Out Of Israel

With the h/t to Moldbug (for the title): David Reich floats a hypothesis. Not co-written unless he used AI, which I suspect he didn't. This claims a strong modern-human presence in the Levant that never ventured east, but led to 3%-7% of the resultant Neander genes found not only in Iberia but also in the Neanders they'd replace.

Because it was that early: 300kya. That'd be the long downslope from the MIS 9 Purfleet peak before MIS 8's false subpeak. I'd assumed some modern humans mixed n' mingled but, if Reich is right, they did this well before Eemian MIS 5.

This wasn't intuitive to me. We are aware of Neanders roaming the Levant before the modern-human expansions of the 60s kya (and the contemporary Iberian Neander expansion). Reich's conclusion implies all the Neanders would have pushed into the Levant since MIS 8 (and Eemian).

I don't know how this accounts for the ghost lineage of "modern" Eurasians which avoided all Neander contact until finally reuniting with their modern kin (us). Said modern kin meanwhile subsumed the Neanders of the Levant.

But most of Reich' conjucture seems to be cluster the 300kya horizon. When we hear of modern-modern humans (including subsaharans) being 80/20: the 80% - for Reich - is east Africa ("Kush"), Nile, and north Africa. That's what spilled into the elder Neanders. The 20% was... erectus, pretty-much.

There may have been a green-sahara at the Purfleet peak. This would have dried out pushing the hunter-gatherers there southward, maybe northeast too.