[_ Old Earth _] Statisticians: Ancestor of All Humans 5,000 B.P. Max (Noah?)

[Charlie Hatchett]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,201908,00.html

 

[Poke]

I'm sympathetic to the idea of a common recent ancestor. But, the article is stupid.

 

[Charlie Hatchett]

I'm sympathetic to the idea of a common recent ancestor. But, the article is stupid.

Elaborate on the "stupidity" please.

 

[Poke]

Elaborate on the "stupidity" please.

Most significantly, the article very much fails to appreciate the degree of isolation between remote populations before modern times.

 

[Charlie Hatchett]

Most significantly, the article very much fails to appreciate the degree of isolation between remote populations before modern times.

So I take it you don't buy Noah's Flood, Babylon, Nimrod...the cradle of

civilization being Babylon....? :-?

 

[Poke]

So I take it you don't buy Noah's Flood, Babylon, Nimrod...the cradle of

civilization being Babylon....? :-?

I wager that because of human migration, it didn't take long for various populations to become highly isolated.

 

[Charlie Hatchett]

I wager that because of human migration, it didn't take long for various populations to become highly isolated.

So then, do you feel it's plausible that the human population was concentrated

in one region 5,000 B.P.?

 

[Poke]

So then, do you feel it's plausible that the human population was concentrated

in one region 5,000 B.P.?

The article suggests that possibility in as little as 2000 years ago. Absurd. In any case, the article is not at all suggesting a small populaton at any time in the past.

 

[Charlie Hatchett]

...In any case, the article is not at all suggesting a small populaton at any time in the past...

...Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree.

But don't stop there; keep going back. As the number of potential ancestors dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who never had children or whose lines eventually died out....

 

[Poke]

Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees.

I meant small as in a single family 5000 years ago. Of course, in the past, eveyone agrees the world's population was smaller, even much smaller thousands of years ago.

 

[Charlie Hatchett]

I meant small as in a single family 5000 years ago. Of course, in the past, eveyone agrees the world's population was smaller, even much smaller thousands of years ago.

Ah..O.K.

That's what I was getting at.

So you don't interpret the flood account in Genesis to be literal.

 

[Poke]

This does make me think of something interesting.

We are all the physical children of Abraham, at least the people of the middle-east and Europe. The state of Israel was dispersed long before Jesus came along. Then the people of Judea were dispersed soon after Jesus' arrival. With the dispersion over the past 2000+ years, as well as smaller scale migration and interbreeding before the dispersions, it is statistically certain that we are all children of Abraham.