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“The molecular stuff has been very important,” says Milford Wolpoff, an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan and a leading critic of the Out of Africa theory of human origins. “But in the end it has the same problem fossils have—the sample size is very small.” Earlier this month, the journal Science published a Wolpoff study of early human skulls, which suggests that Africans may have mixed with earlier hominids rather than supplanting them. The small number of living humans sampled by geneticists, Wolpoff says, and the effects of natural selection over the millennia, make it foolhardy to say with assurance that Out of Africa is right. The geneticists, for their part, readily admit that they need more samples, more markers, and more precise calculations. But they also say that even with today’s imperfect science, the DNA is right. And in places like India and China, where the fossil record is scanty, the genetic history will be the only history. “Genetics is moving so fast,” says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “It’s well ahead of the fossil and historical record.”

"Earlier this month, the journal Science published a Wolpoff study of early human skulls, which suggests that Africans may have mixed with earlier hominids rather than supplanting them. The small number of living humans sampled by geneticists, Wolpoff says, and the effects of natural selection over the millennia, make it foolhardy to say with assurance that Out of Africa is right."

Maybe Wolford would be better served by submitting those skulls to DNA analysis rather than doing "anthropological phrenology". And the "number of living humans" sampled by geneticists is already large enough to be a statistically valid sample. Many examples of all races have been "fingerprinted", with NO data to support Wolford's position.

"Genetics is moving so fast," says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. "It's well ahead of the fossil and historical record."

Heh... Stringer is a Replacement advocate, actually *the* Replacement advocate, and that's just another in a long line of European-based racial superiority models.

Doncha love that quote, though -- the actual morphology, on which *all his assumptions are based*, doesn't mean anything, because we've got some DNA of some few thousands of living people, out of a population of six billion and more, and have made no sampling bias errors, and maintain our original assumptions as the conclusions of every study because we're right and everyone else is wrong, nyah nyah.

The non-speaking Neandertal idea is a persistent baseless idea, and makes a great companion to the baseless idea -- which has come down from Virchow -- that Neandertal went extinct and the glorious, gracile, body-beautiful moderns survived. And sometimes it's even claimed that not a drop of blood was shed in the process. I regard this whole corpus as analogous to Judge Bork's "political seduction of the law" -- it's the political seduction of science.