The lost past of humans

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Jaxom, Dec 13, 2002.

  1. Jaxom Tau Zero Registered Senior Member

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    http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/descent.html

    I ran across this article in my wanderings, concerning how so far modern human DNA is remarkably different than DNA from the Neanderthal, erectus, and other previous hominiods. Unfortunately the article itself takes a theological spin at the end, trying to make the assumption that because science doesn't have an answer yet, the Bible must be right.

    But putting that aside, it sparked a memory of something else I had read in the past stating that the mutation rate of mitochondia in humans seems to point to less diverseness than we would expect in the assumed age of the human race. The suggestion was that somewhere in the recent past, there was some catastrophe that narrowed the gene pool dramatically, and if I remember correctly, using some standard rate of mutation and known population numbers in history, this bottleneck might have occurred roughly 10-25,000 years ago.

    My questions would be:

    1) Does the article above seem valid in its scientific possibilities, that we haven't found the hominiod that we're most likely decended from yet? (They proposed we aren't decended at all, of course)

    2) Has anyone else ever heard of some theory of past narrowing of the species? I have no idea if I remembered what I read correctly.

    3) Could this help support any ideas that modern humans have been around, and possibily civilized, much longer than previously thought?

    Any thought are welcome...I often wonder if there truly is some lost past, and what may have happened, or if it's just some wishful thinking for a Golden Age.
     
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  3. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    My best bet on that catastropy would be a series of plagues (perhaps with smallpox and the black plague among them). The black plague alone took out 1/3 of all humanity in the old world at least once. I presume there would be new world plagues as well.

    After such a plague many of the survivors would have at least one thing in common, they would be naturally resistant to the disease. Chances are the mutation would only be originally found in one family. After competition is wiped out by the plague the members of that one family would reproduce like mad to fill every available niche. Thus a limited genepool.

    Thats just my personal theory but its workable. In fact it is probabaly due to a number of different factors.
     
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  5. adam2314 Registered Senior Member

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    If we have not found the " Hominiod "... After so much searching.... Could it be because He/She did not exist...??.. Maybe Rael is right !!..
     
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  7. wet1 Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    It comes to my mind that it is very likely that the missing link in the homo side may well have not yet been found.

    Think about it. Not every creature that dies becomes fossilized, as the creationism proponets love to point out. (Of course the idea that they have to wait for several thousands of years for this to happen is missed on them.) It takes special circumstances for the fossilization process to occur. So how often do you think the right sort of circumstances happen during the demise of a living creature for it to happen? One in a hundred? One in a million? Probably the odds are far higher than that, given that there would have been far less population for this to happen just right. Even then, what are the odds of finding such fossils? Most either have to wait for the fossilized bone to surface or for construction to dig them up and then recognise it as a find.
     
  8. adam2314 Registered Senior Member

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    Traces ????.. surely there would be some traces !!.. Mankind is leaving his bloody big footprints all over this modern world..
     
  9. John Mace Registered Senior Member

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    Jaxom: Let me try to address your 3 questions.

    1. The article has a definite anti-evolution slant, so it appears that the writer already "knows" the point he or she wishes to prove and is interpreting the data accordingly. That being said, each new archeological find seems to open as many new questions about the ancestors of modern humans as it answers. Bottom line, this is a very difficult puzzle to crack and we only have the tiniest protion of the pieces to look at. We seem to have a general idea of the evolutionary timeframe (5-6 million years since the human/chimp split) and general sequence (bipedality first, larger brains later) but not so great a grasp of the details.

    2. It is generally thought that our species (Homo sapiens) went through an "evolutionary bottleneck" sometime before the last great migration out of Africa. That would be closer to 100ky ago, rather than 25ky. I've read that there may have been as few as 10,000 total individuals of the species at that time. This is based on a stastical analysis of the varibility of modern people's DNA, rather than direct archeological evidence.

    3. Not sure how this follows from the article (which is arguing for a RECENT appearance of modern humans), but it seems like the only theories I've seen about civilization being older than 5-10ky are found on late night Discovery Channel programs.

    BTW, you hit on an interesting point about measuring genetic relatedness of pre-sapiens species. The only data I have seen is several preliminary studies of sapiens vs neandertal mtDNA which put the sapiens/neandertal split at about 500ky ago. The implication is that Neandertals were more like uncles or cousins rather than grandparents (to use a familial analogy). I've not seen that DNA has been extracted from any other non-sapien hominid.
     
  10. Jaxom Tau Zero Registered Senior Member

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    559
    Thanks for the info and comments...it seems that my initial question, how reliable are the observations and/or referred sources in that particular article, has mushroomed into a lot more than I expected. It's good to have theories, but when you have many competing ones, all having validity and problems, you can't really pick a best one until more data eliminates the majority. I never realized how unsure we really are about our past...
     

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