Was It East Asia? Interview with the South China Morning Post about Shi Huang’s Out of Asia

At the time when both the old Out-of-Africa paradigm in human origins research and the Clovis-I paradigm in the study of the origin of American Indians (Native Americans, Amerindians) have failed to account for the rapidly growing body of data, this blog provides a unique and previously unrecognized solution to the puzzle of human origins and dispersals. Drawing on linguistics, kinship studies, ethnology, genetics, paleobiology and archaeology, it brings American Indian populations into the focus on modern human origins research, documents back-migrations of American Indians to the Old World and explores the possibility of modern human origins not in Africa but in America. Only scientific facts are used and only scientific method is employed to derive a theory radically different from mainstream academic and popular science. This said, the blog is not a simple advocacy for an Out-of-America theory but a holistic anthropological critique of Eurocentric, Old World-centric, reductionist, positivist, vulgar materialistic and monodisciplinary approaches to the origin of modern human anatomy, behavior, language and culture. It's my contention that the mainstream science of human origins is driven not only by theory building and data accumulation but also by cultural stereotypes rooted in pre-scientific worldviews. The secondary nature of American Indian populations compared to Old World populations and the recency of human occupation of the Americas is one such stereotype. Correspondingly, the wide-spread belief in the supreme antiquity of Bushmen and Pygmies in Africa is another stereotype. I first sketched out an "Out-of-America" theory of human origins in my two books (the first one was published in Russian, the second one in English) devoted to the phenomenon of human kinship and the global diversity of kinship terminologies.

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