Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old | Hacker News Reader

Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old

news.yahoo.com

49 pointsMcKittrick42 comments

If you find this kind of thing interesting I can strongly recommend "The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins which looks at ~40 common ancestors we have, not just the common ancestors of all humanity, but common ancestors with chimps, gorillas, all the way back to the Last Universal Ancestor - the beastie that all life has as an ancestor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale

+100 for "The Ancestor's Tale". There's a nice illustration there regarding the existence of Henry, a shrew who must have been the ancestor of all humans, and his brother Eric, who might well have been the ancestor of all aardvarks (but not any humans).

Dawkins has written better books - The Greatest Show on Earth is perhaps the best introduction to evolution - but I have a special affection for Ancestor's Tale, because it was while reading it that I finally 'got' evolution, and experienced a sort of minor enlightenment. You know, the one where you stare into space with a foolish grin, as answers to a hundred questions which have been at the back of your mind ever since you could remember suddenly start pouring in.

You might wonder: why should there be a single common-father in the first place? Why not a non-singleton set of common fathers all the way back to near the point where the questions becomes odd because you're dealing with hermaphrodites and/or asexual reproduction?

See: Galton-Watson process ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process )

> The Galton–Watson process is a branching stochastic process arising from Francis Galton's statistical investigation of the extinction of family names.

As far as modern evolution theory teaches as (not original Darwin absurdities), new species arises in the course of genetic mutation. Mutations are kind of random and quite rare, so it is unlikely that the mutation leading to birth of homo sapiens happened many times. Looks like we have one common ancestor, the "chromosomal Adam".

honest question: can you please point out some of the original Darwin absurdities?

The more I read about it, the more it seems that Darwin got right more things that he's usually accredited. I.e. he's depicted as father of the original idea but that it was only a rough prototype. But, according to evolutionist like Richard Dawkins, there no good new theories actually displacing the core concepts, and which don't merely refine or provide slightly different interpretation of some statistical cases (like Gould's Punctuated equilibrium theory).

Given the amount of funded anti Darwin bashing, I wonder if your comment is based on actual knowledge or some distorted information. Can you please elaborate?

His Darwin bashing is probably bullshit. Given that Darwin didn't have a theory of discrete (Mendelian) inheritance he got a truly insane amount right. There are things in Origin of Species that were ignored for generations and when investigated were incredibly fruitful in understanding evolution, like sexual selection.

And cows - whales are descended from cows ancestors too!

He just threw that one off the cuff :-)

The origin of the human species is a different issue altogether. In particular, there is no well-defined "first human" but (given a family tree going back hundreds of thousands of years) there is a well-defined first common ancestor of the Y chromosome (because it is passed down asexually from father to son).

What about a "chromosomal Eve"? A mutation of the magnitude you are referring to would have made reproduction impossible unless there was an Eve with the same mutation.

Evolution doesn't leapfrog like that. It's a series of multiple smaller mutations over long periods of time.

Just a side note: They quote a person from the Ronin Institute, which is a virtual research institute for independent academics. They've received a fair amount of press as an alternative model for scholarship / academia.

http://ronininstitute.org

Honest question: Let X be the single common-father. What was X-1? That is, what was X's dad? Not human?

The article uses somewhat confusing language, but I think this is about the most recent common patrilinear ancestor; now older than what was assumed before. So, the father of a patrilinear MRCA would obviously also have been a common ancestor, but not the most recent one.

"Patrilinear" means that all male humans can trace a path to the ancestral individual that contains only males. Whether the same individual is also the ancestor of all living females cannot be known based on the Y-chromosomal evidence.

If we allow paths that contain both males and females, the MRCA of all living humans may have lived remarkably close to the present time - circa 3000 BCE, based on many estimates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

Can 3000 years be even close to being true? What about, for example, aboriginals in Australia. Is it not believed that they were an isolated population for 40,000-50,000 years?

Wikipedia: "An explanation of this recent MRCA date is that, while humanity's MRCA was indeed a Paleolithic individual up to early modern times, the European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries would have fathered enough offspring so that some "mainland" ancestry by today pervades remote habitats. The possibility remains that an isolated population with no recent "mainland" admixture persists somewhere, which would immediately push back the date of humanity's MRCA by many millennia. While simulations help estimate probabilities, the question can be resolved only by genetically testing every living human individual."

It's possible. For example, if all living Australian aboriginals were to have a European explorer as an ancestor.

(I'm not trying to suggest that this is the case, I'm pointing out how they could have jumped the tree, so to speak)

This has little to do with what is "human" and what isn't. "Father of all humankind" is just a figure of speech, not any scientific assertion about this character.

Ignore species distinctions for a moment. Just tihnk about all the organisms that begat the people alive on earth today (that is, all their parents), and then the parents of those, and so on back. Eventually, you will find a organism that begat every person alive today in a direct line. The question is how far back in history you have to go to find such a person/thing. Note that there will be many such people (and this person was by no means the only person alive at the time, or anything like that -- just one of many, who had several children, who all had several children, who eventually interbred with all other humans). In fact, that person's parents are also the common parents of all mankind, and so on, so this isn't going to be a unique or special distinction; we're just curious about the most recent.

I'm not an expert, but I would assume X would have a genetic mutation that branches off of the lineage of X-1 and continues on, now technically being "human". Obviously this isn't a single person, but rather an estimate for the time period where this branching occurred.

Or something like that. How close am I?

The human race is a hodgepodge of various creatures in the genus Homo. Making distinct seperations like this is nearly impossible to stipulate.

Please understand this correctly. This refers to the "Y-cromosomal Adam", or the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) patrilinearly [1]. It is important to understand that some contemporaries of the MRCA are ancestors of no one in the current population. In other words, when that human lived, there were humans living concurrently that represented the same species (Homo) but their family line does not reach the current time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

340,000 years as of the time yahoo posted this story, or as of the time the study paper was published, or what? At what time was he born (UTC)?

Not so long ago it was proven "The father of all men is 170,000 years old."

If we determine every time that the most recent research is correct, we make all future research obsolete.

Here is a much better link : http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-al...

Scientific Paper : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.02.002

It concerns me that a single individual's chromosome can bump up the common ancestry age estimate from 170,000 to 340,000 – doubling it. That indicates that this estimate is incredibly sensitive to outliers. How can we know that finding another person with interesting ancestry isn't going to bump up the estimate by another factor of two?

Also: regarding "The Ancestor's Tale" – this is probably the best non-fiction book I've ever read. If this kind of thing interests you at all, do yourself a favor and read it.

Does any one know, is there any chance that any advanced, isolated civilisations arose-- tens of thousands of years before the agricultural revolution that we know of?

I guess it is possible, but without any actual evidence this would just be speculation.

Plato seemed to think so.

Interesting to think that if there were a disaster that killed off a whole continent of people, the title of most-recent-ancestor of all living humans would move to someone else.

That's, after all, what we'd be primarily thinking about in that event.

This may have already happened but in much larger magnitude than you realize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

I wonder what the bible thumpers have to say about this.

Bible thumper here.

As science it's pretty interesting.

Because it seems to say that all humanity comes from one father it's also interesting, and I'm sure I'll hear plenty about it on my Facebook feed.

But still, it's not harmonious with a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis, so it's hardly confirmation that the strictly literal interpretation is correct.

> Because it seems to say that all humanity comes from one father it's also interesting.

It's just property of trees. If you go back and observe male member of generations and their descendants you'll see that you have less and less men who have surviving descendants today AND none of their male descendants had only female children. You go back as far as you need to for this number to drop to 1.

That's your "father of all humankind" which might as well be a small rodent (though he isn't because it was only 340,000 years ago).

"Father of all humankind" is very misleading because with him (and before him) there were many other fathers of humankind whose (some) genes located on all 45 other chromosomes except for Y are in many of us. Those men just didn't pass their Y chromosome to us because at some point one of their descendants had only daughters.

All modern man share mutated copies of Y chromosome of this Father of all humankind so it's kinda interesting.

What's more interesting is most recent female common ancestor. Logic goes same way but this time it's not about crappy Y chromosome. This time it's about mitochondria which are passed from mother to all her children (not just females). It's way much more interesting because this means that all people share mutated copies of mitochondria of this "Eve" and mitochondria are power plants of every cell in your body which seems significant. Generation after generation other "strains" of mitochondria died out (due to women dying or having only male children) and only the one we are all carrying lasted to this day. Of course it's not as dramatic as it sounds because if we discovered some other "strain" of mitochondria among human today we'd just have to place "Eve" label few generations earlier. But it's still cool.

I'm sure I don't have to tell that "father of humankind" and "mother of humankind" lived in completely different times and places and that there's no snake or fruit tree.

Interesting behavior of creationists: science is good when they say something close to their existing believes.

I'm not sure we share a common definition of what science means. It's more about understanding the reality via observation rather than seeking to confirm the "truth" by possibly filtering observation that would point away from it.

He didn't mention whether he was a Creationist or not. A large number of Christians (Catholics, for a start), don't have any real significant beefs with evolution - they think of it as a "God works in mysterious ways" type deal.

I don't know about his beliefs nor I want to question them. That's why I tried to be as much impersonal as I could in my reply, while linking to what he said, because it's a relevant context.

It very common to have holders of any belief system (whether theological nature or more mundane stuff like ecology, organic food etc) to cheer when some scientific proof supporting their views is presented to the public, and almost always with very little doubt over either the validity of such proof, or the actual meaning of the find.

Let's see this particular example. The existence of a common ancestor means that we went through a bottleneck.

Imagine that tomorrow all the males in this planet become sterile or die, all but one. If this guy manages to reproduce (well, what would be the odds he wouldn't?), in a relatively short term the human population will raise again.

If you sample the population you will find that they all have something similar, because they all descend from a single male, and apparently it's possible put also a date to that event.

Does this mean that tomorrow is the start of a new humankind? That we are not the same humans as the children of this guy?

Of course not. Neither TFA says that the father of humankind's father wasn't human (i.e. that we found genetic proof of Adam)

My argument is that if you hold some kind of beliefs, you tend to be less critical about stuff and jump to wrong conclusions, even assuming complete lack of malice.

I think it's a very human behavior. I'd really like to know which kind of beliefs (or to use a less emotionally charged term: opinions I take for granted) in other topics make me prone to having wrong judgements about stuff.

So, is that an example of reclaiming the word "bible thumper" for the moderate wing - very classily done btw.

I just love this stuff on all humanities shared family tree - especially as I did not read the first paragraph carefully and thought they had discovered the 340,000 year old man was called Albert Perry !

Humanity it seems has travelled, adventured and loved all over the world for far longer than we can imagine - its a privilege to be part of such an inspiring history.

>>> So, is that an example of reclaiming the word "bible thumper" for the moderate wing - very classily done btw.

Well I'm accused of being a Bible thumper far more often than I'm accused of being moderate or liberal.

My first pass, I thought Albert Perry lived 340,000 years ago too. I think this article needs an editor. :-)

Glad its not just me.

I would love the next human ancestor to be named Albert Perry in honour of the article, much like Lucy.

An existence of a single-common father doesn't imply that there were no male humans alive before or at the time he lived. It's just that descendants of others haven't managed to pass the Y forward.

Exactly, the way I see it is that after many generations, his descendants became so widespread that everyone could trace him as an ancestor. Or more specifically they could trace him as an ancestor through the male line of descent.

This researches are in fact very "biblical".

First of all it seems that homo sapiens had one ancestor, as Bible says. Scientists would say that mutation leading to rise of homo sapiens was just a random mutation, the "bible thumpers" are also happy, since they might say, that this mutation was not random, but God induced.

All these recent genetic findings are easily digested by avarage "bible thumper", there is no fundamental disagreement. One can still belive in God and use genetics without getting crazy :).

> it seems that homo sapiens had one ancestor, as Bible says

Not really; we're apparently all descended from this chap, but he's not the only living male human at the time. He himself had a father, just like we all do. And while there is a female equivalent in "mitochondrial Eve", they didn't live at the same time. So it doesn't really bear much resemblance to the book of Genesis.

Exactly, he might had been lucky and survive some plague, or killed every body else in a small group that was lucky to survive a plague.

Or he simply might have had a large harem and so a his descendance was more numerous that other people and thus more likely to survive a subsequent struggle or plague.

It's also possible that this event was repeated often enough and all that our statistical methods of DNA matching can see is a single father, but it could perhaps have been a whole dynasty and/or brothers sharing mating privileges.

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