David Reich

And you have a phenomenon where

It could be the case that if your dad is an archaic male, then you're not going to be as successful in the competition for local females as if your dad is a non-archaic male.

So some simple social phenomenon like that could explain the data.

And we actually see this in human society.

So for example, if I remember right, like in Central African rainforest hunter-gatherers, there's different treatment of boys and girls depending on whether their dad or mom is one group or the other.

So it's a question.

So there's multiple possible explanations, but it's much easier to explain that than both the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome.

One possibility is that the mitochondrial DNA was less biologically fit.

Another possibility is that there's social discrimination against people based on whether their parents are archaic or not.

Which is, I think, not at all surprising in a human context.

Okay, so the Neanderthals... It's the weakest link in this argument.

This argument is probably wrong, but I'm just telling you what I'm thinking about.

The genetic ancestry doesn't survive.

Probably, yeah.

But these are the ones we are detecting currently.

I think that this is not at all surprising given the context.

So if you think about this model, this is 700 or 800,000 years ago.

This is 300,000 years ago, right?

So this is like 400,000 years separated.

You talked about the Batia paper with me earlier.