Quote: odiousgambitbtw surely the speculation about Olmec origins can [and has?] been answered by DNA analysis of the people living there now... that they left no descendants is unlikely.
Wikipedia article on Olmec Origins says that most scientists believe they developed their culture in isolation, from the Eastern Hemisphere.
As to the African looking features on the giant heads, there were other sculptures with features that look vaguely Nordic. Most scientists believe that there was just a lot of genetic variation.
The descendants of the Olmec lost any unique identity long before the European conquest. Their genes are absorbed into all the different ethnic groups in Southern Mexico and Central America.
It's nice to see that science is beginning to see things my way.Quote: weaselmanYeah ... there are not very many standards in Biology (not even double ones :)) There is actually no one commonly accepted definition of the term "species" to begin with. The interbreeding idea is popular, but, first, it does not always work (think hermaphrodites or asexuals for example or horizontal gene transfer, and, again, interspecies breeding is not really as uncommon as one might think), and second, it is traditionally applied to typological species, not evolutionary.
The thing is, this is not like in math, where a triangle is either a right triangle or not. There is no objective way to answer these questions, so they are usually decided by something similar to a majority vote on scientific conventions. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, of course, but in this area, the definition of the "right" opinion is simply the view held by a scientific governing body such as Global Taxonomy Initiative or European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, not by any particular individual, however smart or enlightened (s)he might happen to be.
Quote: Science“We know from the Neanderthal Genome Project that four percent of the genes of present day Europeans are of Neanderthal origin," Zilhao says. "So perhaps we should start thinking of these people as the European brand of homo-sapiens, that were morphologically different from what we call modern humans in Africa, but they were sapien people as well.”