Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are two different decisions. This page is the record.
What this page is
Most of this article's evidence came from papers in the source library and verified straightforwardly. Three items did not, and they are held here rather than deleted. Two of them are this project's own errors.
Status words.
- REFUTED — the attribution or wording is demonstrably wrong. A better copy will not help.
- UNVERIFIABLE — no route to the named source has been found yet. That is a statement about this project's reach, not about the claim.
- PRINTED WITH A FLAG — the wording is genuine and correctly attributed, but something about it could not be checked, so the article prints it with that said.
Nothing on this page was established with WebFetch. Every check below was made against downloaded bytes.
1. "Perhaps the great divergence of the Neanderthal mitochondrial genome from moderns is also due to hypermutation."
Wording as it circulated: "the only other option is hypermutation… Perhaps the great divergence of the Neanderthal mitochondrial genome from moderns is also due to hypermutation."
Claimed source: Matthew Cserháti, Answers Research Journal 2024, described in this project's own memory file for the Mitochondrial Eve article as "the current AiG position", with the mechanism described as patriarchal drive.
Status: REFUTED as an attribution; the words are genuine and are printed under the right name.
What was tried and what was found. The saved page in the source library was re-read. The article's citation block, printed three times on the page, reads "Jordan, Marshall. 'Ancient DNA Shows Neanderthals and Denisovans Descending from Noah in the Line Ham.' Answers Research Journal vol. 17 (2024): 43–61." Matthew Cserháti appears only in the acknowledgements, thanked for help opening the Allen Ancient DNA Resource. The second sentence of the circulating wording is verbatim from Jordan's discussion and is preceded by "If the high mutation rate indicated by divergence of the Neanderthal Y chromosome is due to defective DNA repair, it should affect the entire Neanderthal genome." The mtDNA speculation therefore hangs off Jordan's inherited DNA-repair-defect mechanism. Patriarchal drive is his separate, Y-chromosome argument. The first fragment is also genuine: the saved text reads "…not cause the excessive number of Neanderthal Y chromosome variant alleles, the only other option is hypermutation. So, what caused the high mutation rate found in Neanderthal Y…", several paragraphs before the mtDNA sentence. The ellipsis in the circulating wording joins two separate passages, and the first is about the Y chromosome, not mtDNA. The article prints only the mtDNA sentence with its own preceding sentence, because that is the pair the research dossier verified.
What the article does instead. It quotes Jordan by name, with the preceding sentence, and describes both mechanisms as he gives them. The source-library key was changed from cserhati-2024-… to jordan-2024 on 6 September 2026, and the memory file was corrected.
What would change the verdict. Nothing; the author line is on the page.
2. "We conclude that the three bones are all from female Neandertals…"
Wording as it circulates: "We conclude that the three bones are all from female Neandertals and that previous suggestions that Vi33.16 was a male ( 40 , 42 ) were due to mismapping of autosomal and X chromosomal reads to the Y chromosome."
Claimed source: Green et al. 2010, Science 328:710–722, the draft Neanderthal genome.
Status: RESOLVED 6 September 2026. The locator was found and the quotation is now printed in the article.
What was tried and what was found. The sentence appears in the research dossier under the Thomas and Tomkins 2014 entry, where it is used to show that the "morphed into a female" episode was a published correction rather than concealed contamination. The dossier gives no section or paragraph for it, and this article's rule is that no quotation is printed without a locator. While writing this page the sentence was confirmed present, verbatim, in sources/papers/green-2010_draft-neandertal-genome.md by string search, in the paragraph on the sex of the three bones; the section heading was not recorded.
What the verifier found. The sentence is in sources/papers/green-2010_draft-neandertal-genome.md at line 1377, under the section heading "Estimates of human DNA contamination" (heading at line 1265). The next sentence in the paper is "We estimate the extent of DNA contamination from modern human males in the combined data to be about 0.60%, with an upper 95% bound of 1.53%." The article now prints the quotation with that locator.
3. Cuozzo's locators
Wording as it circulates: the three Buried Alive quotations printed in the article, including "I am going to tentatively designate Pech 4-5 (4.5) years old and Moustier 32 years old for the sake of discussion and simplicity in the rest of this book."
Claimed source: Jack Cuozzo, Buried Alive, Master Books, 1998.
Status: RESOLVED 6 September 2026. The words are verbatim and the printed pages are now known.
What was tried and what was found. The book is an archive.org printdisabled item, buriedalivestart00cuoz, read by the search-inside route that returns whole paragraphs. The quotations were each returned and confirmed. The offset was then read out of the item's own buriedalivestart00cuoz_scandata.xml, which carries a <pageNumber> for 339 of the 362 leaves. It is not a single offset: printed page = leaf − 2 for leaves 13 to 178, and leaf − 6 for leaves 183 to 355, the four-leaf jump being a plate insert. Anchored twice, far apart, against the contents page: chapter 23 "La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Time", listed at page 119, opens on leaf 121 (offset 2); the Index, listed at page 343, begins on leaf 349 (offset 6). Chapter 33 "Like a Garment", listed at page 255, is a third check in the same direction. Leaves 191, 195 and 209 are therefore printed pages 185, 189 and 203, and the article now cites them that way.
What would change the verdict. Nothing outstanding. A copy of the printed book would confirm the plate insert.