All Human Beings Are Descendants of Adam

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Why is it we don't have the evidence for any of the other members of this population?
I mean why is it that we do not have more markers that can be traced to someone who lived during ME's time?

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Those are two very different questions. To deal with the second one we don't trace markers to individuals, just times. And if we could trace all of them to a common ancestor living at the same time that would be evidence FOR a single original pair.

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Yes. But is there any evidence to say it cannot be such a severe bottleneck?

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My understanding is that the evidence is indeed against such a severe bottleneck (which IS evidence that there were other people living at the time of ME !). For comparison you could look at the problems of the cheetah which really did suffer a very severe bottleneck about 10,000 years ago.This paper Allelic Genealogy and Human Evolution even argues against the ME result being due to a bottleneck !

People have answered that time after time after time, but I will try once more.ME looks at only one factor, one small factor in our genetic makeup.It deals only with our mitochondrial lineage.A few things about ME and her time. She had a mother who was still living, twenty six maiden sisters, one hundred and thirty two maiden aunts and six hundred and thirty maiden great aunts.She also had twenty nine horny brothers, sixteen horny cousins and a blue brazillion kissin cousins.The all lived in a big tent with a thick mattress on the floor.Eve enjoyed life greatly. Her brothers enjoyed life greatly. Her cousins and kissin cousins enjoyed life greatly.Her momma drew cave paintings showing Eve and her brothers and her cousins and her kissin cousins and charged three cowry shells for folk to dl them.Eve's sisters and aunts had a booming business singing panties "Love and Kisses Eve" and selling them by the sea shore.It was the best of times but often Eve secretly wished that her sisters and aunts weren't so butt ugly.Are you with me so far?Edited by jar, : appalin spallin

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Hi Europa, Well, when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much and they want to have a little baby, they have a sort of special cuddle...

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Okay. Amusing though this is, let's just get to the point; why are you talking about a single ancestor? Surely the absolute minimum number for any population is two? A man and a woman. Because, well, y'know...Even the most bonkers-in-the-nut creationists generally accept that we are descended from at least two people. I mean, if you were talking about all humans being descended from an ancestral pair that would make a bit more sense. It would still be wrong, but at least it wouldn't be quite so obviously loopy.It takes two to tango Europa.Mutate and Survive

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On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

But that's not what you're talking about. Let's make this into a scenario with similar terminology.Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that your last name is Jones. You have siblings, cousins, even second cousins once removed. All these people can be traced back to a single woman, and to donate that common ancestor, we'll call her Jones-Eve. SHe's the most recent person all your siblings and cousins and second cousins once removed trace back to collectively. Now, there are a lot of other people that some parts of your family trace back to that other parts don't.It's the same for Mt-Eve. Everyone living traces back to her collectively, but we also all trace back to other people who were alive at the same time, or eariler that other people living today don't trrace back to.Essentially, all Mt-Eve and Y-Adam say is that all humans are related if you go back far enough. It never says that there was only one person alive at a particular time, nor does it ever say that we're all descended from only her. It only says that we're all partially decended from her along with hundreds or thousands of other people at the same point in time.

Yes.
What happened next?

. Edited by Europa, : No reason given.

Wow granny.
you do not have a clue of what you are talking about. Do You?

Really? Enlighten me then.

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Look at it this way Europa; what use is this statement that you are so keen on? What does the statement "We are all descendants of one person" tell us?Certainly it is true in a sense. mt-Eve was one person and we are all her descendants. This is true.However, this is far from the whole story. mt-Eve was part of a functioning human population of many individuals. Every person living will have some ancestry with those people as well - but only with some of them. Nor would those shared traits be universally shared amongst all living humans.Worse is that the statement can be too easily taken out of context, as I have been trying to show you above. The simple, natural and straightforward meaning of "we are all descendants of one person." is that we are all descendants of only one person, a statement that is clearly absurd.For these reasons, I don't really see the point in this line that you are trying to push. Simply saying "we are all descendants of one person." is both incomplete and misleading, too easily susceptible to being misunderstood or deliberately taken out of context. Whilst being trivially true, the statement tells us very little. Such a statement needs context in order to make sense. you seem to want to remove all context from this statement. In doing so, you are robbing it of any communicative power.As for saying "ME may not necessarily be the BIBLICAL Eve. ", you are implying that mt-Eve might be the biblical Eve. This is not so. mt-Eve cannot possibly be the biblical Eve. The biblical Eve lived as part of a very tiny population, just her and Adam. mt-Eve lived as part of a much larger and more diverse population. If she had been one of a single pair of humans, the genetic bottleneck would be very clear and easy to observe. It is not observed, thus mt-Eve is not the biblical Eve. Further, one would expect that mt-Eve and Y-chromosome Adam would have existed at the same time. They did not. Thus, mt-Eve is not the biblical EveAny attempt to talk around this simple fact just comes across as blowing smoke. It is a very poor attempt at a Christian apologetic and it is worse attempt to understand biology. If understanding evolution really is your intent, I suggest that you drop the insistence on this "descendants of one person" soundbite and just forget about the Bible. It's not helping.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : No reason given.

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On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

So a test.Were there other humans alive at the time of ME?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Yes, there may be specific features that we consider characteristic of humans that appeared rapidly in paleontological terms but the evolution of the whole suite of modern human characteristics would still have been gradual. As several people have pointed out there are probably several depending upon exactly what criteria you have for defining what constitutes a human being. You still aren't adequately explaining what you actually mean by this. Are you suggesting a scenario where there was only one person alive on Earth, as has been pointed out sexual reproduction suggests this idea is wrong. Do you mean there were only 2 people as a founding breeding pair?I have pointed out again and again that there are multiple sets of single human beings who can be traced as being ancestral to all modern humans. And as you go further back in time there will be similar sets for all of the preceding generations of humans, eventually you will reach a point where some of those common ancestors do no fit some definition of human. Almost any gene can be used as such a marker. By looking at differences between currently extant alleles of a gene it's history can be reconstructed to determine the timing and sometimes the likely allelic type of the MRCA for that gene. This approach is based on Coalescent theory which I mentioned before. Again, as with everyone else, we don't want you just to keep repeating the same unclear statement over and over again, we want you to actually explain what you mean! By 'we all' do you mean all humanity forever or just all modern humanity?Please try and explain yourself clearly. I understand you probably think you are already doing this but the fact that pretty much everyone else on this thread apparently misunderstands you suggests that this not the case.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

I think the problem is that you still don't really understand how this works. WE are all descendants of ME, but we don't all have the same mitochondrial genome as ME had. Instead we all have variants of that genome that have undergone distinct sequences of mutation.What is done when calculating an MRCA is to use these differences to estimate how far back in time was the point at which the original allele from which all the variants originated existed. This doesn't identify any individual organism and it doesn't necessarily tell us what the ancestral allele or mitochondrial genotype actually was. It just gives us a time for when that particular allele existed.You are correct though that the individual that possessed that allele would be a common ancestor of everyone alive today. This certainly doesn't mean that they were the sole common ancestor of everyone alive today.This doesn't discount the possibility that the same allele wasn't prevalent in other individuals in the same population, just that if it was none of those individuals contributed their copy of that allele to the current gene pool. In the same way that none of ME's female contemporaries ended up contributing their mitochondrial genomes to today's gene pool.TTFN,WK

Every gene in the human population could be traced back to a most recent common ancestor. The point is that different genes will have different MRCAs. We can even apply this concept to different species. For example, ERV's shared by humans and chimps came from a common ancestor.

Yes, and that comon Ancestor was some first "Adam," if you will, who by an Act-of-God chemically mutated in the womb of a surrogate mother Ape with 24 chromosomes wherein two fused together, forming a new species.That initial evolution by a spontaneous generato=ion of a parentless Human evolved further by 22 "steps" from one new species of man to the net until 40,000 years ago Modern man appeared.At the very time in the evolutionary process, modern man 'flooded" out-of-Africa and spread over all the world, even covering the highest mountain tops.At the same time, every other member of Hominoid went extinct, dying out forever along with their previously dominant world view and visions of the aniimal world they had conceived and named.

Does repeating unevidenced claims somehow make them into real evidence?Sounds like something one might learn at the Joseph Goebbels School of Internet Debate?

Hi Kofh2u,If you'd like to discuss your own personal theories then you should propose new threads for that purpose. Please do not introduce your theories into existing threads whose discussion is centered on traditional creationist ideas.