Adam and Eve Have a Date

Here a peer-reviewed publication which estimates Y-DNA Adam's age at +/- 208,300 years ago, within the same range as mtDNA Eve:

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v22/n9/abs/ejhg2013303a.html

Mendez and colleagues reported the identification of a Y chromosome haplotype (the A00 lineage) that lies at the basal position of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. Incorporating this haplotype, the authors estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree to be 338 000 years ago (95% CI=237 000–581 000). Such an extraordinarily early estimate contradicts all previous estimates in the literature and is over a 100 000 years older than the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans. This estimate raises two astonishing possibilities, either the novel Y chromosome was inherited after ancestral humans interbred with another species, or anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged earlier than previously estimated and quickly became subdivided into genetically differentiated subpopulations. We demonstrate that the TMRCA estimate was reached through inadequate statistical and analytical methods, each of which contributed to its inflation. We show that the authors ignored previously inferred Y-specific rates of substitution, incorrectly derived the Y-specific substitution rate from autosomal mutation rates, and compared unequal lengths of the novel Y chromosome with the previously recognized basal lineage. Our analysis indicates that the A00 lineage was derived from all the other lineages 208 300 (95% CI=163 900–260 200) years ago.

The estimate for mitochondrial Eve is within the same timeframe as that for Y-chromosomal Adam. So they could live at the same time.

However, the problem is that these estimates have very low level of accuracy (margine of error is thousands of years).
 
I hate people who read astronomy literally. If you so want to be literal scratch a bit beneath the surface and you'll get that all those "planets" exist in the hollow inside of the "earth".
 
The age of Y-DNA Adam is currently estimated with 95% confidence interval at 210,000 +/- 50,000 (so around 160,000 - 260,000 years ago).

The age of mtDNA Eve is currently estimated with 95% confidence interval at 200,000 +/- 50,000 (so around 150,000 - 250,000 years ago).

You can't prove or disprove that they lived at the same time or in different times. Timeframes do overlap, but the margin of error is huge.
 
Sitchin said they lived ~250kya and he made that prediction long before DNA studies

So that's one for which he seems to be have been slightly close to the accepted answer, against how many hundreds or thousands of examples of all the other alien astronaut stuff?
 
I have been done alluding to bible literalists :p

Neither Sitchin or me is a literalist. Not sure how you got that impression, apparently you haven't read his work.

So that's one for which he seems to be have been slightly close to the accepted answer, against how many hundreds or thousands of examples of all the other alien astronaut stuff?

It can be found in our mythologies
 
So can Ra masturbating the world into existence after emerging from a lotus, but that's hardly a recommendation for anything.
 
Whats the logic behind Adam and Eve being the most recent common ancestor rather than being the first common ancestor that was human? Some scientist decided to call it "Mitochondrial Eve"?

This whole business also involves mitochondrial eve having an unbroken line of decendants on their mothers side, or fathers side for Y-chromosomal Adam, is this really relevant to the concept of just regular old Adam and Eve from the myths rather than the mitochondrial/Y-chromosomal ones?

Or you could just use the emergence of modern humans to date adam and eve, already estimated at somewhere around 200k years ago. Seems simpler to me.
 
So can Ra masturbating the world into existence after emerging from a lotus, but that's hardly a recommendation for anything.

Be careful, Kyriakos hates literalists

The lotus grows in water, the seed of life followed the primeval waters. And the science agrees - life followed the waters. Says so in Genesis too...
 
Even Nostradamus was less vague than that.
 
Be careful, Kyriakos hates literalists

The lotus grows in water, the seed of life followed the primeval waters. And the science agrees - life followed the waters. Says so in Genesis too...

If i show you the numbers X and Y, you can see Y coming from X in an infinite number of different ways. This doesn't mean that if one writes X and Y on a piece of paper he had in mind any individual progression leading from X to Y your or other people will propose.
Ie when people want to see things in myths they always can do so, cause language is inherently ambiguous if one uses enough metaphors or variations of metaphor and distinct objects of reference.
 
Why do people take math so literally? It's all allegory.
 
Whats the logic behind Adam and Eve being the most recent common ancestor rather than being the first common ancestor that was human? Some scientist decided to call it "Mitochondrial Eve"?

All the ancestors of the most recent common ancestor are common. The children of the most recent common ancestor are not all common ancestors. The most recent common ancestor has meaning.

The first common ancestor that was human is basically impossible to define. You have to draw an arbitrary line on a gradient.

This whole business also involves mitochondrial eve having an unbroken line of decendants on their mothers side, or fathers side for Y-chromosomal Adam, is this really relevant to the concept of just regular old Adam and Eve from the myths rather than the mitochondrial/Y-chromosomal ones?

Or you could just use the emergence of modern humans to date adam and eve, already estimated at somewhere around 200k years ago. Seems simpler to me.

It has nothing at all to do with the myths, it was just names that someone decided to use. They're pretty cool names.


This is actually an awesome topic, but there are a ton of misconceptions about it. Here's some wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Common_misconceptions

Not the only woman
One misconception surrounding mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time.[8][33] However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women living during Eve's time have descendants alive today, but at some point in the past each of their lines of descent did not produce a female who reproduced, thereby breaking the mitochondrial DNA lines of descent.[citation needed]

Not a fixed individual over time
The definition of mitochondrial Eve is fixed, but the person in prehistory who will fit this definition can change, not only because of new discoveries, but also because of unbroken mother-daughter lines coming to an end by chance. It follows from the definition of Mitochondrial Eve that she had at least two daughters who both have unbroken female lineages that have survived to the present day. In every generation mitochondrial lineages end – when a woman with unique mtDNA dies with no daughters. When the mitochondrial lineages of daughters of mitochondrial Eve die out, then the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" shifts forward from the remaining daughter through her matrilineal descendants, until the first descendant is reached who had at least two daughters who both have living, matrilineal descendants. Once a lineage has died out it is irretrievably lost and this mechanism can thus only shift the title of "Mitochondrial Eve" forward in time.

Because mtDNA mapping of humans is very incomplete, the discovery of living mtDNA lines which predate our current concept of "Mitochondrial Eve" could result in the title moving to an earlier woman. This happened to her male counterpart, "Y-chromosomal Adam," when older Y lines from Africa were discovered.

Not necessarily a contemporary of "Y-chromosomal Adam"
Sometimes mitochondrial Eve is assumed to have lived at the same time as Y-chromosomal Adam, from whom all living people are descended patrilineally, perhaps even meeting and mating with him. Even if this were true, which is currently regarded as highly unlikely, this would only be a coincidence. Like mitochondrial "Eve", Y-chromosomal "Adam" probably lived in Africa. A recent study (March 2013) concluded however that "Eve" lived much later than "Adam" – some 140,000 years later.[10] (Earlier studies considered, conversely, that "Eve" lived earlier than "Adam".)[34] More recent studies indicate that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam may indeed have lived around the same time.[35]

Not the most recent ancestor shared by all humans
Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common matrilineal ancestor, not the most recent common ancestor. Since the mtDNA is inherited maternally and recombination is either rare or absent, it is relatively easy to track the ancestry of the lineages back to a MRCA; however, this MRCA is valid only when discussing mitochondrial DNA. An approximate sequence from newest to oldest can list various important points in the ancestry of modern human populations:
  • -The human MRCA. All humans alive today share a surprisingly recent common ancestor, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents.[36]
  • -The identical ancestors point. Just a few thousand years before the most recent single ancestor shared by all living humans was the time at which all humans who were then alive either left no descendants alive today or were common ancestors of all humans alive today. In other words, "each present-day human has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors" alive at the "identical ancestors point" in time. This is far more recent than when Mitochondrial Eve lived.[36]
  • -Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent female-line common ancestor of all living people.
  • -"Y-chromosomal Adam", the most recent male-line common ancestor of all living people.

Not the biblical Eve
Owing to its figurative reference to the first woman in the Biblical Book of Genesis, the Mitochondrial Eve theory initially met with enthusiastic endorsement from some young earth creationists, who viewed the theory as a validation of the biblical creation story. Some even went so far as to claim that the Mitochondrial Eve theory disproved evolution.[37][38][39] However, the theory does not suggest any relation between biblical Eve and Mitochondrial Eve because Mitochondrial Eve:
  • -is not a fixed individual
  • -had a mother
  • -was not the only woman of her time, and
  • -Y-chromosomal Adam is unlikely to have been her sexual partner, or indeed to have been contemporaneous to her.
 
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