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Strictly speaking, you could be both right and wrong. It was noted by the authors that if you account for all the long segments of N-ancestry, there was still an excess of N-ancestry. This could indicate that the population was already admixed with N some time before the most recent event. It...

Yes. The timespan we lived alongside each other was probably much greater. And we didn't interbreed with them. At all. We also overlapped with Neanderthals outside of Europe without interbreeding. All the Neanderthal genes in the current human population, and the skeletal remains of ancient...

It wasn't local, Cocoliztli was a European disease like researchers were saying all the time. A strain of salmonella. Anyway, if the immunity is to Smallpox only, the natives still suffer badly from a large number of other virgin field epidemics. the Incas might do better, without a smallpox...

Greenland was not all that christian at the best of times. At least one bishop are recorded as having wept and begged not to be sent there. When the western settlement went dark, the prevailing opinion in Scandinavia was that they had reverted to paganism and fled to Vinland. I would not be...

Well, that is not entirely so. But we are butting up against the fuzzy definitions of "behavioral modernity". It is basically what distinguishes modern humans from paleontology's anatomically modern humans, and other primates. And that seems to be a fuzzy border. Like I wrote, one view puts it...

I believe "Behavioral Modernity" predate agriculture by rather a vast amount of time. The people who consider it to have started late say about 50 000 years ago or so, the early one estimate back before the split with the Neanderthals. It includes things like abstract though, trade, symbolism...

The Ainu/Emishi/Jomon seem to have had better population densities than most hunter-gatherers, perhaps due to their small-scale agriculture or the richness of the Japanese archipelago, similar to the pacific northwest. A bit more contact with China might help them to shift towards more...

What is your definition of "relatively advanced civilization" ? The footprint we are currently stomping down on earth will certainly be visible for geologic ages. Deposits of pollution, mass extinctions, targeted extractions of metal, coal, oil etc, monocultures, pollen deposits, concrete, etc...

Well, we shall see. The first link seems to be a short retort to the original paper by the author of the 2014 study. Lots of papers have them and sometimes they turn out to be right. Two sources were used in the original paper, and this one seems to point out that the first yields a significant...

I had a memory of a paper prodding the back of my head in relation to this , and it finally surfaced. We do not have to guess at what the Siberian peoples who drifted or conquered their way into Europe in the neolithic look like. There is still a relic population extant! A 2002 study, "Genetic...

Yes. Like I said, the most likely source population would be the megalith building cultures of western Europe. So you'd get henges, standing stones, long barrow graves etc :) Displacement of local populations were far more a matter of local climate than distance from the source populations. The...

Well, not really. The thing about agriculturalists is that they produce far, far more calories per square mile of land than hunter-gatherers, and that leads to an incredible difference in population. Hunter-gatherers bump their head against their population ceiling much sooner. A small seed...

Make it agriculturalists, and I'd expect the much the same displacement of hunter-gatherers as we had in Europe.

Difficult without a geologic POD. Siberia is right next to the Americas, very close geographically, its just moving along the same latitude, same climate, same marine environment, similar fauna mostly. People gonna people. Haplogroups are only a small part of the genome. People with different...

Pretty much. Although the development of the skin tone preceded farming in Scandinavia by thousands of years, while I think it followed farming in Southern Europe. So I think it can be related to a number of different changes in diet. My personal speculation is that the end of the Ice Age cause...

We don't find the East Asian skin colour genes in WHGs either. What we find are varieties of the skin influencing genes that are associated with dark skin across todays population varieties. Which actually is what I am saying. We do know that there were variants for dark skin present, we...

<Dashing this off at work, get to Optical_Illusion when I got a bit more of a breather> You misunderstand. While we have pretty good indications that there is a strong selective pressure for blue eyes the further north you go, we don't know the nature of the pressure. We can just observe the...

Well, he is entitled to his opinion, but as his colleagues in that very thread do not agree this is a minority opinion. Possibly a minority of one. The fact is, we know quite a bit about which genes influence and shape skin color. (Its important in forensics for example). When we examine the...

One of the big challenges here is that the Pacific is much, much bigger than the Atlantic. East Asia simply had a much longer way to go than Europe. In fact, as the crow flies I suspect its not much further to go west to the Americas. So you need much more developed ships and navigation. The...

Like the aptly named metalinvader665 points out, there has been a number of migrations. We can also add the Inuit and whatever Australasian people echoes in the genes of Amazonian Indians (only). I suspect a migration finding an empty continent would have had a much easier time of it too. As an...