related to each other than either one is to modern humans. Having an entirely male line and an entirely female line saying one thing, and then the rest of the genome saying something else, is weird.” The explanation some people give is that there may have been modern human mixture with Neanderthals further back in time than currently understood, somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago, and that contributed a few percent to the Neanderthal genome. “But it’s very surprising that only a few percent contribution would be the source of both the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA for Neanderthals.” Maybe contemporary non-Africans are actually Neanderthals, and later waves of modern human DNA from Africa swamped the rest of non-Africans’ genomes so “non-Africans are best described as Neanderthals, with 98 percent modern human mixture, or something profoundly philosophically unsettling like that,” he says, half seriously."