Time for its own thread.
"There has been an idea that most modern European are descended from farmers that came in from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, reaching Britain about 6,000 years ago," Sykes told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "This kind of evidence shows that is probably not true, and that modern Britons are in fact descended from the earlier inhabitants like Cheddar Man who existed on hunting and gathering and who were not farmers."
What an amazing leap in deduction! Why give these people any credibility? They know neither the 1st postulate nor the 2nd!
Fathers can be influential tooBiologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
by Eleanor LawrenceIs Eve older than we thought?"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
Not exactly. Cheddar Man could be an ancestor of Mr. Targett-- in fact, given the exponential arithmetic of genealogy, Cheddar Man is almost certainly his ancestor by many thousands of lines of descent. However, this particular finding does NOT prove direct descent.
What this proves is that Mr. Targett and Cheddar Man had a relative in their maternal lines in common. Males and females alike receive their mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) from their mothers. Cheddar Man had a sister or female cousin, perhaps a very remote cousin, on his mother's side. She had the same mDNA as he did, since they had a common female ancestor, and passed it down through many generations of daughters to Mr. Targett's mother and thence to him.
If Mr. Targett has issue, the child will get its mDNA from Mr. Targett's wife. The only hope for continuation of Cheddar Man's mDNA is via a female cousin on Mr. Targett's mother's side.
-ccm
Read this article before, shame he is the end of the line. An only child that has no offspring.
Re: Descendant Of Stone Age Skeleton Found (Cheddar Man - 9,000 Years Old) From Buffalo Head | 12/30/2005 10:31:28 PM PST read
How do you think that your inane post furthered the purpose of Free Republic? Adolescent attempts at humor belong were adolescents hang out. This forum is for adults and mature children. Please post again after you mature to adult level.
Anyone else hear from such a wondeful freeper?Happy New Year to all
I'm stunned. I figured they'd be lucky to find any DNA in the tooth cavity of a living Brit, ket alone one that died 9000 years ago.
9,000 years, and he lives a kilometer from the cave.
That is ... amazing. I don't think my nomadic family has ever stayed put for an entire generation.
The scientist says this: "They would have shared a common ancestor about 10,000 years ago, so they are related."
I see no evidence presented that Mr. Taggart is an actual descendant of Cheddar Man. They just have a shared ancestor. Cheddar Man could have been the bachelor uncle of the guy whose line later went on to produce the history teacher.
