A00 Haplogroup discoverer Dr. Michael Hammer proven right
Michael Hammer announced the A00 Haplo type discovery in in 2014. DNA from a grandson of a slave in South Carolina was submitted to a genetics testing firm. It came up as “unidentified.” The scientists had never seen a DNA sequence like this gentleman had.
Hammer and his team traced it back to a tiny village in Cameroon – Mbo. It was close to a port where the slave trade had taken place in the early 1800s. 11 villagers in Cameroon, all men as they were testing the Y chromosome, came back positive for A00 Haplotype.
At least two of the men showed striking archaic facial features including sloping forehead, pronounced brow ridges and large nasal aperture.
Their profiles were strikingly similar to the facial reconstruction of the type specimen from the 320,000 year old Jebel Irhoud from Morocco.
One recent study co-authored by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff found African populations with unique and distinctive nasal features – Genome scans of facial features in East Africans and cross-population comparisons reveal novel associationsA00 Haplogroup summation.
Note – Often times A00 Haplogroup is referred to as A00 Haplotype and also alphabetically as Aoo Haplogroup.
Most recently archaeologists have begun excavation projects at an alternative site not far from the Cameroon village of Mbo – at a cave at Shum Laka.
From the NY Times, Jan. 2020,
Ancient DNA from West Africa Adds to Picture of Humans’ Rise
Mary Prendergast, an archaeologist at Saint Louis University in Madrid, considered the skeletons found at Shum Laka, a rock shelter in Cameroon, among the top candidates to test for DNA. “People working all over the continent are aware of this site,” she said.
Archaeologists have dug into the floor of Shum Laka since the 1980s, and have found layers of human remains as old as 30,000 years.
From St. Louis University News, 2020,
Nature Study: First Ancient DNA from West Africa Illuminates the Deep Human Past
One of the sampled individuals – an adolescent male – carried a rare Y chromosome haplogroup (A00) found almost nowhere outside western Cameroon today. A00 is best documented among the Mbo and Bangwa ethnic groups living not far from Shum Laka, and this is the first time it has been seen in ancient DNA.
A00 is a deeply divergent haplogroup, having split from all other known human lineages about 300,000-200,000 years ago. This shows that this oldest known lineage of modern human males has been present in west-central Africa for more than 8,000 years, and perhaps much longer.
Mystery surrounding the Discovery
From a blog post 2013 from one of the co-authors of the original study, Thomas Khran:
Understandably, Bonnie, Thomas and Michael are somewhat restricted in what they can say until such time as the resulting academic paper in the works is published.
We all know that male humans arise from a person we call Y-line Adam, just like we call the first woman Mitochondrial Eve. Before a 2011 paper, it was believed that shortly after Adam, haplogroup A and B were formed about the same time and were brother haplogroups. Fulvio Cruciani’s 2011 paper, “A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa” reorganized that tree and showed that indeed, haplogroup A formed from the root of all humanity with B forming from haplogroup A.
Michael Hammer a victim of Woke Anthropology?
Why did ASU genetics professor Michael Hammer retreat from a discovery of a lifetime. He had discovered what human population geneticists for decades had been searching for: A link to the ancient past of Africans.
He was destined for the Nobel Prize. But then they pulled the plug on the project.
A changing political climate? In the 2000s into the early 2010s it was fine to make fun of Whites for being part Neanderthal. But Africans having even more primitive archaic Hominin DNA admixture?
By 2015, the woke agenda had taken full hold over the fields of genetics and paleoanthropology.
Suggesting that Africans, let alone African-Americans had archaic gene alleles was entirely politically incorrect. Fortunately, Hammer’s research is still available.
Attack from Eran Elhaik and his quixotic team of geneticists
Eran Elhaik a geneticist from Europe slammed a paper by Dr. Hammer is of the University of Arizona. Elhaik is a PhD employed by a Swedish genetics multinational conglomerate.
Elhaik released a paper a few months later attacking Hammer and his findings. But Elhaik got his dates wrong. And he also has quite a curious past. The credentials of his team members are questionable, as well. Here we point out Elhaik’s consistencies.
Elhaik’s biggest error was in stating that the first agreed upon modern Homo sapien was 140,000 years old. Hammer used the figure of 333,000 years ago in the original paper. Elhaik called him out on that. But 333,000 is for Jebel Irhoud which is recognized by a great many paleoanthropologists as the first fully modern human, albeit with some archaic features.
But even given the Jebel Irhoud controversy, Omo 1 is now dated to 230,000 years ago. All paleoanthropologists agree Omo 1 is a fully modern human. By citing 140,000 years as the date for the first modern human, Elhaik still gets it wrong. Though, the new dating of Omo 1 occured in 2019. Elhaik would now have know the correct date in 2014 when his paper was released.
Unfortunately, Hammer has been driving out of the field of human genetics. Living archaic hominins exist in southwest Africa, but nobody is currently researching them.
While all the controversy with Elhaik had been going on, Dr. Hammer suffered a personal tragedy on the home front. His 15 year old daughter, who had been suffering with Epilepsy, had a seizure in the middle of the night, and sadly passed away.
Dr. Hammer threw himself into finding a cure for rare children’s diseases. Today he still works at the ASU genetics lab.
