Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
10 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“We’re getting about 7,200 positions in the DNA that have 50% confidence of being real. Only half of those are real—we don’t know which ones—so 3,600 of them are real.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. This is actively what I’m thinking about all the time right now. There’s a big transformation in terms of the culture of humans 300,000 or 400,000 years ago: this invention of Levallois technology, the ability to make stone tools out of cores.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if we talked about it before, but I remain very confused about the relationships between archaic and modern humans.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. Nobody’s thinking about this model right now. It just seems obviously a very natural model to me.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don't know. Here’s one thing that is really interesting. A couple of years ago, we published a paper on relatively recent hunter-gatherer populations from mostly eastern and central Africa in order to be able to discern these deep population exchanges that we would really like to know in order to understand human evolution.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don't know. It's very speculative. I'm very tempted to think that there's so many of these groups that some of them would eventually have gone down this route.”
07 / uncertainty
“We don't know that. We just know that today we have it. It could have been only a couple of hundred thousand years ago or 100,000 years ago that these changes happened.”
08 / uncertainty
“The bottleneck occurred well before the mixture with Neanderthals, which is probably somewhere like 50,000 years ago, plus or minus 5000 years or something. We don't know where it occurred.”
09 / uncertainty
“We don’t know the biological underpinning of the differences that modern humans have from our closest living relatives.”
10 / uncertainty
“I don't know. The discovery of the ability to extract DNA from ancient human remains was such a shock that we could even do this.”