Svante has mad scientist written all over him! He should be cast in the next movie about a pandemic as the Doctor Ain-like font of man’s microbial demise.

Most commentators on the current human situation will evoke our primate ancestors, even though it is obvious that they have done little reading on the subject. This brief talk would not be a bad beginning for the armchair paleoanthropologists populating the New Right, which is about the only place real discourse occurs in this age.

Svante Pääbo has done much to fill in the still vast gaps in our knowledge. He does not mention the Toba super eruption 75,000 years ago or get into the ‘Sahara pump’ concept. Reading up on those two things will assist the viewer in putting his findings and observations in context.

Of course you right wing guys are going to hate all of the implicit race mixing and even species mixing, and, as TED Talks is left-leaning the good scientist does seem to feel obliged to close with a ‘race mixing is the human way’ message. He did not, however, get into the gory details of just how right wing most of that race mixing and species mixing has been. We are not talking wife swapping, but rape. I supposed he grinned knowingly within as he spared his tree-hugger audience the data on all of those missing paternal markers and the slaughters implicit in their absence.