This is an interesting surmise and really confirms the refugia driver to
speciation. For humanity there is no
such thing and rapid interbreeding is certain allowing variation to be well distributed
perhaps in a few thousand years. In fact,
barbaric man used every opportunity to share gene flow and our only real
opportunity for island speciation happened just too recently to do much good.
The closest we actually have are our handful of old lineages who hied themselves
out into the wilderness to preserve their particular lineage and that will be overwhelmed
in time also.
I have actually done the calculation to determine how fast knowledge can
travel worldwide using only hunter gatherers.
This worked out to around a thousand years as the core knowledge would
be held naturally by women as they are passed generationally from tribe to
tribe.
Humans Did Not Speciate For Two Million Years
Newly found fossils suggest hominids are
‘breeds’ of the same species.
I remember hearing exactly this sort of thing
in my anthropology/archaeology courses while I trudged through university
attaining my first degree. Maybe you’ve also taken similar courses in the
past, and have heard the same kind of thing. Well, a recent discovery in
Dmanisi serves to lend much credence to this theory after all.
The skull, named ‘Skull 5’, appears to have
traits belonging to African hominids dating from at least two million years
ago, and also traits belonging to Eurasian hominids dating to around 1.5
million years ago. The skull was found in a pit with four other humanoid
fossils, each of them slightly different from the others. And with several
animals, all dating to around the same time.
The hybrid appearance of Skull 5 has made the
researchers studying it begin to turn towards the theory of human evolution
that basically says we’re all still Homo erecti – just different ‘breeds’,
so-to-speak, of the original erectus line. In other words, our entire hominid
line hasn’t speciated (formed new species) at all in over two million years.
For two million years our line has been
diversifying, especially once we started migrating out of Africa. I imagine the
main thing that would keep us from speciating during this time would be a
healthy amount of interbreeding continuously occurring across vast expanses of
our population. Of course, this tradition continues, definitely more so,
to this day.
So, instead of wracking one’s head in futility
trying to construct a ‘normal’ phylogeny for the hominid line, as is usually
possible for most other animals, one should construct more of a bubble-shaped
phylogenetic tree and simply label the various ‘buddings’ as different kinds of
a one particular species of hominid – whatever one we wish to go with.
That means we must start to think like this
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