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Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#31
post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

I found these kind of observations interesting. Just a note, maybe it would have help you to avoid the downvotes if you had quotations on "Adam" and "Eve"

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#32
post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

That is an interesting point. In Hinduism there's some mythology around astronomical cycles that have similar spans to those mentioned in Bible. I've a far-out theory that Bible is actually referring to the same cycles.

Side track: there's a serious argument that parts of Bible are translated pretty badly (which puts into perspective people quoting it verbatum). I've been told of a specific example where (excuse the paraphrasing) Eve is said to emerge from the side of Adam, as in from the interior of his torso, and it's popularly taken to be a metaphor. Some interpret it to mean that a woman is somehow a byproduct of man, and thus lesser. Anyway, someone actually took up checking the translation and concluded that it's not that Eve emerged from Adam's side, but that she emerged at his side, as in stood by him. Going by what's written in a super old book that's been translated and altered many many times is, well, adventurous.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related. If you look at one generation ago one have 2 * 2 ^ 0 ancestors, at two generations, one have 2 * 2 ^ 1 ancestors, etc. At 27 generations one apparently has more ancestors than people in the world at that time. This apparent paradox stems from the fact that we are heavily inbred. Thus the article is corr…

> The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related. I'm not following your point - maybe it's just a linguistic thing. To me, inbreeding implies relation, at least blood-relation, even when there was no other relation, e.g. conquering armies raping and pillaging. No argument with your math.

There might have been multiple separated inbreeding groups. Yes these groups are related among themselves but not inter-group.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#34
post #10

This was also a conclusion in a thoughty2 youtube video I watched: This Is Why Inbreeding Is So Dangerous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmv-z851BOE I'm pretty this is why people all over the world like to keep track of their ancestry. People who don't will be more closely inbred.

> I'm pretty this is why people all over the world like to keep track of their ancestry. People who don't will be more closely inbred.

Not sure about that. Tracking ancestry probably became a middle-class hobby in mimicry of the aristocracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the aristocracy in most places were notoriously pretty much okay with marrying cousins.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#35
post #9

Weren't Australian Aboriginals isolated for tens of thousands of years and some full blooded individuals still exist today? How could they have an ancestor outside Australia in only 1400 BC?

The entire linked Nature paper is freely accessible. It's just a simulation, but they say this:

> No large group is known to have maintained complete reproductive isolation for extended periods.

The paper's conclusion:

> Given the remaining uncertainties about migration rates and real-world mating patterns, the date of the MRCA for everyone living today cannot be identified with great precision. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the most recent common ancestor for the world’s current population lived in the relatively recent past—perhaps within the last few thousand years. And a few thousand years before that, although we have received genetic material in markedly different proportions from the people alive at the time, the ancestors of everyone on the Earth today were exactly the same.

> Further work is needed to determine the effect of this common ancestry on patterns of genetic variation in structured populations. But to the extent that ancestry is considered in genealogical rather than genetic terms, our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour 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 laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#36
post #10

This was also a conclusion in a thoughty2 youtube video I watched: This Is Why Inbreeding Is So Dangerous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmv-z851BOE I'm pretty this is why people all over the world like to keep track of their ancestry. People who don't will be more closely inbred.

> I'm pretty this is why people all over the world like to keep track of their ancestry. People who don't will be more closely inbred. Not sure about that. Tracking ancestry probably became a middle-class hobby in mimicry of the aristocracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the aristocracy in most places were notoriously pretty much okay with marrying cousins.

There isn't actually much risk in marrying a cousin. It is when successive generations marry cousins that you become more closely related to your cousin than you might naively expect. This is where the inbreeding risk comes from. And, parts of the aristocracy did, in fact, have significant effects from this inbreeding.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#37
post #9

Weren't Australian Aboriginals isolated for tens of thousands of years and some full blooded individuals still exist today? How could they have an ancestor outside Australia in only 1400 BC?

Odd stuff I've read. There wasn't no contact. But contact was very limited. It's northern Australia is 100-300 miles from parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, etc.

Also also genes that don't confer any particular advantage tend to peter out when inserted into large populations.

Above my pay grade but I think that argues that the genetic difference that do exist tend to either not confer any particular advantage, like maybe shape of your nose, hair color. Or confer some limited advantage, skin pigmentation for instance seems to be strongly associated with solar radiation and dietary availability of Folic Acid and Vit D.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#38
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another important point here is that genes don't divide infinitely, so that if you go back some distance, you start finding ancestors from whom you actually didn't get any DNA. The book Who We Are and How We Got Here talks about this. When DNA recombines at conception, it only snips and stitches in a fairly limited number of places. It doesn't 'mix' finely like paint. It's more like taking two short pamphlets of ~25…

>> The genetic evolutionary difference between distinct groups like Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, ... is something like 70,000 years of divergent evolution with very very minimal gene flow between the groups. Any citation?

The 'recent dispersal' started some 70-50,00 years ago, reaching Europe about 40,000 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations#Homo_sa...

Europeans have pretty low levels of sub-saharan genetic markers, with some remnant markets in southern Europe dating to the late Roman era, diminishing substantially as you move north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_admixture_in_Europe

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#39
post #28
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intuition on this is wrong, and there's no need to fly off the handle. Ancestry is infectious. Take two populations, A and B, completely isolated from each other. (nevermind that they all have a common ancestor long before the populations diverged). Now one day in 1000 B.C. a single individual from population A migrates over to population B, mates, and has offspring (more than 1) with an individual from populati…

"The key is that the propagation of ancestry never stops, because ancestry doesn't round down to zero." I get your other points but this assumption seems obviously wrong. Plenty of people historically did not live to leave children behind. Then of course, we can have complete stops in the propagation of ancestry.

But they would then not become an ancestor, and thus will not appear in a chain of ancestors.

Re: Humans are more closely related than we commonly think

#40
post #32
post #24

Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here. But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years. So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the…

That is an interesting point. In Hinduism there's some mythology around astronomical cycles that have similar spans to those mentioned in Bible. I've a far-out theory that Bible is actually referring to the same cycles. Side track: there's a serious argument that parts of Bible are translated pretty badly (which puts into perspective people quoting it verbatum). I've been told of a specific example where (excuse the…

Hmm, I was really surprised about the part on woman creation, as I've never read such version (in Polish), but, indeed this https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&versi... (very) strange translation mentions woman to be taken from man's rib.

This translation https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&ver... looks much better

"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them"

and it makes much more sense in context of the rest of the Bible, especially New Testament.

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