Thread by @AdamRutherford

New paper out today, finally, on the misplaced confidence about a so-called geographical ‘homeland’ of Homo sapiens, and how to avoid ‘inference pitfalls’ from weak data.

authors.elsevier.com/c/1d3iS15SlTrL…

Led by @DrEleanorScerri, @cschlebu, @liisaloog and @mt_genes, it’s a response to Chan et al (2019), a Nature paper which we didn’t think was very good, and was misleading about how we can understand human origins.

Thanks to a dizzying array of colleagues from a range of disciplines @huw_groucutt, @Turi__King, @chiarabarbieri, Guido Barbujani, @ChikhiLounes, @ChrisStringer65, Mattias Jakobsson, @DrAEriksson, @DrManica, @SarahTishkoff, @aylwyn_scally, Chris Brierley,

Here’s a key conclusion. It’s a push back against simplistic (and scientifically flawed) origin stories, which have popular appeal, but do not reflect the inherent complexity and messiness of human evolution, which we should embrace.