[Beren]

New Studies Suggest an ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ Link

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Published: August 12, 2013

It may not have been the Garden of Eden, but two new studies suggest that the most recent common male ancestor of Homo sapiens — Y Chromosome Adam — and the most recent common female ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve, may have lived at the same time and in approximately the same region.

For years, geneticists believed that Mitochondrial Eve appeared hundreds of thousands of years before her male counterpart. By charting the evolution of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from a mother to her children, scientists in the 1980s placed her existence about 200,000 years ago, most likely in Africa. Comparable studies found that Adam, whose Y chromosome is shared by all men currently alive, lived just 100,000 years ago.

Now, by sequencing the Y chromosomes of men currently living in various parts of the world, two teams of scientists have discovered thousands of previously unknown Y chromosome variations, which they say allowed them to establish more reliable molecular clocks.

These studies, which are published in the journal Science, place Y Chromosome Adam in Africa 120,000 to 200,000 years ago. One of the studies performed a similar analysis of the men’s mitochondrial DNA that suggested Eve lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.

Despite the biblical comparisons, it’s important to note that not all genetic material descends from these two ancestors, who most likely never met each other, said Carlos D. Bustamante, a geneticist at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an author of one of the studies.

“There were many other men living around at the time, there were many other women living around at the time,” Dr. Bustamante said. “The rest of the genome is coming from thousands and thousands of other ancestors.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 13, 2013, on page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Evolution: New Studies Suggest an ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ Link.

The Book of Genesis created by science.

[U184]

The Book of Genesis created by science.

Except not...

Despite the biblical comparisons, it’s important to note that not all genetic material descends from these two ancestors, who most likely never met each other, said Carlos D. Bustamante, a geneticist at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an author of one of the studies.

[Beren]

Yeah, it's not the exactly same story indeed, like the Big Bang is not exactly the same as God created the Universe. However, scientific and Biblical stories of how the world and humanity were created do not seem to be that much different actually. It's also possible that the Great Flood was real too.

[U184]

The flood happened, in a way. The ice sheets melting at the end of this last glaciation period served to rise the shoreline by over 300 feet.
Low level areas in the fertile crescent are separated by large mountainous areas, so some portion would see slow water advancement like we see in Venice and other areas would have seen a deluge of water coming down after the spaces between the peaks filled up and spilled over.

Today over 85% of man lives within a few miles of the shore, that number would have been about the same in the past, higher if you take into account large rivers. The flood was both a long phase natural disaster and in some areas resembled the biblical accounts, quick hard flashes, the process took a lot longer than described, but Humans had a much smaller attention to detail in those days.

However, scientific and Biblical stories of how the world and humanity were created do not seem to be that much different actually.

I could agree to this, except for one thing, all those stories came long before our versions of Biblical stories, Christianity, or Judaism.
Some 6k to 8k years before.

Making connections between things, after the fact is easy, like with Nostradamus. His prophecies are great to point at and say he knew, after.... much harder to be specific before the fact.

The same can be said for the ancient stories retold by the books, or as Christians call them, the Bible. Man looks for correlations and when they do, they find them.

[Beren]

Man looks for correlations and when they do, they find them.

I always thought the story of Adam and Eve was bogus, now it seems to be somewhat true actually. And it also seems like the Universe just started from scratch indeed. Then came the stars, the planets, the oceans, the lands, etc., just like the Bible says.

[U184]

Universe just started from scratch, the Universe just started from scratch, the Universe just started from scratch... over and over. That is true, as far as we can tell.

Adam and Eve is another matter, as far as the OP goes. Not all lines came from Adam and Eve and either way what your describing here is the simple idea of genealogy. Something people have been aware of for a very long, long time.

Now, what I find of interest is that one can follow the Sons of Noah through time and migration and see that they founded certain cities that bare their name, in order. This would follow that an area became overpopulated and the leader sends his son out to make another land for trade and to find new resources.

Not to mention giving breathing room to the originating area. The generations listed in the Bible are a great historical timeline of migration, of a particular tribal line. Said line then split and in one way or another is responsible for the majority of the populated areas in the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe and all the points of migration after the original founding of said populated areas.

It would not be hard to imagine that 'Adam' and 'Eve' are the progenitors of that particular tribe, nor that they survived and spread across the Globe. The interesting thong would be to see percentage maps that match the progenitors line.

As in, what races and in what areas, have stronger genetic matches to the progenitors. Then compare those findings with the migration pattern showed in the Biblical generations.

Though it should be noted that the old books have very little in common with the new testament and just because something is 'proven' from the old books, that lends absolutely zero weight to the new testament or the divine claims of Jesus.

[Beren]

No one says the Bible has any scientific relevance, but compared to other ancient religious materials, it is somewhat real, or rather realistic. Which is really amazing to me.

[ThirdTerm]

The new study (Poznik et al. 2013) estimates the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of the Y chromosome, known as Y-chromosomal Adam, to be 120 to 156 thousand years. The study may have disproved the pioneer study by Thomson et al. (2000), which suggested that Y-chromosomal Adam lived about 59,000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam are our hypothetical common ancestors and Mitochondrial Eve is the ancestor of haplogroup L (mtDNA) originated in Sudan and Y-chromosomal Adam is the founder of haplogroup A, which is most frequent in Namibia (64%-66%), but its frequencies are above 10% in some parts of the Iberian Peninsula (i.e. Sayago, Madeira, Alcacer do Sal).

The presence of Africans in Britain has been recorded since Roman times, but has left no apparent genetic trace among modern inhabitants. Y chromosomes belonging to the deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny, haplogroup A, are regarded as African-specific, and no examples have been reported from Britain or elsewhere in western Europe. We describe the presence of a haplogroup A1 chromosome in an indigenous British male; comparison with African examples suggests a western African origin. Seven out of eighteen men carrying the same rare east-Yorkshire surname as the original male also carry haplogroup A1 chromosomes, and documentary research resolves them into two genealogies with most-recent-common-ancestors living in Yorkshire in the late eighteenth century. Analysis using 77 Y-STRs (short tandem repeats) is consistent with coalescence a few generations earlier. Our findings represent the first genetic evidence of Africans among ‘indigenous’ British, and emphasise the complexity of human migration history, as well as the pitfalls of assigning geographical origin from Y-chromosomal haplotypes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2590664/

[foxdemon]

The new study (Poznik et al. 2013) estimates the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of the Y chromosome, known as Y-chromosomal Adam, to be 120 to 156 thousand years. The study may have disproved the pioneer study by Thomson et al. (2000), which suggested that Y-chromosomal Adam lived about 59,000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam are our hypothetical common ancestors and Mitochondrial Eve is the ancestor of haplogroup L (mtDNA) originated in Sudan and Y-chromosomal Adam is the founder of haplogroup A, which is most frequent in Namibia (64%-66%), but its frequencies are above 10% in some parts of the Iberian Peninsula (i.e. Sayago, Madeira, Alcacer do Sal).

The new study fits the fossil evidence better. H sapiens was still restricted to Africa. It is to be expected the common ancestors would be African and about the 100-150 thousand year period. Later than that H. sapiens starts spreading out into Eurasia. Due to dispersal, it would be hard to have common ancestors for everyone at that point.

[U184]

The species went through times were there were very few left, say 25k. The majority also got to a point were they stayed in one area, the races that were migratory were the most prolific and spread their seed as they traveled. So connected dispersal of migratory DNA should be much more evident than genetic matches from removed locations where the populace did not migrate.

[Potemkin]

However, scientific and Biblical stories of how the world and humanity were created do not seem to be that much different actually.

In fact, they are quite different. Genesis gets the order of events wrong, for example. The only thing the Biblical and scientific accounts have in common is that they both describe the universe, the world, and humanity as having a beginning, an origin. Scientific progress has ruled out the idea that the universe has always existed (which, for example, Schopenhauer believed as late as the mid-19th century).

[Russkie]

You're an idiot if you try to read the bible from a scientific perspective, it was never meant to be read like that. Religion in general is and was never about science.

[foxdemon]

You're an idiot if you try to read the bible from a scientific perspective, it was never meant to be read like that. Religion in general is and was never about science.

Though you are right to say the bible was never meant to be read from a scientific perspective, the claim religion was never about science can be contested.

First we need to look at the two terms, 'religion' and 'science'.


Science is a relatively new word. The usage might have become common only in the 19th century. The process we now call science was natural philosophy as a part of philosophy in general. We can identify earlier experimenters as scientists. Eg: Newton, Galileo, Pascal. But they didn't call themselves scientists. The fact that Galileo had so much trouble with the Church shows that natural philosophy was considered to be transgressing on religious territory.


Religion, as we understand it, is also a relatively new idea, though the term goes back a long way. In other cultures the word for religion is also the word for law. Eg: Sanskrit: 'dharma' means both law and religion. Consider ancient states like Israel, Egypt which were what we would now call religious states. In earlier times what we now call religion, law, science, other academia, government, even art were all bound up in the same system of belief. It is only in western modernity that these areas were 'emancipated' from religion and became distinct areas of knowledge in their own right.


Even today we see unity between religion and other areas we consider separate in other cultures. Islam for example makes no distinction between religion and state. The idea of a separation of church and state is not part of the culture. This was also the case in medieval Catholic Europe. Religion was totalitarian in the sense it encompassed everything.


So, your claim that religion was never about science doesn't hold water. What we call religion did once encompass what we now call science. You could say instead that in the modern world religion is not about science. Though there are plenty of fanatics that would like to change that. Eg: debate over evolution versus creation in US schools.

[Russkie]

So, your claim that religion was never about science doesn't hold water. What we call religion did once encompass what we now call science. You could say instead that in the modern world religion is not about science. Though there are plenty of fanatics that would like to change that. Eg: debate over evolution versus creation in US schools.

creationism is a protestant heresy, invented to compensate for the fact that they lost the essence many centuries ago. They basically read the bible at the level of a toddler.