Not Out-of-Africa

In his 2000 edition of Genes, People, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza publishes the following table on page 89.

Cavalli-Sforza argues that this table supports the general out-of-africa theory. It doesn't

I have worked for several decades with this type of analysis, MDSCAL, and this table tells me clearly that all the populations shown left the same geographic location in central Asia in the vicinity of Tashkent, the so called Kurgan Region. The reason that the African tribes are arrayed the way they are is because they are small cohorts with limited genetic interaction. This is probably due to the diseases in Africa and the difficulty of long range travel. It is also possible that the Africans left the Kurgan region earlier than the rest. But it appears more likely that all left within a few thousand years of each other, about the same time, probably 40,000 years ago based on other evidence Cavalli-Sforza presents.

In addition, Cavalli-Sforza presents evidence, without tables, that two large population expansions occurred that parallel historic expansions. One is the sweep of a peoples from the Norse peninsula through all of Europe. The other originates in Japan and sweeps up Korea into most of the surrounding area. The former population pattern resembles the historic path of the Vikings; the latter, the invasion of the Japanese from 1890 to 1941. It seems to me that the historic patterns could not have left the genetic record that Cavalli-Sforza finds. There must have been one or more prehistoric movements of the same people into the same regions.

 

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