Fascinating today to see how many reactions to the new mitochondrial DNA phylogeny paper in @nature could have been direct quotes from 1988 mtDNA "out of Africa versus multiregional evolution" debates... doi.org/10.1038/s41586… 
@nature "The Search for Adam and Eve", by @JohnTierneyNYC was a @Newsweek cover story in January, 1988, covering the story of how geneticists were revolutionizing human origins through the study of mtDNA. I'm going to share some quotes from the article in this thread.
"As the veteran excavator Richard Leakey declared in 1977: 'There is no single center where modern man was born.'"
"What bothers many of us paleontologists," said Fred Smith of the University of Tennessee, "is the perception that this new data from DNA is so precise and scientific and that we paleontologists are just a bunch of bumbling old fools."
Smith continues: "But if you listen to the geneticists, you realize they're as divided about their genetic data as we are about the bones. We may be bumbling fools, but we're not any more bumbling than they are."
(You see why I love Fred Smith)
"The most obvious conclusion from the genetic evidence," [says paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff], "is that Eve's descendants spread out of Africa and weren't incorporated at all into the local populations. I find that incredible."
Wolpoff continues: "In recorded history, there always has been intermixing as populations moved or villages exchanged wives. I believe we have a long history of people constantly mixing with one another and cooperating with one another and evolving into one great family."
"We don't know what's going on here," says the University of Pennsylvania's Alan Mann. "Certainly the mitochondrial data is a significant advance. But there really isn't any good fossil evidence from that period to back it up."
Mann continues: "In this field, a person kicks over a stone in Africa, and we have to rewrite the textbooks."
"It's an inevitable consequence of reproduction," says John Avise, a geneticist at the University of Georgia. "Lineages will be going extinct all the time."
"There must be one lucky mother," [geneticist Allan] Wilson says. "I worry about the term 'Eve' a little bit because of the implication that in her generation there were only two people. We are not saying that."
Wilson continues: "We're saying that in her generation there was some unknown number of men and women, probably a fairly large number, maybe a few thousand."
"If it's correct, and I'd put money on it, this idea is tremendously important," says Stephen Jay Gould... "It makes us realize that all human beings, despite differences in external appearance, are really members of a single entity that's had a very recent origin in one place."
I'm not really going to editorialize in this thread. Like I said, I find it fascinating how little has changed. Our fossil record is better, but most of the increased sample is Homo naledi.
We know a good deal more about African early MSA and latest ESA archaeology but face the enormous problem that hardly anywhere presents archaeology in direct association with skeletal material.
And genetic data are deep but we've gained an appreciation that today's genomes are a hugely biased sample to ask questions about past populations. Even so, we know now of deep populations in Africa that survived well into the Late Pleistocene.
