This complexity is not a problem to be explained away.

It is the actual history of the human species in the Pleistocene.

We are not the products of simple linear descent from a single ancestral population that gradually spread and diversified.

We are the products of a messy, dynamic, multiply-connected population history in which mixing, migration, and replacement were constant.

The Yana children’s teeth are one window into this complexity — a 31,000-year-old snapshot of a population that was one node in the interconnected network of Late Pleistocene humanity.

The Second Opening — What Came After, And What We Still Don’t Know