The Family of Man: CHART OF THE DAY
A figure from Priya Moorjani’s Stanley Hall lab—recovering archaic DNA from living genomes—is the occasion for a look at the Family of Man 75,000 years ago. How the 400,000 of all homo sapiens subspecies then—outnumbered 5-1 by our Great Ape hominid cousins who had not made the evolutionary bet on super-big, super-energy consuming brain—fill up the 2³⁰⁰ slots back then in my ancestry lineage tree.
Today we have this figure made by Yulin Zhang and Priya Moorjani, coming from Stanley Hall, 200 yards to the east of Evans Hall where my office is:
Relevant because I need to figure out what to do with my first substantial “an anthology intelligence, a gift-exchanging division of labor, a cultural species” week in Econ 135 come next spring.
Some version of the Zhang-Moorjani figure certainly belongs somwhere on the slides. But where, and how, exactly? It is relevant to the “when did we become us?” question, and to the knotty question of what genetic and cultural switches that were flipped mattered, and when they happened:
Yulin Zhang, Priya Moorjani, & al.: Tracing Archaic DNA <https://moorjanilab.org/> <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aef8874> <https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/07/30/new-technique-pinpoints-human-dna-inherited-from-ghost-ancestors/>: ‘Genealogies preserve a record of our evolutionary past. TRACE reconstructs those histories across the genome. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, we can uncover genetic contributions from extinct human populations, even in the absence of ancient DNA…. Adaptation to new pathogens and food sources has been one of the strongest selective pressures in human evolution. Interbreeding with other human groups introduced new genetic variation, providing additional raw material for natural selection. Beneficial variants could then be retained and spread over many generations…
How to think about this?
Well, for the generation alive 75,000 years ago, there are 2300 23000 slots in my ancestral lineage family tree: sorry: that is not what I had written, which was only 2300 and was: 2,037,035,976,334,486,086,268,445,688,409,378,161,051,468,393,665,936,250,636,140,449,354,381,299,763,336,706,183,397,376 . 23000 is a 904-digit number, some 1.23 x 10903. I will put it at the bottom.
That’s a lot of slots. Especially considering there were probably only around 400,000 of all homo sapiens of all subspecies roaming around the world back then.
Of those, it looks like the way to guess right now (which will change) is that, for me, personally:
86% of those slots were filled by homo sapiens sapiens living in Africa, whose descendants were about to undertake the last Out-of-Africa great human migration.
12% of those were homo sapiens neanderthalensis living in Europe and the Middle East. (Why then do I have only “2% Neanderthal ancestry”? Because the Neanderthal genes have been, mostly, selected against since the “mixing events”.)
1% of those were homo sapiens denisovensis living in Asia."
1% of those were from some other homo sapiens population, a ghost subspecies or two we have not yet found any non-genetic evidence for.
Peculiarly, of the 86% homo sapiens sapiens, more than 19/20 of those come from a very small less-than-10,000 slice of the entire 200,000-strong homo sapiens sapiens East African Plains Ape and South African Plains Ape populations back then.
Were all of those 400,000 people back then truly us?
Definitely yes.
If I were forced to guess at both molecular-clock and genetic-functional distance as of 75,000 years ago, I would give you something like this:
And do note that the East African Plains Ape population was never separated from the South African Plains Ape population, making any “subspecies” or even “race” talk within today’s Family of Man profoundly silly.
And after 75,000 years ago, the mixing of the top four lines (and the ghost population[s]!) begins.
Possible other points of interest:
Around 1,000,000 years ago, our ancestors crashed to perhaps 1,280 breeding individuals and nearly went extinct. That near-extinction lasted roughly 117,000 years before the population recovered <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487>.
All 8.4 billion humans alive today descend from perhaps 400,000 people scattered across the Old World 75,000 years ago.
Even as recently as 75,000 years ago, we were an evolutionary long-shot, over-specialized in big brains, outnumbered 5-1 by our other Great Ape hominid cousins: not an obvious success story.
Modern humans did not descend from one clean ancestral group but from several weakly separated African populations that kept exchanging genes <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260426012255.htm>.
The deepest splits among living human lineages traces to only about 120,000–135,000 years ago. But only 1–4% of genetic difference between living human groups traces to those ancient stem populations—“race” carves human nature nowhere at any joint.
My ~2% surviving Neanderthal DNA reflects a much larger original admixture that selection then pruned away, with deleterious Neanderthal variants were removed fastest in the first ~100 generations after mixing. Large stretches of the modern genome are “archaic deserts,” swept completely clean of Neanderthal ancestry markers.
Denisovan genes still shape immunity and altitude tolerance in living Asians and Oceanians.
Human history is a web of populations splitting, drifting, and remerging — not a branching tree with clean tips.
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##the-family-of-man-chart-of-the-day
##enlarging-the-bounds-of-human-empire
##chart-of-the-day
##the-zhang-moorjani-al-map-of-archaic-dna-the-knotty-question-of-when-exactly-we-became-us-how-we-appear-to-be-an-evolutionary-long-shot
#the-family-of-man
#family-of-man
#human-evolution
#homo-sapiens
#zhang-moorjani
#cultural-species
23000 = 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68766806668524727287654234968279552497680253106526867970008957969557362000373694493761563950933451852957949762696556279307672728321371046826075400262380520703490658066782578494595162490714088562926109340474078196816559610291398603705195521958107021975556657155603649016586341409635462285518870938606924807000970050591581253686006519752384738289305414516931907037950075424611879928561178524931201411477491568702055723518850000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 , I think.