Earlier in the week, I pointed to a news story about upcoming
research that substantiates some amount of gene flow among
Pleistocene groups, persisting into living populations
("Multiregional evolution lives!"). That scenario made a bit of
a splash in the news, but the result is not unprecedented. Last
year around this time, I noted a study by Wall, Lohmueller and
Plagnol that came to a similar result -- estimating that around
5 percent of the gene pool of today's people outside Africa
derived from ancestral non-Africans. That followed on earlier
work by Plagnol and Wall from 2006 with essentially the same
result. Looking back at the blog, this has been a recurring
topic since the beginning. For example, back in 2005 when I was
still doing a meetings update, I posted about several conference
presentations on the topic ("Genetics and multiregional
evolution, meetings 2005"). At that time the new results were
from Alan Rogers, Jody Hey, and Mike Hammer's lab, all
suggesting that ancestral diversity either sugge