It has become fashionable within elements of 'western' academia, to shift traditionally African-ascribed markers unit by unit to overseas origins, while very few are open to the possibilities that markers long taken for granted as "Eurasian" could actually be of direct African origin. The drivers for such moves can be a matter of trying to shift the Out Of Africa conception of human origins overseas, on a piece by piece and gradual basis, especially given preexisting scant substantiation to the contrary, or else a matter of not coming to terms with the prospect of recent African ancestry in "non-African" territories, which is determined to tarnish "racial purity" by racist cliques, and/or implicates Africans—particularly "black Africans"—as agents of certain "important" sociocultural turning points or "technological breakthroughs" in human history. In this respect, as a common example among many, haplogroup E—the predominant contemporary Y-DNA phylogeny on the African continent which has not only gained reputation for spilling over the boundaries of Africa in a substantial way, but also tied to "turning points" in human history, like say, the turn to a farming economy during the Neolithic era—has gained elevated interest over the years. This interest has accompanied the effort to shift the origins of the haplogroup from Africa to "Eurasia" via a "Middle Eastern origin" theory by certain parties. An earlier example of this, by Chandrasekar & co. (2007), had been discussed on this site; the example this time around comes from Abu-Amero et al. (2009), which will be the subject of review of this blog entry.
