Multiregionalism and Diversity

There are many problems with your handling of the genetic data in your paper, the most important one being that you ignore most of data. In the case of the ginger gene, you are basing your argument on essentially nothing: you're using a newpaper article as your source, for research that has never been published. Until it's been published, the work has no scientific weight at all. And since the report is six years old and the work is still unpublished, it's a good bet that it never will be.

Jon,
No, I cannot address the point, because without seeing the published study I can't evaluate the work -- I can't tell what the authors did, can't tell how certain they are of their results, and can't see if there are any potential problems with it. That's why any significant research has to be published for other scientists to use it. The fact that the work was done by a good researcher at a good institution tells me nothing particular. The fact that the good researcher hasn't published the work in six years does suggest something, even though it isn't conclusive: the work probably didn't pan out. That's something that happens all the time.As for your paper as a whole, my main problem with it is that it does not weigh the genetic evidence for and against Out of Africa and come to a conclusion. Instead, it considers a small fraction of the evidence, and only pieces that might reflect badly on an OoA model. I suggested two specific kinds of evidence you'd neglected in a post on a previous thread: first, the overall diversity level of humans (which is low enough to be extremely difficult to reconcile with an evolving multiregional population), and second, the many nuclear loci that show evidence for a genetic origin in Africa (see the Takahata and Satta paper I cited there).