David Reich - How One Small Tribe Conquered the World 70,000 Years Ago
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Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with David Reich, who is a geneticist at of heart ancient DNA at Harvard. And, David's work and his lab's work and his fields work has transformed, like, really transformed our understanding of human history and human evolution. I mean, it's very fascinating stuff for many perspectives. In its own light, it's very interesting. From the perspective of AI, which I plan on asking you about, it's interesting to understand human evolution and what that implies about what the future of AI might look like. Anyways, I'll stop doing the introduction. David, we wer
Well, I think what's very interesting is that what we have data from now are modern humans, the sequences of people living today. We also have data from Neanderthals, who are archaic humans who lived in Western Eurasia for the last couple of 100000 years, and we have now sequences from many Neanderthals. We also have DNA from Denisovans. Denisovans are archaic humans who were discovered from the DNA, from a a a finger bone that was found in a cave in Siberia, not anticipated to be a new group of humans, but were sequenced. So we have DNA from these different sources, plus bits of DNA from thes
Interesting. So, I mean, from your book, I remember that there are lineages of human modern humans that are over 200000 years separated from other groups, like the sun hunter gatherers from, everybody in Eurasia today or everybody descended from Eurasia. So the, then you're saying that a 100000 years before that is when we have a sister lineage with Neanderthals. Actually, I'm not sure what what the the new findings we're finding about how close the related Neanderthals are to us and how much, mitochondrial and micro chromosome DNA they share. What what model do you think is the most plausible
I'm very agnostic. I really, really don't know.
But the ones you sorry. The ones you the models you were just talking about, it seemed sounded like you thought they were low probability. Is there one you think is, like, more fun? I
think the models that are considered to be standard dogma are now low low probability. Yeah. So there's a standard dogma that's that's developed over an accretion of papers where the data the the history gets patched. So 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. That gets patched onto the current model, which is now a series of patches. I
understand.
And Nobody has really rethought the whole thing very hard. The whole thing is not obviously very, very different, so you can actually reassemble the whole model in a new way without doing it from the ground up or from the simple model up, but in fact thinking about it again and seeing if it can be all related in new ways. In fact, it might be actually quite different in the way that I just described.
Where did the gene flow between, the most recent gene flow between Neanderthals and humans I guess not the most recent, because the most recent was 60,000 or whatever years ago. But the one you're referring to here, where physically did that happen?
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