"Out of Africa" theory: a done deal

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Fraggle Rocker, Feb 22, 2008.

  1. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks again. Can (and have) linguists tools been used to date some early technical progress like the invention of the wheel and asign proper credit to some group? For an older example: where and when was the bow and arrow invented or is that too far back in the past. How about some form of indoor toilet?* etc. What can you linguist tell us about man's progress or have the archologist done it all? If they have does their work only help the lingiusts? (or is it a "two way street" - both helping the other to understand better man's history?)
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    * Probably just myth, but I have idea the flush verions was invented by Mr.Crapper.
     
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  3. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    BillyT: Here is the site referenced by Zarlok for the article written by Annemarie Nagle about Mitochondrial DNA. It references m-Eve as about 150,000 years ago. I've read other articles, especially when it was first being written about, placing her at about 120,000 years ago: http://home.nc.rr.com/ambiient/site/mtdna.htm
     
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  5. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Here are quotes from the text of the above reference:

    "In 1987 a research team from the University of California @ Berkeley determined that the entire existing human population is descendent from an African woman who lived approximately 150,000 years ago dubbed "mitochondrial Eve." ... This split [into 18 tribes] in Eve’s progeny is believed by scientists to have occurred around 144,000 years ago, and this date appears to correspond to the period in which Y chromosome trees project that branching took place."
     
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  7. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Here's one that places m-Eve at 140,000 to 290,000 years ago:http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html

    Here's one that places m-Eve at 150,000 to 200,000 years ago: http://syllabus.med.unc.edu/yr4/gen/medhist/publish/mitochnotes.htm

    This one has it at 200,000 years ago: http://w-uh.com/articles/030628a-Mitochondrial_Eve.html

    Here's a grade school internet lesson plan with it at 150,000 years ago:http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/programs/realeve/

    Here's one at 200,000 years ago:http://www.newscientist.com/article...dna-evidence-strengthens-eve-hypothesis-.html

    Here's one at 200,000 years ago with the Mungo man controversy: http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2001/04/26/53.asp

    This one is an organization that will determine which ancestral line you belong to if you provide them a tissue sample, has m-Eve at 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and has the more recent "7-daughters of Eve" along the primary 7 European/caucasian lineages:http://www.oxfordancestors.com/your-maternal.html

    Here's the best summary of this: "Y-chromosomal Adam probably lived 65,000 years ago, and mitochondrial Eve some 150,000 years ago. The people living around the same time as these two individuals would have passed on their genes like Adam and Eve, but their Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lines would have eventually died out." which is found at:http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2005/04/29/dna_ancestry/

    Enjoy your reading!
     
  8. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks. that was a facinating informative read.
     
  9. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    BillyT:

    Glad you found it interesting. I thought I should make a brief comment about the above quote, as it might seem confusing as to why Y-Adam and m-Eve are so far apart in time. Clearly they were not each other's spouses. Rather, Y-Adam is a much more recent descendant of m-Eve from whom all men alive can trace their Y chromosome. It is suggestive that Y- Adam and his descendants managed to visit all of the peoples of the world at about 65,000 years ago such that their Y-chromosomes now exist in all men. Since this is about the time of the spread of mankind around the globe, this makes sense. It would appear that earlier tribes of true humans already existed going back to m-Eve's time [150,000 years ago] with whom Y-Adam's sons interbred. I'm not certain how extensive those earlier tribes were, or where the greatest ages of m-Eves daughters exist in modern people. Also, the 150,000 year date is by a presumed regular mutational clock which might not be entirely accurate, and we should keep open the possibility that m-Eve lived much closer in time to Y-Adam.

    For those who want to find a true mother and father of us all, m-Eve had a single mother and a single father from whom we are all descended, and they lived in a tribe of the last of the pre-humans.
     
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Linguists are the last in line. Reconstructions of prehistoric languages are far too hypothetical to be convincing evidence for anything in another discipline. We think we know where the original Indo-European tribe lived before its diaspora because of the names of trees and other lifeforms that have come down through all of its descendant languages, but even then it's "somewhere in the region of Anatolia or perhaps Georgia." That's not very precise.
    The wheel was invented in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago. We have archeological evidence for that because primitive wheels have survived. The first wheel was actually the potter's wheel and it's a pretty complicated invention because it's no good without an axle and a socket and is of no use unless it's very precisely built. Wheelwright was a skilled specialty that required a fairly advanced civilization with good division of labor. Once those problems were overcome, turning it sideways and adapting it for transportation was probably easier. We have only speculative histories of languages going that far back so they're not as useful as archeology.

    There is a slight possibility that the wheel was invented independently in China more than two thousand years later, but obviously it's hard to discount the likelihood that in all that time one or more of the many wheeled vehicles in the civilization to the west simply traveled there.
    The bow and arrow goes back much farther, around 15,000 years, and it was invented independently in at least three places. We can't trace any languages back that far except for a handful of hypothetical root words that could easily just be coincidences.
    Archeology has far more discoveries to its credit than linguistics. I'm not a professional so I can't tell you if archeologists have ever been aided by linguists. Archeology has been a big resource for linguists simply because it has provided us with so many early examples of writing.

    Which leads to the fact that linguistics is only helpful in the study of history when we have actual written records, and those only go back a few thousand years. We're best in the modern era with the plethora of printed documents. We can tell you when a word first came into use, and that tells you something about the technological or social issue that caused it to be coined.
    The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in what is now Pakistan had flush toilets three or four thousand years ago. Sir John Harington invented a flush toilet system essentially equivalent to the modern version in 1596.

    London plumber Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet but he was instrumental in its widespread adoption. The word "crap" is authentic Middle English for dregs, residue, etc., probably derived from crappe for chaff, which is a Latin borrowing. In Crapper's time, as the upper class began installing indoor toilets to distinguish themselves from the common folk, the slang word "crapper" was already being applied to the toilet. (Perhaps by the people who weren't getting them.

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    ) He did nothing to discourage the assumption that it was named after him since it was both a great family joke and good for business.

    We've never had a really good word for the object. We use cumbersome compounds like "water closet" or euphemisms like "lavatory" which is a place for washing. "Toilet" is the activity around a lady's dressing-table and "rest rooms" are not for resting. These days many of us resolutely uncouth Americans call it a "potty," a baby word referring to the "pot" used to "toilet-train" toddlers.
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2008
  11. zarlok Banned Banned

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    Uhh, what remarkable genetic uniformity? We are not as close together as many bogus liberal-marxist articles like to claim. They rely on a little sprinkle of truth and two giant scoops of ignorance: one from the journalists/editors, the other from the naive and equally ignorant general public. You are referring to Lewontin's fallacy, no doubt.

    The out of africa goons and the Lewontin goons are all cut from the marxist "noble lie" prophets and social engineering cloth. They are the most dangerous things to science imaginable.
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The fact that there is more genetic diversity in a 500 mile circle of chimpanzee range than there is on the six continents and ten thousand islands of human range.

    If we were dogs, we'd probably all be the same breed - little bit of coat color variation, some tendencies to hip displasia is some lines, but a Great Dane is a Great Dane.
     
  13. DeepThought Banned Banned

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    In the mtDNA Eve experiment they used computer routines to simulate mtDNA mutation and a target string of chimpanzee DNA. I can't find any +/- error stats for this experiment and would suggest, therefore, that its claims are approached with extreme caution.

    It's generally true, I think, that our ancestors were far less in number than we are today. But to reduce it to one or two seems an implausible claim given the experiments methodology. On balance, I would reject the mtDNA Eve claim until it is supported by hard evidence.
     
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2008
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Actually that's not true. There is less difference between the DNA of a beagle and a Tibetan mastiff than between a human from Norway and one from New Guinea. The reason is that dogs went through a genetic bottleneck much more recently than humans. Dogs domesticated themselves only once, around 15,000 years ago. (It was voluntary; humans were a long way from the technology of animal husbandry.) It was one wolf population in what is now China; the ones who didn't sidle up to the campfire are still there and we've looked at their DNA. Domestication might have occurred independently in other locations in time, but cooperative human-dog hunting packs were so successful that the idea--and the DNA of the already-domesticated dogs--spread quickly.

    The same is true of the domestic cat. They're all descendants of the Libyan population of Felis sylvestris. Some other animals like the horse were domesticated in multiple locations and eras.

    As I've noted in other threads I find it significant that man lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, distrusting other bands and showing no evidence of cooperative behavior, for eons. Then another species showed him that it is possible to live in harmony and cooperation with "folks" he couldn't even talk to. Suddenly, within a couple of thousand years after that, humans began living together in large groups in permanent farming villages, and another couple of thousand years later they began living in harmony and cooperation with total strangers, in cities.

    I suggest we can thank dogs for the inspiration for everything we've accomplished since the Mesolithic Era. Man's Best Friend, indeed.
     
  15. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    The errors that would exist in the mtDNA claim is the dating error. As I said, she might have lived much closer in time to Y-Adam, maybe even after [in which case our last common mother/father pair would have been Y-Adams' parents, rather than m-Eve's parents, who also lived in a clan or tribe of pre-humans].

    There is no question but that all women share mitochondria that they inherited from their mothers, who inherited them from their grandmothers, etc. Going backwards, there is one woman who can be shown to be the ancestral mother of all those who came after. She almost certainly lived in a 'clan' or 'tribe' of other females and males, but the other female mitochondria did not survive to modern day, even though their other genes on chromsomes did. Ergo, m-Eve is by definition the last common female ancestor of all modern females. We know this because mitochondria do not undergo sexual division [i.e. meiosis], but rather purely binary fission much like the ancestral "bacteria-like" ancestor of the mitochondria.

    Personally, I tend to believe that there are likely significant errors [as you suggested] in the dating of m-Eve, likely for the reasons you suggested, and she likely lived much closer in time to Y-Adam, but I have no hard evidence for that, but rather the evidence suggestive that mankind started spreading around the globe at about 60,000 years ago, displacing other pre-human tribes [such as erectus, neanderthal, etc.].

    The dating of the more recent divergences of m-Eve's daughters [some of which are shown in the cite by Zarlok and also posted by me above] appears a little more certain in the time-lines. Unfortunately, much more work needs to be done in this area, on more tissue samples and more regions of m-DNA, to clarify this.
     
  16. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    In this ref it states that the sperm also has a little mitochondria DNA that it injects into the much larger egg during fertilization, but that this mitochondria DNA is destroyed. I assume that the sperm's mitochondria DNA is also from mEve. (probably an exact copy of that man's mother's version, which may have some SNPs slightly different from his wife's eggs, especially if she comes from a distant group of humans). It seems amazing, but I can not think of any other way, that the egg can detect these few SNP differences to selectively destroy the relative few mitochondria that came form the sperm. Any comments?

    For man to notice SNPs, complex expensive machines are required.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 27, 2008
  17. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    BillyT:

    I'm not certain how that happens. The mitochondria are likely quite different in a sperm compared to an egg, since the sperms is so much smaller than an egg. To pack in any mitochondria at all might make them different in morphology from normal mitochondria, and thereby readily detected as a foreign body by the egg's defense mechanisms. Even the invasion of the egg cell by the sperm is a complex mechanism, as once a single sperm has entered, no other sperm can do so, essentially instantaneously, so that there are never two sperm admitted. I'm not certain what happens to the other components of the sperm cell itself, either. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in cell biology than I can answer this better, if it is known. Also, I'm not certain if this is universally true for all eukaryotes [all of which engage in meiotic cell division, and formation of sex cells], many of which have varying sizes of sperm. However, because it appears to be true for humans, it does make for a convenient method for determining maternal lineages.
    Isn't it interesting how the more we know, the more we learn about how little we do know?
     
  18. zarlok Banned Banned

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    There is no question but that all humans share mitochondria that they inherited from their mothers
     
  19. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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  20. Roman Banned Banned

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    You wouldn't get that gay-pride flag looking genetic distribution if it weren't for inbreeding. The reason why there are so many different genotypes, why variability is so high, is due largely to small population size. Eg, inbreeding.

    Basically, if you have a population of 1,000,000 breeding individuals, the chance that you breed with yourself, or someone very closely related to you, is very slim. You gametes self fertilizing, in fact, are 1/2,000,000. The tiny number of times that happens means any given mutation is lost. However, our understanding of early hominids and humans puts them in much, much smaller group, which greatly increases the chance that mutations (chance events) that occur will be preserved and not lost to breeding.

    I've simplified it a bit, but given previous discussion with you, you can't handle complexity. Let me know what you don't understand. And I do realize this might go against what you "feel". Please note that your "feelings" have little bearing on science.
     
  21. Roman Banned Banned

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    Would your "canonical theory" be considered a paradigm? Or did only Kuhn use that? I've heard it used only once outside of that book, in a scientific setting.
     
  22. John99 Banned Banned

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    :zzz:


    Maybe when you graduate from high school and have some more experience you will understand things better. Until then just keep reading your text books and dont forget to give the teacher an apple.
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No, I don't think so. The word is used in many ways in the various specific disciplines, particularly the soft sciences. But in the general body of science a paradigm is a structure within which theories are formulated. I think the closest we could come would be to call a collection of "canonical theories" a paradigm.
     

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