Shallow roots....

[Dementia_Madness]

Roots of Human Family Tree Are Shallow
By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer

This article appeared online from the Associated Press on July 1, 2006. It appears to have been deleted from the source. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060701/ap_on_sc/brotherhood_of_man

Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.

Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.

That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.

"It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book "Mapping Human History" traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.

But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived.

With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.

Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.

That revelation is "especially startling," statistician Jotun Hein of England's Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature.

"Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled.

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots.

How can this be?

It's simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.

It's nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you've got a million ancestors. By the 13th you've got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.

But wait. How could anybody — much less everybody — alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the 9th century?

The answer is, they didn't. Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago whose daughter was your mother's 36th great-grandmother, and whose son was your father's 36th great-grandfather. That would put him on two branches on your family tree, one on your mother's side and one on your father's.

In fact, most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million people on Earth back then. Simple division — a trillion divided by 200 million — shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times on the family tree of every single individual living today.

But things are never average. Many of the people who were alive in the year 800 never had children; they don't appear on anybody's family tree. Meanwhile, more prolific members of society would show up many more than 5,000 times on a lot of people's trees.

Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree.

But don't stop there; keep going back. As the number of potential ancestors dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who never had children or whose lines eventually died out.

And it wasn't all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.

[plumbervol]

Branch kin. I suppose everybody is related when you chase the mitochondria back to whoever was EVE. Not the Eve of the Bible but the Eve of the Human Race. But come to think of it when the early Jews wrote this story and read the Babylonians version of Eve and they wrote their story a grainof truth existed with or without divine inspiration somewhere sometime their was a bilogical Eve!!

[roustabout]

You suppose that the Eve was a legend.  Too bad Jesus, who you call Lord, doesn't agree.  The account of Adam and Eve often is ridiculed today as legend, but Jesus believed the story to be true (Matthew 19:1-6).  And there are many other instances where Jesus and Paul confirm Genesis as an authentic genuine account.  Is this an accident?  I think not. 

For more. http://www.greatcom.org/resources/reasons_skeptics/ch_06/default.htm


Sad that so many have bent their lives to the doctrines of men in an attempt to maintian their intellectual viability. 

[Dementia_Madness]

There was an "EVE" she is the actual "EVE" mentioned in the Bible, She is the mitochondrial eve, the "the Eve of the Human Race."

Here is the funny thing, so many people find it hard to believe that an all powerful God, who is capable of simply speaking existence into being, cannot do any of the things mentioned in the Bible.

I find it amusing that science says that everyone alive today is descended from one person who lived about 6000 years ago.... This is the exact same thing the Bible tells us, and yet still the belief in the actual TRUTH of the bible is hard to accept by people who are supposed to be Bible believers.

[plumbervol]

mitochondrial eve....

Why did God only pick Abraham to talk to? All of this branch kin runnin?

[Dementia_Madness]

Perhaps Abraham had certain genetic qualities God wanted to use, it could be that Abraham was not simply picked because of his blood...he was picked because of his willingness and ability to accept God's will. If you notice, though God's prophets and saints were all flawed, they each had a Holiness, and an ability to turn back to God to serve their purpose and fulfill God's will.

The problem with people thinking certain things in the bible are impossible, is they always remove God and his omnipotent will from the equation. If God could speak existence into being, he could hold the stars, the planets, even the cells of your body together with his own will. If you believe that Genesis 1:1 is true, then everything that follows in not impossible. If you doubt the beginning, then everything else that follows is questionable, even Jesus Christ and your very salvation. remember in the Garden of Eden, what the devil did to trick Eve, all he truly did was make Eve doubt God's word. Today many "Christians" have fallen into the same trap. In the beginning Satan made eve doubt God's word and thus from that all creation was limited. "Eat of this fruit and you will die!" became "Eat of this fruit and you will die?" and from there everything went down hill. In the same manner "God made Adam and EVE!" becomes "god made Adam and Eve?" Can you see the connection?

[Dementia_Madness]

bump

Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord. "But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:17

[roustabout]

Why did God only pick Abraham to talk to? All of this branch kin runnin?

Don't know why I didn't notice this question before. But, if you are still interested PV, could you please elaborate on your question a little?