I wonder what the bible thumpers have to say about this.
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.
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.
I would love the next human ancestor to be named Albert Perry in honour of the article, much like Lucy.
Well I'm accused of being a Bible thumper far more often than I'm accused of being moderate or liberal.
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
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.