Quote of note:

He sees it as scientific proof that racism has no rational basis. "You can be 99 percent confident that there was recurrent genetic interchange between African and Eurasian populations," he says. "So the idea of pure, distinct races in humans does not exist. We humans don't have a tree relationship, but rather a trellis. We're intertwined."

It's good to remember that for every scientist who wants to prove that Africans are genetically distinct from Europeans, there's one who wants to prove they aren't.

Um...race has no rational basis...but you really can't use the relationships between two non-human species as proof.

Now you may be saying, sure, humans could have been raping Homo erectus, but that doesn't mean any of them made babies -- that's like saying humans who rape chimps are interbreeding. And you'd be right if it turned out to be true that there was only one migration out of Africa 100,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens had diverged enough from its fellow hominids that matings were likely to be sterile. But if Templeton's findings are accurate, there were migrations out of Africa 1.5 million years ago and 700,000 years ago, as well as the familiar one we all know and love, 100,000 years ago.

The multiple migration theory IS the standard anti-African "interpretation" of the evidence. But who gives a damn what happened 700,000 years ago when our species developed 300,000 years after that? And can you find any species (not traits) other than humans for which people are arguing for the emergence of multiple appearances of genetically identical species?

Interbreeders
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
Posted on February 14, 2006

There's an anthropologist in St. Louis who used a computer simulation to prove that people interbred with other species for at least a million years. You know what that means -- Homo erectus is more ripe for punnage than ever. Washington University professor Alan R. Templeton published his findings in the recently issued Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, explaining that he'd finally disproved the popular "out of Africa" theory, which holds that Homo sapiens zoomed out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago, killing every other hominid it met (including fellow tool users and fire makers Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis).

Instead of killing, Templeton found, early humans were more likely having sex with these hominids on their way out of Africa into Asia and Europe. They also probably migrated out of Africa in three waves, rather than one or two, seeding Asia and Europe with early hominids who later cozied up with newly arrived groups.

Templeton figured all this out using a computer program called GEODIS, which reconstructs early human mating patterns by doing statistical analysis on population distributions of haplotypes, chunks of genes that get inherited together over long swaths of history. Based on what he found, Templeton says, "The hypothesis of no interbreeding is so grossly incompatible with the data that you can reject it."