Mysterious Melissa brought this interesting new study to my attention. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science. It was reported on Science Daily.
Excerpt:
More than 7 billion people live on this planet — members of a single species that originated in one place and migrated all over Earth over tens of thousands of years.
But even though we all trace our family lineage to a few common ancestors, scientists still don’t know exactly when and how those few ancestors started to give rise to the incredible diversity of today’s population.
A brand-new finding, made using advanced analysis of DNA from all over the world, sheds new light on this mystery. By studying the DNA sequence of Y chromosomes of men from many different populations, scientists have determined that their male most recent common ancestor (MRCA) lived sometime between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago.
It’s the first time the human ancestry has been traced back through the male line by sequencing the DNA of many entire Y chromosomes.
And, it agrees reasonably well with previous findings about our female most recent common ancestor, made by studying DNA carried down through the human race’s female line. Such studies used DNA from mitochrondria — structures inside cells — and placed that time of the most recent common ancestor between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.
[…]The reconciliation of the timing of “Adam” and “Eve,” however, may be this study’s most important immediate implication.
“This has been a conundrum in human genetics for a long time,” said Carlos D. Bustamante, PhD, a professor of genetics at Stanford and senior author of the study. “Previous research has indicated that the male MRCA lived much more recently than the female MRCA. But now our research shows that there’s no discrepancy. In fact, if anything, the Y chromosome may be a bit older.”
So the new dates for Adam and Eve would allow them to actually date. Ha ha!
Now those dates are still too far in the past to satisfy an old-Earth creationist like me, but it solves that problem about them existing durring completely different dates. I’ve been waiting for that one to be solves for a decade! It’s progress.
WINTERY KNIGHT 