20. Deconstructing the Tree Diagram to a Mess – or at least a Net

Abstract

Despite the resilience of traditional models, the increasing knowledge about the amount of admixture in living populations and genetic transfer between archaic (such as Neanderthal and Denisovan) and modern human lines raised new questions. Are we entering a post-Linnean and post-Haeckelian age, in which heterarchical understandings of diversity and net-shaped notions of human relatedness take over? Is opinion more generally moving towards models such as proposed by Franz Weidenreich close to eighty years ago that today are subsumed in modified forms under the label of multiregionalism, in which human evolution is conceptualized as having been marked by genetic exchange and thus little taxonomic differentiation? And if so, what political implications might this shift entail?