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Sunday, November 25. 2018

Turns out all of humanity is related to a single couple

So you waste your money with those $120 spit tests.  It has been known for a long time that all humans share an ancestor in Mitochondrial Eve, but it was never clear that we all might share the same great, great, great....etc - grandpa too. 


There was an ancient genetic bottleneck, probably due to some natural disasters (caused by climate change?). 


Clearly, we can name these people Adam and Eve. 

Posted by The News Junkie in History at 14:22 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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Not exactly a single couple as the Post seems to suggest.

We have genes going back to perhaps one woman and perhaps genes bottnecking at one man .

This does NOT make them a couple, very likely they lived at very different times, and probably never met. Nor does it imply that there was ever only a single couple. Only that at some point our gene lines touched common ancestors as well as thousands of other people at the time.
#1 Jay on 2018-11-25 15:14 (Reply)
Jay: This does NOT make them a couple, very likely they lived at very different times, and probably never met.

That is correct.

Anytime you have bifurcating descent, such as mitochondrial DNA or Y-chromosome, there will be a most recent common ancestor. This does not mean that mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosome Adam existed at the same time. Nor does this mean the only genes that survive necessarily came from Eve or Adam. Interestingly the most recent common ancestor will tend to change over time.

Previous studies have shown that Eve and Adam are more recent than might have been expected otherwise, implying a genetic bottleneck. This study shows that many animals species experienced a similar bottleneck at about the same time, 100-200 thousand years ago, consistent with Earth's climate history.
#1.1 Zachriel on 2018-11-26 08:54 (Reply)
Z: Interestingly the most recent common ancestor will tend to change over time.

Consider if Eve has two daughters, Shalva and Bat-Ami. Eve is the most recent maternal common ancestor. Over time the daughters have daughters who have daughters of their own. Over time various lineages will naturally go extinct. At some point, if all of Shalva's matrilineal descendants die out, then Bat-Ami will now be the most recent maternal common ancestor.
#1.2 Zachriel on 2018-11-26 09:01 (Reply)
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call them Noah and his wife?
#2 Agammamon on 2018-11-25 15:17 (Reply)
Noah had kids, did he not?
#2.1 BD on 2018-11-25 16:37 (Reply)
The Noah story - and the more-or-less contemporaneous Gilgamesh story from Babylon, and some Australian "Dream Time" legends - may be related to a bolide impact ~5500 years ago in the Indian Ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater
#2.1.1 Ken Mitchell (Link) on 2018-11-25 18:31 (Reply)
You are correct sir! Mr and Mrs Noah are the proud owners of these genes. We get the three races (Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid) from their three sons and their three genetically very different wives. Then we get all of human history from the great dispersion after the Tower of Babel fiasco.
#2.2 M@rk on 2018-11-25 19:51 (Reply)
The Toba event is the best prospect for a bottleneck in genetics.
#3 Mike K (Link) on 2018-11-25 16:17 (Reply)
We are all the product of many bottleneck events, when most of our ancestral tribes, dozens of them, were almost wiped out but a few survived. If there are a few really extreme ones, as suggested here, that is very cool, but it doesn't change the picture much.

Genesis is not a made-up, just so story, but an approximation preserved over generations. Its long-lived ancestors are more like dynasties. Taken that way, it is remarkably accurate.
#4 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2018-11-25 17:37 (Reply)
One breeding pair is FAR too few to produce a healthy gene pool. Something is wrong with either the methodology of this study or the way it's being interpreted.
#5 wolfwalker on 2018-11-25 19:18 (Reply)
I'm not buying the DNA story. Interbreeding would have produced a race of idiots, oh wait, maybe that accounts for liberals.
#6 FRP on 2018-11-25 20:21 (Reply)
Not only humans but 90% of all species appeared at the same time.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/228798/20180530/massive-genetic-study-reveals-90-percent-of-earth-s-animals-appeared-at-the-same-time.htm

Everybody's looking for the comet or the bolide or the volcano that wiped the slate clean. Of course they're looking for Dark Matter too.

Now for something totally different...

"Genesis 1 King James Version (KJV)
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
#7 Roy Lofquist (Link) on 2018-11-25 22:13 (Reply)
WHY has the Gang of Z not commented? Could it be they AGREE with the story?
#8 Sam L. on 2018-11-25 22:56 (Reply)
please...let lying dogs sleep...
#9 maddog (Link) on 2018-11-26 05:28 (Reply)
Genetics based on DNA analysis is starting to look like today's cosmology, i.e. a rabbit hole. I suspect in 30-50 years we'll look back and laugh at all this, and be chasing some other kind of origin rainbow.
#10 BillH on 2018-11-26 11:22 (Reply)
Considering that all life on Earth is based on DNA (or at least closely-related RNA), all employing basically the same structure and code, this story doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Every life form on Earth has a common ancestor in what amounts to a single cell or even proto-cell. DNA/RNA only happened once, apparently. From that came bacteria, archaea, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, plants, animals, viruses, mushrooms, trees, yeast, dinosaurs, whales, people, you name it.
#11 Texan99 on 2018-11-26 20:03 (Reply)

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