It's not so much that I'm skeptical of Morin's conclusion as it is that I think it's an issue only if one buys into the attempts to describe the human "family tree" as a nice clean genealogical chart with distinct subspecies and nice clean boundaries between them. In other words, I question whether there really was such a thing as Neanderthals and "Cro Magnon" and the rest. Rather, I think of the human genome as a big cloud, and not a series of clean lines on a chart, in which various fossils we've discovered simply represent one location in "genetic space" at one point in history.

Seems obvious to me, because all of these ancestors are said to be subspecies of homo sapiens, and the definition of a subspecies is that it can interbreed with other members of the species. How can you possibly draw a nice neat line under those circumstances?

Humans are walkers and spread out across the world...and eventually walked home again to Africa. We form circulating patterns of genes, not a branching tree, and most assuredly, if homo sapiens sapiens could interbreed with homo sapiens neandertalensis, given our innate sociability, you can be sure that they did.

So I guess I'm saying that Morin's probably right, but it's not exactly an Earth-shaking conclusion.