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Scientists dismiss race as key to human origins SUN CITY, South Africa (July 8, 1998 10:04 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -- God does not play dice, Einstein always insisted, so the clatter of roulette tables and slot machines would seem a singularly inappropriate setting for a serious investigation into the origins of humanity. On the other hand, there is a delicious irony in a casino complex which is a monument to the inanities of apartheid hosting a scientific gathering that has conceded one seemingly inescapable truth -- the commonality of mankind. More than 700 delegates from 75 countries concluded a unique interdisciplinary conference this weekend at Sun City in the former South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana: a "dual congress" held by the International Association for the Study of Human Paleontology and the International Association of Human Biologists. For a week some of the world's top scientists argued about the accuracy of dating methods, the prehensile tendencies of "Little Foot," whose remains are the latest contender for "missing link" status and the claim to respectability of the "aquatic ape theory", which offers, among other things, an explanation of mankind's tendency to baldness and preference for the missionary position. But underlying the myriad riddles that are the joy of paleontology sits a potentially explosive issue. It was represented at the conference by a "race questionnaire" issued to delegates. It posed the single question: whether there are "biological races within the species Homo sapiens." The answer turns on a related issue which has long taxed paleontological circles but is, with the help of biologists, in the process of being decided: the relative claims of what are known as the "Out of Africa" theory and "multi-regionalism." The names are misleading, because most mainstream scientists now accept that mankind originated in Africa five million years ago. The argument turns more on which boatload of emigrants played Mayflower to the rest of the world: Homo erectus, who seemingly left African shores 1.5 million years ago, or Homo sapiens, who is held to have gone forth to conquer a mere 150,000 years ago, exterminating the remnants of erectus. At the heart of the argument lies the question whether the racial characteristics of present-day man -- notably skin color -- are the product of comparatively recent, and therefore superficial, adaptations to environment or represent a far longer and possibly more significant process of evolution. The champion of the multi-regionalism approach was a blunt-talking Australian university professor, Allen Thorne. "I believe race exists," he said. "I don't think there was a second Out of Africa, because I don't think there was a new species. I think it's been the same species for the last two million years." The Out of Africa hypothesis meant Homo sapiens would have had to wipe out all the other hominid populations in the world -- such as the Neanderthals. "Hitler didn't manage that, so how does a bunch of guys with a few spears and rocks?" Thorne askeed. Biological differences between population groups were enormous, he insisted, and could not be accounted for by the time-spans offered by the Out of Africa theorists. But Thorne's position is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. "The Out of Africa model has substantially more support in the paleontological community now because of the data," said Tim White from the University of California, who discovered Ardepithecus ramidus, the earliest hominid remains on record, dating back 4.4 million years. "The earliest anatomically modern people are indeed African and Middle Eastern and date to little more than 100,000 years ago," White said. "The earliest people in Australia may be as old as 40,000-50,000 years." Chris Stringer, principal researcher into human origins at London's Natural History Museum backed him. "A million years ago there were people living in Europe, in Asia and in the Far East, but there was only one place which has a continuous line of evolution from those ancient people through to modern people, and that is Africa." The Neanderthals and their counterparts in China and Java had become extinct and, at most, "their contribution to our ancestry is very low," Stringer said. So-called racial features had evolved "very recently" in Europe, probably 20,000 years ago. There was growing support for this theory from genetics, Stringer said. One of the world's leading geneticists, Sir Walter Bodmer, principal of Hertford College of Oxford University and former director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, backed them, pointing out that gene frequency analysis supported the Out of Africa hypothesis. "All the evidence suggests that about 150,000 years ago there was a later migration out of Africa of a species that was very close to what we are, if not the same as Homo sapiens. It's the descendants of those that formed the different population groups in different parts of the world," he said. "Most of the genetic variation in human populations is found within any population, and a minority of it relates to difference between them. You can take a population of 1,000 individuals from anywhere and they will have as much variation, almost, as a population of 1,000 sampled from all over the world. The differences between populations is far less than the differences within them." "There is no credence to a demarcation of human populations into clearly separated population groups." By DAVID BERESFORD, The Guardian. 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