All modern humans descended from a solitary pair who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, scientists say.

Scientists surveyed the genetic 'bar codes' of five million animals - including humans - from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race.

These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it's not just people who came from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, too

Stoeckle and Thaler, the scientists who headed the study, concluded that ninety percent of all animal species alive today come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than 250 thousand years ago - throwing into doubt the patterns of human evolution.

'This conclusion is very surprising,' Thaler admitted, 'and I fought against it as hard as I could.'

The new report from experts at the Rockefeller University along with from the University of Basel published the extraordinary findings in Human Evolution.

The research was led by Senior Research Associate Mark Stoeckle and Research Associate David Thaler of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

They mined 'big data' insights from the world's fast-growing genetic databases and reviewed a large literature in evolutionary theory, including Darwin.

Dr Stoeckle said: 'At a time when humans place so much emphasis on individual and group differences, maybe we should spend more time on the ways in which we resemble one another and the rest of the animal kingdom.'

The conclusions throw up considerable mystery as to why the need for human life to start again was needed such a relatively short time ago, especially since the last known extinction we know of was during the time of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

This opens up the possibility of an inbuilt human evolutionary process wherein we break down and die out, leaving the need to start from scratch.

We're also surprisingly similar to not just every other human, but every other species.

'If a Martian landed on Earth and met a flock of pigeons and a crowd of humans, one would not seem more diverse than the other according to the basic measure of mitochondrial DNA,' said Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

'Culture, life experience and other things can make people very different but in terms of basic biology, we're like the birds,' Dr Stoeckle added.

The 'mitochondrial DNA' examined in the research is that which mothers pass down from generation to generation and it showed the 'absence of human exceptionalism.'

'One might have thought that, due to their high population numbers and wide geographic distribution, humans might have led to greater genetic diversity than other animal species,' added Stoeckle.

'At least for mitochondrial DNA, humans turn out to be low to average in genetic diversity.'

The study has been misunderstood by some religious parties who thought it meant that we all came into being in some seminal Big Bang-typed event 100,000 ago, but this isn't what the findings actually suggest.

What Stoeckle and Thaler's findings point to is that our species has to revamp far more often than we thought, and we do so in unison with all animals.

Guess I have already read about this. That big ol' boat came later.

The big bang? The Lord said 'let there be light' and Bang! It happened.

Hmmmm. Seems to loosely follow/support the Bible account. Hmmmm.

H&K-Guy

One of the most interesting stories I have ever read.
Seriously.

Soooo, Barack Obama is my brother I guess. No wonder Cain slew Able.

quote:

All modern humans descended from a solitary pair...

Lemme guess. Male and Female?

quote:

Originally posted by H&K-Guy:
Hmmmm. Seems to loosely follow/support the Bible account. Hmmmm.

H&K-Guy

Noah?

Then there's that pesky 4th from the last paragraph.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:

quote:

All modern humans descended from a solitary pair...

Lemme guess. Male and Female?

Thank you Sir, I had to LMAO at that.

So were their names actually Adam and Eve?

quote:

Originally posted by bigwagon:
So were their names actually Adam and Eve?

Well, they sure weren't Adam and Steve. That's for sure.

H&K-Guy

Complete bullshit. The database they’re referring to is GenBank which has a 25-35% error rate. The difference between you and a squirrel is single digit percentages and the extremely errorneous findings reported here don’t even hold up in the fossil record.

quote:

The study has been misunderstood by some religious parties who thought it meant that we all came into being in some seminal Big Bang-typed event 100,000 ago, but this isn't what the findings actually suggest.

It's important to realize this study does not invalidate the evolution of species in favor of a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The first humans still descended from more primitive species in a process spanning millions of years. It's just that at a point some 1-200,000 years ago, 90% of the creatures on the earth experienced a biological "Big Bang" that wiped out most life, but left just enough to repopulate from the few survivors. It's not like the first human couple suddenly materialized out of the mists 6,000 years ago.

bunk

a wonderful story - 'he even fought against it'

yeah, right

and I have a bridge to sell

Is there a link for this article?

So we're all a bunch of in-breds in some way?

Complete retarded bunk. Sorry folks, try again.

quote:

Originally posted by Rawny:
So we're all a bunch of in-breds in some way?

This was my first thought as well. There must have been a lot of weird people running around a few hundred years after the first coupling.

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:

quote:

The study has been misunderstood by some religious parties who thought it meant that we all came into being in some seminal Big Bang-typed event 100,000 ago, but this isn't what the findings actually suggest.

It's important to realize this study does not invalidate the evolution of species in favor of a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The first humans still descended from more primitive species in a process spanning millions of years. It's just that at a point some 1-200,000 years ago, 90% of the creatures on the earth experienced a biological "Big Bang" that wiped out most life, but left just enough to repopulate from the few survivors. It's not like the first human couple suddenly materialized out of the mists 6,000 years ago.

Yes. Perhaps there was a pandemic of some sort.

quote:

Originally posted by Jimbo54:

quote:

Originally posted by Rawny:
So we're all a bunch of in-breds in some way?

This was my first thought as well. There must have been a lot of weird people running around a few hundred years after the first coupling.

Jim

The argument that I've heard from this camp is that the negative symptoms of inbreeding are a result of negative mutations which accumulated over time. In other words, the original gene pool as more "pure," whereas repeated copying introduced "errors" that became the geneotypes for the phenotypes that we now recognize as the symptoms for inbreeding.

This perfect-seed theory doesn't really account for the fact the original couple itself was a result of mutation over the millions of years prior to their own advent. I.e.: imperfection became perfection through mutation, then devolved back in to imperfection randomly.

quote:

Originally posted by FishOn:

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:

quote:

The study has been misunderstood by some religious parties who thought it meant that we all came into being in some seminal Big Bang-typed event 100,000 ago, but this isn't what the findings actually suggest.

It's important to realize this study does not invalidate the evolution of species in favor of a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The first humans still descended from more primitive species in a process spanning millions of years. It's just that at a point some 1-200,000 years ago, 90% of the creatures on the earth experienced a biological "Big Bang" that wiped out most life, but left just enough to repopulate from the few survivors. It's not like the first human couple suddenly materialized out of the mists 6,000 years ago.

Yes. Perhaps there was a pandemic of some sort.

It was a population bottleneck that almost did us in. Pandemic was one of the possibilities.

https://www.businessinsider.co...killed-humans-2016-3

Twenty years ago “mitochondrial Eve” made the news. Supposedly she was the single woman from which all of use have descended from. Later there was “mitochondrial Adam.” However,they two were separated by tens to hundreds of thousand years.

Actually, “Eve” is best described as
“most-recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect to matrilineal descent.” That is, as linked through female lineage.

In reality “Eve” was neither the first and certainly not the only woman living at that time. It means we are descended from her mitochondrial DNA. So how did this happen?

Not all women live to reproduce and pass their mitochondrial DNA on to their descendants. Women die in accidents, in childbirth, some are sterile and others never have children. Once any of this happens that woman’s lineage is lost forever. It’s a mathematical certainty that we will eventually have just one mitochondrial DNA.

However, the theory had critics and many problems

“The critics of the Eve story, who saw that the mitochondrial data did not fit with the fossils in the field that show a multi-regional continuity, so they started voicing several complaints against the mitochondrial data:

The mitochondrial data was determined using restriction analysis rather than DNA sequencing.

Restriction analysis is an enzymeatic method which can give false results at times.

They used African Americans rather than Africans from Africa to represent native Africans in their study. So they did not get a proper sampling of the African population.

They used an inferior method to build a phylogenetic tree. They used a program called PAUP which had been written to determine evolutionary relationships. However, the program gave different results when you entered the data in a different order. The answer was dependant upon the order that the data was entered into the computer. A big problem!

Blair Hedges and his group in Penn State, found that when the data was entered in different orders, that sometimes some other part of the world was indicated as the place where Eve lived, rather than Africa.”

While “mitochondrial Eve” and a “single couple” make the news, there’s a lot of physical evidence against it.

http://www.mhrc.net/mitochondrialEve.htm
http://www.mhrc.net/mitochondrialEve.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
https://www.smithsonianmag.com...e-species-180959593/