RAZIB KHAN ON NEW DISCOVERIES IN GENETIC HISTORY: Here be humans: We keep discovering how much less of humanity is. . . us. “The ‘Out of Africa’ narrative of circa 2000 presented our own lineage as a superhuman race, the apotheosis of human evolution. The telos of two million years of encephalization, as human brains got bigger and bigger. The latest results do not fit easily into our old hero narrative. Neanderthals win the contest for largest human brains. And ‘Dragon Man’ turns out to have had a very large brain too, in line with modern cranial capacities. All human lineages were getting bigger-brained over the last few million years, not just the lineage that led up to us. . . . Today on our planet there is just one human species, but this is an exceptional moment. For most of the past few million years there were many human species. . . . Our planet was very different 100,000 years ago, and if we could survey that time, we would be astounded by the human diversity across its surface. To enumerate what little we know with certainty, there were at a minimum: modern humans, Neanderthals, at least three to four varieties of Denisovans, and two pygmy Homo populations in Southeast Asia. Likely there were still remnant Homo erectus in Southeast Asia as well, and other diverged lineages within Africa, and a new Homo in Nesher Ramla, Israel, in the Middle East with affinities to Neanderthals.”