<p>“As for further speciation - could you explain your ideas on this a little more? I would be interested in your thoughts.”</p>
<p>In vitro fertilization. There are already scientist messing around with human animal hybrids. Also with all the possibilities of genetic engineering, embryo selection etc etc. If people want to pick the sex of their children they also want to pick other characteristics. Why use steroids when you can tweak a few genes?</p>
<p>Plus on top of all that if we don’t wipe ourselves out speciation will probably occur in Homo anyway. Natural selection doesn’t grind to a halt just because of modern medicine or science. Wall Street or the courts or professional sports for that matter are as much of an eco-niche as a rain forest or savannah. It takes special skills to survive there so it is safe to assume that groups of humans could evolve to occupy the niche and exploit it.</p>
<p>I realize you like the single origin hypothesis and it is currently in vogue, particularly with the Mitochondrial DNA evidence but the timeline just isn’t long enough to account for the human variability we see not if modern man only busted out of East Africa 150,000 years ago. There is also the problem of all those other hominid lines outside of Africa. Did Homo erectus not continue to evolve when he left Africa? Did Homo sapiens wipe all the other hominids out? What about the continuity we see at archaeological sites? And what about Mungo Man? 40,000 years old and his Mitochondrial DNA does not fit the out of Africa hypothesis? Where did he come from and where did he go? To my mind some sort of multiregional evolutionary development for modern man still seems the most likely.</p>