Posted on 03/08/2013 7:34:13 PM PST by haffast
DNA evidence has revealed that the oldest known common male ancestor is 340,000 years old, more than twice as old as previous estimates.
New Scientist reports that the sample comes from a recently deceased man named Albert Perry. After the African-American South Carolina man died, one of his relatives submitted a sample of his DNA to a company called Family Tree DNA for analysis.
snip
All previously compared DNA samples pointed to a common Y chromosome traced back to man who lived between 60,000 and 140,000 years ago. But Perry’s DNA sample broke the trend, not matching up with this common ancestor.
"It's a cool discovery," Jon Wilkins of the Ronin Institute in Montclair, N.J., told New Scientist. "We geneticists have been looking at Y chromosomes about as long as we've been looking at anything. Changing where the root of the Y-chromosome tree is at this point is extremely surprising."
After the initial tests on Perry’s DNA, geneticists at the University of Arizona conducted further tests to confirm the anomaly. The Y chromosome in Perry’s test matched up with those of 11 men who all lived in one village in Cameroon.
University of Arizona researcher Michael Hammer says Perry’s DNA suggests there may have been an earlier species of humans that went extinct—but not before interbreeding with the more modern version of man.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This thread is killing me.
That didn’t take long.
Oddly worded, yet bizarre association
Bad reporting.
Every man now living on earth is descended from this individual male who lived 340,000 years ago. Of course he had parents, grandparents,uncles, cousins and lots of other relatives. But the descendants of all of his uncles and brothers have died out by now. (I'm sure in your family tree there are collateral relatives who either died without children or whose children have no descendants living now.) He is the last, not the first, common ancestor of modern humanity.
We only have a minuscule percentage of the puzzle pieces on the table.
There are a lot of pieces between this guy and any of the known founding Eves.
We know roughly where the pieces need to be to put the puzzle together, but we also know there are a lot of blank places on the table, we know the missing pieces are scattered in various boxes in the attic, the basement, next door and that well over half of them got lost in various moves from here to there.
We know it’s a family portrait, we have a vague idea of the background, we don’t know exactly which family members sat for the portrait, and there are enough puzzle pieces in the boxes to make a couple dozen portraits, landscapes, pictures of trains and Parisian cafés.
Other than that, it’s a simple matter of putting the puzzle together...
Oh, please.
The pieces are buried in backyards. Random backyards. All over town. And no one thought to mark the locations at the time of burial.
That too.
It still doesn’t explain why there are gaps between the pieces we do have now does it???
Apparently, science hasn’t learned enough to know they ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
ROTFL!!!
LOL
I guess I could “stair” at the sun instead.
Thanks for the help.
They never cease to amaze, these 'scientists.'
Truth is, man has only been on this earth for a little over 4000 years - per a book called the Bible.
First thing I thought of when I read this.
“Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old”
So who is he, Connor MacLeod? Suppose they mean he lived 340,000 years ago, not that he’s that old?
Is the author suggesting there was an intermediate progenitor—to NOT include Neandertal?
No immaculate conception at all. It just means that the descendants of any other male humans perished without contributing their Y-chromosome to any of the males in today’s world. All present males have inherited the Y-chromosome of this single human male who lived in the distant past. The date is surmised by relationships to surviving DNA and time periods required to accumulate changes in the genes due to natural causes over time.
Aarrg, my eyes.
Just imagine all the civilizations that could have arisen, fallen, and all remains disappeared it that time frame (our current civilization is at best only 6K old, although Hindu literature would put that date back an additional 16K).
If each civilization lasted just 10K and it took an additional 10K for all remains to subsume to Nature, then dividing by 20 we get something like 17 prior civilizations. No need for Aliens to explain the oddities and anomalies found in various places.
Humans (but not necessarily Homo sapiens) have been around for millions of years.
What happened here is what another poster said above. The male chromosome is lost whenever a man does not have sons. So, in a small population (as humans were that long ago), it is conceivable that there is only one unbroken line of male ancestry. As the population grows larger, with more males carrying that variant of the Y chromosome, the chances of that specific chromosome surviving are greater; other Y chromosomes have a larger chance of disappearing.
This story is a bit misleading. The ancestor 340K years ago is not the source of Y chromosomes for the entire population. That specific Y variant only exists in one village in Africa. All other men tested have a newer Y chromosome variant from an ancestor who lived around 200K years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if other families with variant Y chromosomes are found as time goes on. We are still a long way from knowing the genome of every single person, or even a statistically relevant number of people.
Or ‘we are still a long way’ from knowing just how little of what we think we know is actually true.
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