Posted on 07/01/2006 4:12:22 PM PDT by blam
It isn't even saying that. Even if humanity had never had a bottleneck and had had a constant population of a billion people at every point in time into the distant past, it *still* wouldn't take long (well, less time than you'd expect anyway) for one person to eventually be the great-great-great-etc. grandparent of every one of the billion people alive a few thousand years later.
Smaller populations *speed up* this process, but it happens eventually even with huge populations.
That would be two common ancestors, not one.
....I'm well aware of that likelihood....I was being facetious
Sorry, read the full article and the rest of the replies. It has nothing to do with a one-person bottleneck.
All the way back to grandpappy Icheneumon, a know-it-all proto-bacterium (I seem to recall a Gary Larson cartoon).
Wrong again, see my previous reply. And note that the researcher's model produced its results even while assuming that the population was never smaller than tens of thousands.
This is just a result of ordinary population dynamics, and in no way any evidence of any kind of Adam/Noah bottleneck, because it happens in ANY population eventually.
She was an even more distant ancestor (or at least one of her contemporaries was -- the individual known as Lucy may of course have died before having children).
The time of a "last common ancestor" is not the same as an "original ancestor" -- the LCA themselves had distant ancestors of their own, who are also common ancestors of us all, just not the *last* one (i.e. the one most recent in time).
Then there's the Darwin/Ichneumon rubberneck: straining to see which Darwin award-winner got creamed by the bus of extinction on the superwayhighway of evolution.
No, no he didn't. You've got the process of speciation wrong.
Darwinist cat fight!
Life is funny like that.
Can't say for sure but, very early. The ancient direct line that produced modern humans has died out in Africa.
You said -- "That would be two common ancestors, not one."
And my pappy always told me it took two...
Regards,
Star Traveler
I just read the full article, and it does sound rather interesting, but I think they fail to account for the fact that just one obstinate little inbred group (i.e., the Sentinelese) that isolated itself, say, 10,000 years ago, screws up the simulation. Personally, I suspect the true last common ancestor - the last person that lived who now appears on every single family tree - lived around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
You said -- "Sorry, read the full article and the rest of the replies. It has nothing to do with a one-person bottleneck."
We all still came from that boat ride... Whatever else happened, that might be another story.
Regards,
Star Traveler
I'm not aware that Old Professor is necessarily a "Darwinist". In any case, I see that he and I have had this conversation before.
Late Pleostocene Human Bottlenecks. . . (Toba)
"The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade."
"In the beginning" = Big Bang. Adam/Eve = shared common ancestor in the past several thousand years.
Other Christian scriptures prophesy worldwide devastation by natural phenomena including a "burning mountain hurled into the sea" which atheist science now concedes has happened in the past and assures us will happen again.
It annoys the atheists. But it just makes me chuckle.
The oldest human DNA presently alive on earth belongs to the Orang Asli
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