In a message dated 9/6/2009 6:32:55 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, saboca...@gmail.com writes:
The second point, revising the "out of Africa" timing is of particular interest. Could you elaborate on this? Greg McD Comment "They also got more recent dates for other crucial events such as the age of our African ancestral mother, known as mitochondrial Eve, from who all recent humans (Homo sapiens) descended. She was found to have lived around 110-130,000 years ago, rather than previous estimates of 150,000-200,000 years ago." Versus . . . . (Genesis Revisted by Zecharia Sitchin pg 199 Chapter 9 “The Mother Called Eve.” Scanned from First Avon edition 1990. 17th printing.My personal copy of the book. “Because a person's DNA keeps getting mixed by the genes of the generational fathers, comparisons of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell (which come half from mother, half from father) do not work well after several generations. It was dis covered, however, that in addition to the DNA in the cell's nucleus, some DNA exists in the mother's cell but outside the nucleus in bodies called "mitochondria" (Fig. 62). This DNA does not get mixed with the father's DNA; instead, it is passed on "unadulterated" from mother to daughter to granddaughter, and so on through the generations. This discovery, by Douglas Wallace of Emory University in the 1980s, led him to compare this "mtDNA" of about 800 women. The surprising conclu sion, which he announced at a scientific conference in July 1986, was that the mtDNA in all of them appeared to be so similar that these women must have all descended from a single female ancestor. The research was picked up by Wesley Brown of the Uni versity of Michigan, who suggested that by determining the rate of natural mutation of mtDNA, the length of time that had passed since this common ancestor was alive could be calcu lated. Comparing the mtDNA of twenty-one women from di verse geographical and racial backgrounds, he came to the conclusion that they owed their origin to "a single mitochon-drial Eve" who had lived in Africa between 300,000 and 180,000 years ago. These intriguing findings were taken up by others, who set out to search for "Eve." Prominent among them was Rebecca Cann of the University of California at Berkeley (later at Hawaii University). Obtaining the placentas of 147 women of different races and geographical backgrounds who gave birth at San Francisco hospitals, she extracted and compared their mtDNA. The conclusion was that they all had a common female ancestor who had lived between 300,000 and 150,000 years (depending on whether the rate of mutation was 2 percent or 4 percent per million years). "We usually assume 250,000 years," Cann stated. The upper limit of 300,000 years, paleoanthropologists noted, coincided with the fossil evidence for the time Homo sapiens made his appearance. "What could have happened 300,000 years ago to bring this change about?" Cann and Allan Wilson asked, but they had no answer.” ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
