Homestead mailing list

[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

No, it's not that stupid biblethumper BISHOP USHER drivel, it's that 
prior to a fully COMMON ancestor, ancestor lines direrge, thought they 
are still ancestors and still human.


 YALE News Release

CONTACT: Janet Rettig Emanuel, 203-432-2157 or janet.emanuel AT yale.edu 
<mailto:janet.emanuel@yale> #269

For Immediate Release: 1 p.m. EDT, September 29, 2004


     */"Most Recent Common Ancestor" of All Living Humans Surprisingly
     Recent /*

*New Haven, Conn.* -- In this week's issue of Nature, a Yale 
mathematician presents models showing that the most recent person who 
was a direct ancestor of all humans currently alive may have lived just 
a few thousand years ago.

"While we may not all be 'brothers,' the models suggest we are all 
hundredth cousins or so," said Joseph T. Chang 
<http://www.stat.yale.edu/people/josephchang.html>, professor in the 
Department of Statistics <http://www.stat.yale.edu/> at Yale University 
<http://www.yale.edu/> and senior author on the paper.

Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication 
with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as 
geography and migration. Those precise mathematical results showed that 
in a world obeying the simplified assumptions, the most recent common 
ancestor would have lived less than 1,000 years ago. He also introduced 
the "identical ancestors point," the most recent time -- less than 2,000 
years ago in the simplified model -- when each person was an ancestor to 
all or ancestor to none of the people alive today.

The current paper presents more realistic mathematical and computer 
models. It incorporates factors such as socially driven mating, physical 
barriers of geography and migration, and recorded historical events. 
Although such complexities make pure mathematical analysis difficult, it 
was possible to integrate them into an elaborate computer simulation 
model. The computer repeatedly simulated history under varying 
assumptions, tracking the lives, movements, and reproduction of all 
people who lived within the last 20,000 years.

These more realistic models estimate that the most recent common 
ancestor of mankind lived as recently as about 3,000 years ago, and the 
identical ancestors point was as recent as several thousand years ago. 
The paper suggests, "No matter the languages we speak or the color of 
our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the 
Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, 
who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and 
who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu."

The results can also work backwards, into the future. According to 
Chang, "Within two thousand years, it is likely that everyone on earth 
will be descended from most of us."

Other authors are Douglas L.T. Rhode of the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology and Steve Olson of Bethesda, MD. The National Institutes of 
Health supported this research.

Citation: Nature, 431, 562- 565, (September 30, 2004) 
<http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v431/n7008/abs/nature02842_fs.html&dynoptions=doi1096481466>. 
For solicited commentary on this paper, see News & Views and 
supplementary material in the same issue.

# # #