Did hominids divide into different races much earlier than currently believed?

Did hominids divide into different races much earlier than currently believed?

If what I am about to quote in this entry about the age of the earliest common human ancestor means what it appears to mean, then it turns the current view of human evolution on its head. I’m not endorsing it, just reporting and reacting to it.

Continuing in the same thread at Mathilda’s Anthropology Blog, Tod points to evidence showing that light skin and blue eyes are very recent developments, within the last 10,000 years. Then he says:

I agree the San [Bushmen] are not dark despite the fact that the Kalahari gets a lot of UV due to the altitude . (Kalahari is a featureless, gently undulating, sand-covered plain, which everywhere is 3000 feet (900 metres) or more above sea level). The San have little pigmentation compared to West Africans despite the amount of UV in the Kalahari being comparable to West Africa.

So, according to Tod, not only is the oldest human group (or the group thought to be most like the earliest human group) “not dark,” with “little pigmentation compared to West Africans,” but they are not dark despite receiving as much sun as West Africans. What does that tell us about the tropical sun necessarily producing black skin? Tod says that sexual selection, via polygamy versus polyandry is the answer. I’ve posted a comment asking him to explain that. (Mathilda answered my question.)

Mathilda then replies to Tod. Her references are to various genes or alleles; we don’t have to know exactly what she’s referring to, the dates are the important thing. If she’s saying what I think she’s saying, her data are placing the racial division of mankind far further back in history than the current accepted view. She writes:

Hmm, the blue eyed mutation is recent, but some of the other eye colours turn up in South East Asia and just can’t be so recent; Same for the hair colour mutations some of which have very old ages—you seem keen to make these ALL recent from the study of just a couple of loci, when some of the hair colours (two ginger variants and fair/brown) came out as archaic era dates in studies. Mc1r has an effect on skin colour, and won’t be selected out in low uv levels if the basic skin tone is already brown….
My issue was that it’s skin was TOO dark, not that it was dark. [She’s referring to Neave’s “first European.”] There’s no reason to maintain a skin that dark at that latitude after that amount of time.

She then quotes a study (in pdf) by a group of genetic scentists about a gene called MC1R which affects hair and skin pigmentation :

Both African and non-African data suggest that the time to the most recent common ancestor is 1 million years and that the age of the global 314 variant is 650,000 years. [Emphasis added.] On this time scale, ages for the Eurasian distributed Val60Leu, Val92Met, and Arg163Gln variants are 250,000–100,000 years; the ages for African silent variants—Leu106Leu, Cys273Cys, and Phe300Phe—are 110,000–40,000 years. For the European red hair–associated Arg151Cys and Arg160Trp variants, we estimate an age of ª80,000 years; for Asp294His, and Ser316Ser, we estimate an age of <30,000 years. SDs are approximately half these expectations.
These ages are entirely compatible with age distributions estimated for African and non-African mutations in other nuclear genes (Harding et al. 1997; Zietkiewicz et al. 1998). The ages estimated for the Arg151Cys and Arg160Trp red hair–associated variants are consistent with a widespread European distribution, as we also observed.
Red hair associated MC1R variants are Arg151Cys, Asp294His and Arg160Trp (two are 80,000 years old, one 30,000). Val60Leu is associated with fair or light brown hair and is estimated at 250,000 ot 100,000 years.

What! The age the most recent common ancestor is one million years! That would mean that hominids began separating into different races 800,000 years before Homo sapiens appeared. Which would bring us back to the Carleton Coon thesis that there were of several Homo erectus races, each of which was ancestral to one of the several races of Homo sapiens, a theory I thought had been refuted long ago.

The quoted passage then places various European genetic mutations at between 250,000 and 100,000 years old, and the age of the gene for red hair at 80,000 years.

It would appear that Mathilda and her sources are arguing for a human history radically different from the current accepted view.

* * *

In her next comment Mathilda specifically challenges the Out of Africa view:

OR Andrew… it suggests a limited amount of introgression from archaic humans (more likely). A lot of human DNA doesn’t trace trace back to Africa and is over 1 million years old. Some factors of the X chromosome don’t and are used (by publishing geneticists) to argue for archaic ancestry in non Africans. Bit of a myth all the studies support the OOA scenario, and that support for it is universal.

“A lot of human DNA doesn’t trace trace back to Africa and is over 1 million years old.” The mind boggles.