Erika of Gutsick Gibbon admits Sepehr is correct: Eurasians have “up to 4% Neanderthal in their DNA”

Erika contests fellow YouTuber Robert Sepehr, than ends up agreeing with him on Subspecies

Erika, is the host of the YouTube channel Gutsick Gibbon.  She is best known for being an outspoken critic of Christian conservatives.

From fandom.com, at 26:

[A] YouTuber who makes videos about primates, zoology, palaeontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, and debunks Young Earth creationism.

Erika is a Masters of Research student in Primate Biology, Behavior and Conservation. She has a BSA in Pre-Professional Animal Science, and minors in Anthropology and in Biology.

Interestingly, as fandom also notes, Erika is herself a former Christian and believer in young earth creationist. Nowadays she often appears on various rabidly atheist channels including AronRa and Paulogia.

Her videos regularly garner 10,000 to 20,000 views.  She’s produced over 100 videos in the last 4 years.  A typical Gutsick Gibbon video may get as many as 2,000 Likes.  She has 38,800 subscribers to her channel.

Erika recently stepped out of her comfort zone.  She is now taking on proponents of race realism.  Her latest video is titled,

Robert Sepehr is a Bad “Anthropologist”

Robert Sepehr is an anthropologist with a degree from the University of California at Northridge.  About 20 to 30% of his videos are related to human evolution and anthropology.  The other 70 to 80% are along the lines of ancient civilizations, and far out topics such as Atlantis, and alt-archaeology.

Sepehr is also a successful YouTube creator and producer.  His trademark Beach Boys soundtrack and California lifestyle ambiance leads off each video.  As an example, his very latest, “Darwin’s DNA Dilemma” already has nearly 5,000 Likes and 550 comments.  Sepehr has 346,000 subscribers.  Sepehr is on multiple platforms including Odysee, D-Live and Bitchute.  So, it is hard to judge his overall view counts.

During much of the video, Erika tears into Sepehr’s doubts and cynicism on ROoA (Recent Out of Africa).

[Robert] “suggests as we will see in a moment, that each race is a different subspecies or species of human.” — Erika

But then, starting at the 29 minute mark, Erika examines Sepehr’s views on race realism and archaic Hominid DNA admixture.  Ironically, she swerves into acknowledging much of what race realists and HBD advocates have been saying all along. That modern Homo sapiens can be divided into differing subspecies based largely on archaic Hominid DNA admixture.

Erika: There is overwhelming support for Out of Africa. That is to say Homo sapiens leaving Africa, that is to say where we evolved 300,000 years ago, and leaving 50 to 80,000 years ago. To go and disperse among the rest of the world where other Hominins were already dwelling because they left Africa too, just a bit earlier.  That was a mouthful. But at least now we know Robert is wrong.

Robert: We now know thanks to DNA, that humanity is a hybrid species, made up of different Hominid species to various degrees.  And that is what makes up the various races today.

Erika: [Elongated] Hmmmmnnnnnn….  what a weird thing to say.  Robert, kind of sounds a little [pause – racist gif].  So what Robert is doing here he is espousing a version of something called the Multi-regional hypothesis.

So, while Charles Darwin from the very beginning was like, it’s probably and out of Africa thing and he deduced this because the closest living relatives to Humans, Gorillas and Chimps, lived in Africa at the time Darwin was writing Dissent of Man, and of course still do today.

So, what Robert is effectively saying is the opposite of that.  This is the thing that came up to challenge Out of Africa, the Multi-regional hypothesis.  The idea at the time when it was first proposed, which is a long time ago, and different versions of the Multi-regional hypothesis have since come out, each progressively better.

But Robert’s version seems to be close to the original idea that each one of the human races descends from some kind of progenitor Hominid and that we are not all the same species.  He kind of alludes to this by calling Humans a hybrid species. And also suggests as we will see in a moment, that each race is a different subspecies or species of human.

“Now Robert is correct that Hominids did hybridize…  Eurasian individuals…  tend to have 1 to 4% Neanderthal in their DNA” — Erika

Now Robert is correct that Hominids did hybridize a lot in the ancient past.  So, Eurasian individuals, Europeans and Western Asians tend to have 1 to 4% Neanderthal in their DNA.  But that’s not a lot.  Similarly southeast Asians can have up to 12% Denisovan DNA in their modern genomes. And what Robert loves to bring up is that you have African individuals, Western and North African individuals that can have up to 19% of this kind of ghost Hominin lineage in their genome.

[Scoffs] Robert likes to paint this ghost lineage as Homo erectus or even Homo habilis… Robert chooses to identify the ghost lineage as primitive, so primitive in fact that it emerged over a million years earlier than the other Hominins that hybridized. Potentially suggesting a primitive nature to those who privatized…  Hmmmn…..

Erika than concedes the point that in and of itself hybridization of species is valid.  But then she objects to his linking modern human traits including intelligence to this hybridization.

Robert: Present day sub-Saharan Africans trace up to 19% of their genetic ancestry to an extinct archaic hominid species, such as Homo erectus, not found in DNA of present-day Asians or present day Caucasians.

Erika: I mean like yeah, I think he’s a racist.

See our article from 2020:

Africans have more archaic, ape like gene variants says controversial geneticist Dr. Shi Huang