Maju: &quot;Science would not be science if we wou...

Maju: "Science would not be science if we would stop paying attention to the details. The Devil is in the details, goes the English saying, and has lots of reason. If we ignore them, we just get lost in a world of imprecise fantasy and speculation and science dies."

It's because I am paying close attention to the details that I see problems you do not see. And I see clues to the possible solution to these problems that you can't see either, probably because you are insentive to the problems in the first place.

If we cannot account for the gap, then we will be unable to respond to multiregionalists who will argue that all the many similarities between Africa and SE Asia/Melanesia, etc. must be due simply to convergent evolution, and we will be back at the crudest stage of the multiregional position, which even Wolpoff and Templeton no longer try to defend.

Even if you can’t accept the musical argument I’ve presented, based on P/B, then at least acknowledge the problem posed by the distribution of musical instruments, which even the archaeologists can’t ignore.

The gap is real. If we can’t account for it within the context of the Out of Africa model then we might as well give up that model and go back to the original multiregional dogma, that humans are who they are due to convergent evolution taking place in parallel in various parts of the world. So not only music, but language too would have to be understood as somehow magically “evolving” in the same direction at roughly the same time due to some intrinsic, built-in, magical faculty of the human mind.

I’m not saying I have the solution, and if you have a better idea on this matter I’d love to hear it. But don’t deny the problem exists – it is very real.