Hallast et al. (2021) recently published a research paper that proposes East Asia as the geographic point of origin for non-African Y-chromosome lineages. I disagree. My analysis of the genetic, paleoclimatological, and archeological data (St. Clair 2020) defines the Levant as the source region. A summary of my arguments is as follows:
1) Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.
2) The Y-chromosome data support a single out-of-Africa migration during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (between 71 and 130 thousand years ago).
3) Admixture between humans and Neanderthals support human occupation of the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (between 71 and 130 thousand years ago).
4) The paleoclimatological evidence supports an out-of-Africa migration into the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (between 71 and 130 thousand years ago).
5) The fossil evidence supports an out-of-Africa migration into the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (between 71 and 130 thousand years ago).
6) Fossil evidence supports human occupation of the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (between 57 and 71 thousand years ago).
7) The paleoclimatological evidence supports human occupation of the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (between 57 and 71 thousand years ago).
8) Dating estimates for haplogroups D-M174, E-M96 and C-M130 support human occupation of the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (between 57 and 71 thousand years ago).
9) The fossil record sets the human colonization of Europe, East Asia, and Australia during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (between 29 and 57 thousand years ago).
10) The paleoclimatological record sets the human colonization of Europe, East Asia, and Australia during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (between 29 and 57 thousand years ago).
11) The phylogeography of Y-chromosome variation and dating estimates support the human colonization of Europe, East Asia and Australia during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (between 29 and 57 thousand years ago).
East Asian origins of non-African Y-chromosome haplogroups, as proposed by Hallast et al. (2021) is problematic for the following reason: any Y-chromosome mutations that may have evolved in the region during Marine Isotope Stage 4 would have perished because of the cataclysmic Toba volcano explosion that occurred in Indonesia about 75 thousand years ago (for more details, see Rampino et al. 2000; and Wei and Li 2017).
Hallast, Pille et al. 2021. “A Southeast Asian origin for present‑day non‑African human Y chromosomes.” Human Genetics (2021) 140: 299-307.”
Rampino, Michael R. and Stanley H. Ambrose 2000. “Volcanic winter in the Volcanic winter in the Garden of Eden: The Toba supereruption and the late Pleistocene human population crash.” Geological Society of America Special Papers 345: 71-82.
St. Clair, Michael R. 2020. “The Prehistory of Language from the Perspective of the Y-Chromosome.” The Genetic-Linguistic Interface Project. Preprint. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26725.01760
Wei, Lan-Hai and Hui Li 2017. “Fuyan human of 120–80 kya cannot challenge the Out-of-Africa theory for modern human dispersal.” Science Bulletin 62: 316-318.
I will steer generally clear of the debate of what the relatively recent distribution of haplogroups (i.e. last few thousand years) and the fragmentary fossil genetics can tell us about what arose where. I'm not a geneticist, but I do understand models and non-unique solutions.
What I do want to comment about, because natural hazards are my specialty, is the idea of a haplogroup having been definitively wiped out ("would have perished" in the paragraph following #11 in the post by Michael St. Clair above). An eruption, even as massive as that of Toba circa 75,000 BP, produces a finite region of total devastation (i.e. no large vertebrates survive). A haplogroup arising from a mutation, even at the exact site of the current Lake Toba, could have dispersed far enough in a few thousand years to have survived the eruption in some small group of humans, and thus have perpetuated. I am not arguing that such a thing did, or did not, happen. I am merely pointing out that the occurrence of the Toba eruption in Indonesia does not preclude the survival of humans in Fuyan, China.
Thank you for your comments. The archeological data favor several out-of-Africa dispersals of Homo sapiens, but the climate and genetic data suggest only one of these was successful. The successful model posits a bottleneck at the time of the Toba eruption followed by population grown and expansions at the beginning of MIS 3.
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