Haplotype E is exclusively sub-Saharan (Nigeria, Ghana) and shows the introgression of a “ghost” species that shares a common ancestry with the modern human lineage. We are starting to understand the complex differentiation of the human species into such subspecies like Denisovans (South East Asia), Neanderthal (Europe) and the African "ghost", and the complex merging back, creating diverse mixtures. No one is superior to the others, and the general picture is a chaotic movement leading to no special goal. No signs that there is any tendency to "progress".
My first book on human evolution was a children's book "Como el Hombre se Hizo Gigante" (How man made himself a giant), the Spanish translation of a famous, Russian Marxist children's book. It showed a clear and linear advance, from man discovering fire to the building of glorious dams and canals in the Soviet Union, the Five Year Plan. Evolution was progress. (The message was that humanity was progressing from the primitive disorder of capitalism to the higher stage of socialism). It was a simplified, somewhat infantile (well, it was written for children) but easily understandable and attractive concept. Almost a theology, a well ordered and purposeful universe.
That theology was wrong. There is no progress but senseless chaos. A meditation point on this Yom Kippur.
The author was M. Iliyn, pseudonym of
Il’ia Iakovlevich Marshak. Jewish names were not in fashion in the Socialist paradise. Still, we believed.
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