An extended reply to Mendez et al.: The 'extremely ancient' chromosome that still isn't

TL;DR

This paper critically examines and publicly responds to claims about the age of the human Y chromosome made by Mendez et al., highlighting scientific disagreements and censorship issues.

Contribution

It provides an unfiltered, detailed rebuttal to Mendez et al.'s claims, emphasizing the importance of transparency and scientific debate.

Findings

Mendez et al.'s claims about the Y chromosome's age are challenged.

The authors' original reply was censored and altered.

A full, uncensored reply is now published for transparency.

Abstract

Earlier this year, we published a scathing critique of a paper by Mendez et al. (2013) in which the claim was made that a Y chromosome was 237,000-581,000 years old. Elhaik et al. (2014) also attacked a popular article in Scientific American by the senior author of Mendez et al. (2013), whose title was "Sex with other human species might have been the secret of Homo sapiens's [sic] success" (Hammer 2013). Five of the 11 authors of Mendez et al. (2013) have now written a "rebuttal," and we were allowed to reply. Unfortunately, our reply was censored for being "too sarcastic and inflamed." References were removed, meanings were castrated, and a dedication in the Acknowledgments was deleted. Now, that the so-called rebuttal by 45% of the authors of Mendez et al. (2013) has been published together with our vasectomized reply, we decided to make public our entire reply to the so called "rebuttal." In fact, we go one step further, and publish a version of the reply that has not even been self-censored.