David Reich

Are Neanderthals archaic?

Neanderthals are modern.

What's also become clear in the last few years in a separate thread of research, not based on ancient DNA, but based on using more and more powerful and sophisticated ways of pattern finding in modern data, is that modern humans are also highly substructured.

We can see that even without having ancient DNA yet.

Of course, once one has ancient DNA, it's so much clearer.

But it's very clear that you can't explain, for example, modern African DNA without invoking very extreme substructure as deep as the mixtures that contributed and mixed between Neanderthals and modern humans.

And so that mixture, which of those groups were archaic?

Which of them were modern?

Were they both archaic?

Was one of them modern?

Was one of those more closely related to Neanderthals and the possibly higher proportion of ancestry?

It's not obviously wrong that the model's very, very different from the standard one that we currently have.

I'm very agnostic.

I really, really don't know.

I think the models that are considered to be standard dogma are now low probability.

There's a standard dogma that's developed over an accretion of papers where the history gets patched.

Someone sequences a genome, someone performs an analysis, someone proves something that wasn't known before.

And so we claim a mixture event we didn't know about it before, an event that we didn't know before.

And that gets patched onto the current model, which is now a series of patches.

And nobody has really rethought the whole thing very hard.