Unlike the fossils and the archaeological materials, we cannot show you the DNA evidence in the Multiregional-Out of Africa controversy directly.  But you can still look at representations of the evidence and try to draw conclusions from them.

Exhibit 1 is an example of addressing the controversy indirectly.  This is a tree of relatedness in the nuclear DNA of living populations, adapted from the work of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza.

If Multiregional evolution is true, then Africans should be about as closely related to other populations as other populations are to each other, and there should be no greater diversity within Africa than within other populations.  What does this tree indicate?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

If Out of Africa is true, there should be a difference between Africa and other populations, and there should be greater diversity within Africa (because modern humans have been evolving there longer) than within the rest of the world.  What does this tree indicate with respect to these two factors?

Exhibit 2 is an example of addressing the controversy more directly, by comparing mitochondrial DNA from the original Neander Valley skeleton to mitochondrial DNA from a sample of about 900 modern humans.  The horizontal scale represents the number of differences found in a restricted sequence of mitochonrial DNA, and the vertical scale represents the percentage of pairs that have that number of differences. On the left are the results of comparing each human to each other human; in the middle are the results of comparing the Neandertal DNA to each modern human. On the right are the differences between modern humans and chimpanzees, just for reference. These results indicate that the average difference between Neanderthal and modern mitochondrial DNA corresponds to a molecular-clock difference of about 550-650,000 years.

This can be used to test the European case of the Out-of Africa vs. Multiregional controversy. If the multiregional model is true, Neanderthals contributed considerable genetic material to modern European populations in fairly recent time, so that Neanderthal-modern differences should overlap with modern-modern differences.  If Out of Africa is true, modern humans diverged early from archaic H. Sapiens (including Neanderthals), and there should be more difference between Neandertals and moderns than there is among moderns.

What does this chart of differences suggest about the possibility of Neanderthals having contributed to the ancestry of European populations?

Exhibit 3 is another example of using direct evidence from Neanderthal DNA.  It is a chart of the genetic relatedness of two Neanderthal specimens--the Feldhofer specimen from Europe and the Mezmaiskaya specimen from the Caucasus mountains--to modern humans from every region, including Europe, to each other, and to Chimpanzees.

This can also be used to test the Out-of-Africa vs. Multiregional hypothesis.  If Out of Africa is true, Neanderthal should be equally unrelated to each modern population.  If Multiregional Evolution is true, Neanderthal should be more closely related to modern Europeans. From this chart, is Neanderthal more closely related to modern Europeans than to other modern populations?

Question 4 comes not from any exhibit, but from your reading.  Go back and look at the last section of the Thorne and Wolpoff article supporting multiregional evolution, beginning with the big "W" on the right hand side of page 82.  They criticize mitochondrial DNA analyses of modern humans as a means for testing the Out-of-Africa vs. Multiregional model.  But your Exhibits 1 and 2 present evidence first from modern nuclear DNA and second from Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA.  Do these kinds of evidence counter Thorne and Wolpoff's argument?  Why or why not?