Hello, cousin! (re: Recent common ancestors to all living humans)

Of course the creationists will jump on this because it fits their style.Seems simple, just extrapolate back the generations and at some point you have more ancestors then there were people on the earth.One problem I can see other than how unrealistic the result is is simply that it makes no account for regional seperation. I am sorry but at 2k-5k BC I am pretty confident that none of my ancestors were Austrailian Aborigines nor Native American.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

How much migration was there between Australia, North America, and Eurasia 2k to 5k years ago?Certainly they talk about it, but in no way does it seem that it was adequetly or accuratly accounted for in their conclusion.This quote for me certainly raised a red flag. If someone could calculate a "realistic" migration rate between Native Australian and European people then that alone would probably be news worthy. What it sounds like they are doing is applying a rate taken from analyzing some migration dynamics and applied it to the whole population. A step that if true would be very much invalid.The other think you should note is that by slightly changing their "rate" they give a number that I would be hightly skeptical of 1 A.D. I would need more details to be sure but at first glance that just seems rediculous.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

The study itself may be awesome but do you think the "made for TV" version of the study does it justice or uses the findings from the study accuratly?Even though that is not what RAZD is saying, I think that is what he means. Without being an expert on the subject, it "seems" to be the case that the 2k-5k number is way off and may be a bastardization of the real science.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

So basically RAZD's problems are true if you only examine the sensationalized article. Are we all just agreeing differently that the Yahoo article is a misrepresentation if not wrong all together?

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

I am not sure I even am defending him. I really just want to know if my original skepticism for the article was warranted. From what I read of your post #6 it seems that it was.Based on the information you gave it seems like the original study has some merit but when the article writers took and ran with it they did so in an invalid way. I am no expert but it seems very unlikely that the MRCA between myself and a native Australian lived anywhere within a few tens of thousands of years let alone 2-5 thousand years.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

That is why I phrased my skepticism tentativly. Thanks for the info by the way.I have a couple questions that you may or may not be able to answer. When using the measure of migration (.1 individuals per generation) is that applied to every possible combination of groups or just the ones that are geographically adjacent?How do they go about determining that value? Again, with much tentative skepticism, it seems that in a number of occasions of significance .1 would be drastically large. This would be especially true if the answer to my first question is that the rate is calculated between all permutations of the groups. Since I am not a scholar on this topic I wouldn't know one way or the other. I am only asking the question based on my intuition.One last thing, is there any consideration in the model to account for how much of the migratory input from one group to another would be stemmed by the loss of a line with a migratory ancestor at the root? In other words, is the effect of the migration permanent once it is introduced? That may not even make any sense given the details of the model but it is a thought that crossed my mind while thinking of applying migratory rates to the basic exponential model.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)