Out of Africa, < 100K yrs ago, theology or hard science?

Question

Biology & DNA sequencing keeps questioning the validity of recent & unmixed versions of Humanity, but the Out of Africa proponets remain staunch defenders of their view... is this science or theology?

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hegene.htm

Answer 1

I think it is theory because of a gene that is found in North and South American Indians, most Europeons and Asians but is found in few Africans. If life started in Africa then were did this gene come from and how come it is in more people? How can life start in two areas at the same time or close? DNA shows we are all related, something does not make sense.

Answer 2

Actually, the most recent DNA sequencing of the mitochondrial X info and the Y information, coupled with the archaeological information quite supports &quot; Out of Africa. &quot; When are you social scientists going to give up ideology for evidence?

Possible; not necessarily sufficient. That is why we are happy to have the converging Y chromosome evidence.

Mathilda! Your own blog is not that convincing! We biologists do not really care what many anthropologists think. Introgression, or no, the Out of Africa theory is the one with the evidence untainted by anthropological posturing.

Put &quot; Out of Africa theory &quot; into your address bar to see mountains of support and mole hills of rebuttal. Why do you anthropologists go on this way? Some of you still support the findings of Margret Mead on Samoa!!!!

Answer 3

Just last week they claimed (on Yahoo!) to have found a human skeleton more than a million years old (1.3 million years old) in a cave in Spain, at Atapuerca.  This is NOT the first of such news; so if you believe in &quot;Out of Africa&quot;, that means that Out of Africa happened more than a million years ago, that humans simultaneously began in more than one place, or ALL of this stuff is just a hoax, like many other &quot;scientific theories and discoveries&quot; of the past.

There are so many flaws in &quot;Out of Africa&quot;. IF humans began in Africa, why is it that Asia has, and has always had, the highest population? Why is it that the first civilizations begin in the area of modern Israel, Iran and Iraq? (They were also the first to grow grains.) Why is it that the oldest known agricultural sites are in Mexico? (More than 10,000 years ago...According to the Out of Africa THEORISTS, the Indians crossed an ice bridge from Siberia 10,000 years ago. So, the VERY year they crossed this alleged ice bridge, they were already in Mexico planting crops? Give me a break! (Another problem: according to geologists and other earth scientists, during that ice age when the Natives supposedly crossed over on the ice bridge, the ice was more than a mile deep, even as much as two miles deep.  Get a map of Alaska (I have flown over it a few times). Those mountains are already high; with 1 to 2 miles of ice on top of the moutains, they would have had to have had oxygen masks! Not to mention, they could not have survived on eating/drinking ice; they could not have carried sufficient food/clothing/shelter/fuel for fire!

As far as I am aware, Out of Africa is not really opposed by theology; the Bible does NOT state WHERE the Garden of Eden was.  The Sahara desert used to be (before man overgrazed it) a jungle with lakes and rivers.

So, there is as much science AGAINST Out of Africa as there is FOR it.  Including DNA.

REad some of those OTHER books and decide for your self.

Answer 4

You had to get me started...

I think it&#039;s clung to because it has some compatability with the Adam and Eve story, making it palatable to Abrahamic religious people who may not agree with a 100% literal translation of the bible, but who think it may be correct in an allegorical sense.

It is by it&#039;s nature a fragile theory, as it it only take one interbreeding event to make it incorrect. And human males aren&#039;t renowned for being picky. If the choice is between no woman, and an ugly Neanderthal women from that tribe they&#039;ve just wiped out, most will pick the ugly woman.

There are at least four DNA studies that show OOA to be impossible, and plenty of geneticists and anthropologists believe the &#039;Weak Eden&#039; theory is more accurate. The only problem is that the OOA theory is also the most compatible with the &#039;there is no race&#039; line taken by the educated media, so they work in tandem to shore each other up.

The lack of mitochondrial DNA is actualy pretty meaningless. We have &#039;lost&#039; one large Y chromosome group (IJ) and another is extremely rare now (DE). One Mt DNA type, pre-HV was also thought extinct once, but it&#039;s just very rare. It was very common in Cro Magnons though. In one South American country, absolutely no native male Y DNA could be found in the modern population. So it&#039;s easy to lose Y and Mt DNA lineages. Also bear in mind, both Y and Mt DNA are functional, not neutral, and a subject to natural selection too.

The genetic evidence for &#039;weak Eden&#039; so far is...

Two X chromosome with a seperation time from the &#039;African X chromosome Eve&#039; of about two million years, one in Mbuti Pygmies, one in Asians, not seen in Africans.

The MCPH1 gene, also not found in Africans and seperated from the African original by nearly two million years.

And more, seen here..

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpre...

As well as anthropological studies to support introgression. I can&#039;t find that many anthropolgists that support the OOA theory.

COOL LIST OF GENES on that link, BTW!

Answer 5

In response to Nothing

There was a recent find of a 1.3 million year old &quot;human ancestor&quot; found in Spain.  There were likely several types of hominids in the world.  This is only a few hundred thousand years after habilis was found cohabitating in Africa with erectus.  The point is we don&#039;t know if it were an actual ancestor or just a close relative.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23813443&amp;GT1...

Ed, that was a really great article.  It does indicate that the &quot;Out of Africa&quot; has become theology to some degree.  I don&#039;t buy Wolpof&#039;s view that it means they mated with archaic humans.  It could also indicate that the modern population was one of multiple species where our lineage was widespread and occupied Europe and Asia and coexisted with others like some of the Asian erectus.  There is a study that indicates that there were two different species or categories of erectus in Asia.  Who knows how many species that might actually represent?  One of them may have been our ancestors or at least contributed.  It seems likely that populations from Africa largely replaced others but that doesn&#039;t mean that there were no human ancestors in Asia prior to 100,000 years ago.  Looking in Africa for verification by tracking genes is not reliable evidence.  Humans can move that distance in a single generation.