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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

> "the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," Parson said.

For us hackers and compsci people who are used to thinking about the rates of growth and binary trees, it shouldn't be surprising that the most recent common ancestor of all humans has been estimated to have lived less than 10k years ago. Wikipedia has a nice article on it -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

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How is that 10K date even possible? If the first migration to the americas happened ~16K years ago - then there were populations isolated for at least that long. Aboriginal Australians reached Australia something like 40K years ago. It's not hard for me to imagine that there is at least one Aboriginal Australian who's ancestry is ... what's the right word ... does not contain any Europeans.

This is a case where the objection to the argument presented in the article is so obvious to me I feel like I'm missing something. (wouldn't be the first time!) It almost sounds like they wrote a computer program that was seriously abstracted and when run it spit out "3000 BP" and now "they" are interpreting that result literally.

The Wikipedia page actually agrees with you, more or less.

See the "MRCA of all living humans" section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMR...

Only "10k" years ago? You are definitely reading that wiki page wrong.

Mitochondrial Eve lived 140 to 200 kya (kya = 1,000 years ago). Y-chromosomal Adam lived perhaps 388 kya.

Edit: I guess you are looking at common ancestor, not a bottleneck. Reading the page more I find that everyone has a common ancestor around 3000 BC or so. But that common ancestor probably wouldn't be the guy frozen in the ice. But I'm betting the Sentinelese people would mess up those estimates.

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