davis@hplabs.UUCP (Jim Davis) (11/16/83)
The original article: > All living people (or at least ~99% of them) have a single common female > ancestor on their purely maternal line. In other words, tracing back to > one's mother's mother's mother's ... mother will bring everyone back to > a single individual woman. She is estimated to have lived between > 50,000 and 500,000 years ago. Piet Beertema writes: > Fine! But please explain: how comes the oldest fossil > hominid skull is about 2,000,000 years old! Must have been > only males then living at that time.... I (Jim Davis) write: Piet's comment is simply ridiculous. Simply because all people are (if they are) descendants of a single individual 50,000 years ago does not imply that this individual did not have parents. I am sure that Piet will not dispute that there are no surviving members of Neanderthal Man or Homo Erectus; they are all dead now. Does the fact that they are dead imply that they never lived (the conclusion of applying Piet's logic to this problem). Michael Ward writes: > This seems to imply one of the following: > - There were no hominids before ~50K years ago. > - All hominids except one family were somehow wiped out in that time. > - Our common ancestral tribe went a-raiding and delivered their > excess women throughout the world. > - Our common ancestral tribe slaughtered all other hominids in the > world. > Since the first three options seem unlikely for one reason or another, > and the one that is left is very disconcerting to me, I would appreciate > it if someone would think up a more pleasant explanation of this. I (Jim Davis) write: It might be appropriate to discuss a similar example occuring during our own time period. There is a human cell culture called HeLa (named after its now desceased contributor). At one time there were many other human cell cultures from different donors. Recent work (I'm sorry not to give the researcher's name, but I'm forgetful) has shown that most of the currently existing cell cultures are now HeLa cultures. This does not mean that there never were any other cell cultures, nor does it mean that there were no cells cultures before HeLa (though I am not sure that there were). All that this means is that over time the HeLa strain "took over" or "crowded out" the other strains. If the slaughter that Michael Ward refers to took place over hundreds of generations, and was not necessarily caused by any form of direct conforntation, is it still as disconcerting? After all, Neanderthal Man or Homo Erectus were certainly killed off via this same "slaughter" (quoted because there was no necessity for any direct conflict). I do not find it far fetched that humanity may have shared a common female ancestor as recently as 50,000 years ago. I do find the conclusions that others draw to be quite strange. Please be sure that flames or counter replies make it to net.misc, I do not subscribe regularly to any of the other groups containing this discussion. -- Jim Davis (James W Davis) ...!ucbvax!hplabs!davis davis.HP-Labs@Rand-Relay ----------------------------------------------------------------