[blam]

"But Ms. Becker and her colleagues doubt there could have been enough people to drive the creatures to extinction with spears. It would have been a real challenge to slaughter all the animals," she says.

I must have said this 50 times on FR the last seven years but, does anyone listen to me, noooooo!

[Domestic Church]

Ms. Becker listened to you.

[ASA Vet]

does anyone listen to me

I've been listening to you for that whole time. You are one of the few remaining islands of sanity. Please continue.

[Dustbunny]

I listened to you, mainly because it was a logical, common sense conclusion.

[muawiyah]

Part of the evidence developed in the debate over where modern humans originated was the number of different mitochondrial DNA types found in different groups, and which ones each group had.

The "Out of Africa" thesis rests on a count showing that Africans have many more types than do other groups, and that all types have a source or counterpart (little changed) among Africans.

By conveniently forgetting about this comet which killed off tens of thousands of small settlements and tribes throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the sample got biased.

It's pretty clear that Africans would end up with more types of mitochondrial DNA than others simply because they weren't eradicated by the comet.

In fact, the latest "trail" out of Africa hypothesized by analysts in the field looks more like the outer limit of a blastzone than it does a "trail".

The Sa'ami and Eskimo ability to deal with vast quantities of seal meat and sea mammal fat suggests that at some point the only folks to survive the comet were hidden in caves, or under cliffs, and when they emerged there was nothing to eat but sea mammals.