Three major landmarks in paleoanthropology resulting from the genet- ics revolution

stand out. The rst, drawing on an earlier idea of a non- Darwinian molecular clock,
was the acceptance of a drastic shortening of the time period since the
chimpanzee-hominid divergence, to around 5 million years. The second was the
establishment of mitochondrial DNA methods of chronology to propound the Eve
and Out of Africa hypotheses, initiating a new phase in an older debate over
single-lineage versus multiregional mod- els of human origins. Both breakthroughs
were based on methods of infer- ence from extant populations. The third landmark
was the successful extrac- tion of mitochondrial DNA from a Neanderthal specimen,
which bolstered the argument for a species difference between Neanderthals and
modern humans and an early separation between them. That issue is far from
resolved, but the signicance of the event lies in the potential for obtaining DNA
directly from ever older remains. The mitochondrial DNA methodology was
immediately applied to the study of human population history. One of the early
Wenner-Gren projects was Mark Stonekings analysis of blood samples from
populations on six Indonesian islands, designed to trace prehistoric migrations
through the Pacic. Other proposals for the study of DNA in diverse populations followed, all aspiring to uncover group relationships and ultimately to recon- struct
population movements and adaptations. From my perspective as a champion of
four-eld anthropology (including biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural
anthropology, and linguis- tics), this development held the promise of integrating
data from all the elds to address issues of population history and relationships.
Increasingly, however, what we saw at Wenner-Gren were applications claiming to
recon- struct population history from DNA alone, without recourse to independent
evidence from prehistory or other sources and with little questioning as to what DNA
can actually reveal. There was also an unfortunate use of nonbi- ological concepts,
such as ethnic group or language group (race being stu- diously avoided, for the
most part), with the assumption that such entities can be identied directly from the
DNA. The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was a particular product of the
interest in genetic relationships of populations. It was born out of the messianic
vision of the geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who was engaged in reconstructing
world population history and who argued for the need to bring an appreciation of
human genetic diversity to the effort to map the genome. Many biological
anthropologists embraced the HGDP in the early 1990s in the hope that it would
yield an invaluable data bank of population genetics that could be applied to a wide
range of old and new anthropolog- ical problems. A surge of criticism followed,
however, not only from mem- bers and advocates of the potential target groups
(those whose blood would be collected) but also from anthropologists who saw
theoretical