In the scientific world, it is generally accepted that the first people on our planet lived in Africa. Proof of this can be found in the fossils discovered during archaeological excavations and the results of genetic studies. But Chinese scholars have recently taken a different view. The theory of evolution was refuted by them, and instead proposed another hypothesis of the origin of man. But does their research deserve close attention of scientists or all this has nothing to do with science?
As you know, there are several main hypotheses about where modern man came from. The first was offered in 1984. It was named multi-regional. The essence of this theory lies in the fact that the immediate ancestors of man - the archontropes - came from Africa and during the early and middle Pleistocene settled throughout Eurasia. All modern races of mankind originated from their separate populations: Negroids, Caucasians, Australoids and Mongoloids. In addition, the supporters of this hypothesis argue that erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans belong to the same species - people, representing its separate forms. The common ancestor of humans lived on the planet approximately 2.3-2.8 million years ago.
The main argument supporting this hypothesis is the fossils of archanthropus, erectus and other ancient people. The remains found throughout Eurasia, according to the proponents of this theory, may indicate a regional connection of some human characteristics. Simply put, modern man has arisen more than once.
At the same time, there is a serious problem, since the multi-regional hypothesis fundamentally contradicts all scientific ideas about the development of human civilization. On the one hand, in the theory of evolution, there is such a concept as parallelism, in which different species of animals independently of each other acquire common features. For example, dolphins and sharks have fins and a streamlined body. Due to these features, these representatives of the aquatic world are similar, but in no way can they be close relatives. Another example: in mammals, squids and insects, the eyes are so different from an anatomical point of view that it is impossible even to admit the existence of a common organ. With people, everything is completely different.
Refute multi-regional theory and genetic data. After analyzing human mitochondrial DNA in 1987, which is inherited only from mothers, it was found that all people are the descendants of one woman who lived about 200 thousand years ago. This woman lived among other people, but only her mitochondrial DNA was inherited by all modern people, including Africans, Australians and Asians.
This discovery is completely incompatible with the multi-regional hypothesis. People descended from one ancestor, and not from several, living all over the planet. Moreover, 200 thousand years is much less than two million. Of course, this does not help answer the question of when people appeared: the woman who became the ancestor of modern man was herself a man, like her parents. At the same time, thanks to new data, scientists started talking about the fact that the second hypothesis of human origin - the African one - is true.
According to this hypothesis, the first person who, in terms of anatomical characteristics, resembled a modern one, appeared in Africa. It was from there that all branches of man originated, including the bushmen and pygmies. As noted by Alexander Kozintsev, a researcher at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it was in Africa that a kind of mini-version of multiregionality could have formed. It is likely that many different groups formed here, some of which gave rise to man. At the same time, there were contacts between representatives of different branches, which ultimately led to the formation of modern man as one species.
In the global version, multiregionality cannot provide the genetic unity of the entire species of Homo sapiens. Otherwise, the supporters of this hypothesis would be forced to assume that the populations of ancient people living on different continents somehow contacted each other. However, there is no evidence of such intercontinental contacts during the Pleistocene.
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Homo sapiens left Africa about 70-50 thousand years ago. In the course of settling on the territory of Eurasia, he gradually ousted the Denisovans and Neanderthals, periodically interbreeding with them. In the event that modern man descended from Neanderthals, as advocates of multi-regionalism claim, then their mitochondrial DNA would practically not differ from human. But the deciphering of the genome of Neanderthals showed that there is a large genetic gap between them and modern man.
Despite this, attempts to rehabilitate this hypothesis are still ongoing. For example, Shi Huang, a Chinese geneticist from Central Southern University, who is an ardent opponent of Darwinism, decided to refute the genetic evidence.
He criticized the molecular clock technique, which is used to estimate the genetic distance between species. Its essence lies in the fact that in the process of changing the generation in the DNA of a certain species, there is an accumulation of neutral mutations that have no effect on survival. This is extremely important, because harmful mutations are discarded in the process, and beneficial ones happen very rarely. Related species also accumulate mutations at the same rate. That is why species belonging to the same genus are equally different from each other, and there are much more differences between species of different genera.
The molecular clock, therefore, is not only a tool for determining the relationship between species, it also helps to establish the approximate time of separation of one species from another. In this case, the word "about" is the key word. This is because molecular clocks, for all their usefulness, have many disadvantages. The main one is the rate of mutation, which is not always constant. This is influenced by certain factors that can speed up or slow down mutations. For example, the emergence of new repeated DNA sequences is possible, which are "hot spots" of random changes. Ultimately, species that are evolutionarily close may be much further along the molecular clock than species that are not so closely related. Proponents of multi-regionalism often point out thatthat the mitochondrial DNA of different chimpanzees is more different than that of Neanderthals and humans. In other words, the genetic chasm that separates modern man and Neanderthal, supposedly does not matter.
The Chinese scientist went further and made an attempt to prove that the generally accepted mechanism of evolution does not work. In order to explain why the molecular clock fails, he proposed a rather controversial theory, which he called the maximum genetic diversity hypothesis. According to this theory, mutations in genes are a driving factor only in microevolution, in other words, they contribute to the occurrence of minor changes at the level of one species. In the case of macroevolution, during which new groups of organisms are formed, epigenetic programs become more complicated, and the more complex they are, the more mutations can disrupt them. For this reason, theoretical genetic diversity should be reduced. Thus, Shi Huang argues, in complex organisms there is a certain limitation on the number of neutral mutations. This makes it possible to explain why Neanderthals and modern humans differ less than different types of chimpanzees.
The geneticist used his rather dubious hypothesis to revise the theory of evolution. Thus, Africans are closer to each other than to other groups of humanity. This conclusion contradicts the African theory - if people from the very beginning lived on the African continent, then nothing prevented their individual lines from accumulating a significant number of mutations. In addition, Huang tried to establish the approximate time when the separation of the main populations of human populations that lived in Eurasia took place - about two million years ago. The date raises great doubts when comparing it with the age of a woman - a single ancestor (the so-called mitochondrial Eve), but at the same time, it fits well into the hypothesis of multi-regionalism.
In addition, the geneticist suggested that there were two migrations from Africa: the Denisovans and the erectus with the Neanderthal ancestor. Based on this, the scientist came to the conclusion that modern Africans are closer to Denisovans than the rest of humanity. And the mittochondrial Eve was moved by him to East Asia.
The most interesting thing is that all these conclusions are based on the exclusion of neutral mutations from genetic analysis. As Huang points out, these mutations distort the truth due to epigenetic programs. The Chinese geneticist went even further and created his own version of the molecular clock, slowing it down and taking into account only changes in conservative, difficult-to-change DNA sequences. Thus, he just turned everything upside down, unnecessarily throwing away a significant amount of important data.
However, he did not take into account that there may be other explanations for the slowing down of the molecular clock. In particular, according to evolutionists, this may be due to the generation time effect. Humans live longer than monkeys, so mutations accumulate more slowly in the human body.
It is impossible to compare the rates of mutations between humans and chimpanzees. The molecular clock can be used only at the local level, to estimate the time of appearance of species closely related in genus. In the process of human evolution, the difference between humans and Neanderthals is of great importance. If the molecular clock is applied on a larger scale, blunders are inevitable. This further highlights how important it is to adhere to the boundaries of applicability of scientific instruments.
If we talk about the scientist himself, then his works, including the one in which he expounds his theory for the first time, were not reviewed by experts. Despite the support of supporters of multi-regionalism, Shi Huang is forced to be content with databases of preprints, to which he can upload drafts of his works, without fear of serious criticism from experts in the field of anthropogenesis.
Some Western scholars argue that Chinese research into human origins is political. Chinese scientists strive to prove to the rest of the world that humanity arose on the territory of their state. Despite the fact that Chinese anthropologists deny such assumptions, they zealously defend the theory of Asian origin, claiming that it has strong evidence.
It should be noted that some confrontation can be traced in other industries. In particular, the proportion of studies in China that support the benefits of Chinese medicine is much higher than in the rest of the world (all clinical results are criticized by supporters of evidence-based medicine). If we talk about the hypotheses of anthropogenesis, then it is likely that in this case, a certain role was played by resentment for the Peking man, who was a relative of Pithecanthropus and for a certain time was considered the ancestor of the Mongoloids. However, at present, the palm has moved to Africa.