otinuoustransition. “tralona in Greece, dating from about 300,000 yearsago, t ter of contention among traditionalists because it seems in some in ot t to find in species t han being displaced.”
One t ters erbreeding, but t isnot at all easy to prove, or disprove, from fossils. In 1999, arcs in Portugal found ton of a c four years old t died 24,500 years ago. ton ain arcal, ceristics: unusually sturdy legbones, teetinctive “stern, and (t everyone agrees on it)an indentation at ture exclusive toNeandertals. Erik trinkaus of ason University in St. Louis, ty onNeandertals, announced to be a modern alsinterbred. Otroubled t tal and modern features more blended. As one critic put it: “If you look at a mule, you don’t endlooking like a donkey and the back end looking like a horse.”
Ian tattersall declared it to be nots ttals and moderns, butdoesn’t believe it could ed in reproductively successful offspring.
1“I don’t kno are t different and still in the samespecies,” he says.
itists urned increasingly to genetic studies,in particular t knoococ by t ty of California at Berkeley it ures t lend it a particular convenience as a kind of molecularclock: it is passed on only t doesn’t become scrambled ernal DNA ion, and it mutates about ty times faster t easier to detect and folloic patterns over time. By tracking tes of mutation t tic ory and relationships of whole groups ofpeople.
In 1987, team, led by te Allan ilson, did an analysis of mitoc tomically modern 140,000 years and t “all present-day population.” It o tiregionalists. But to look a little more closely at ta. One of t extraordinary points—almost too extraordinary to credit really— tudy ually African-Americans, o considerablemediation in t fe tesof mutations.
By 1992, tudy ed. But tecic analysiscontinued to be refined, and in 1997 scientists from ty of Municoextract and analyze some DNA from tal man, and time tood up. tudy found t tal DNA rongly indicating t tic connec