Researchers came up with 27 million ancestors, using modern and ancient genomes:
Per Will Dunham of Reuters, the research study helps show the scope of human genetic diversity and establishes how people around the world are related to each other. Researchers have confirmed that the human species started in Africa before migrating to other parts of the globe.
“The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan,” Wohn tells Reuters. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans.”
David Kindy, “Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors” at Smithsonian Magazine (March 22, 2022)
But wait. According to the usual evolution story, didn’t all of our genome come from individuals we would not recognize as humans? Moving on here…
One curious find, if it holds up (much appears to be guesswork), is that humans were in the Americas much earlier than thought:
“Our method estimated that there were ancestors in the Americas by 56,000 years ago,” Wohn tells Times Live. “We also estimated significant numbers of human ancestors in Oceania—specifically Papua New Guinea—by 140,000 years ago. But this is not firm evidence like a radiocarbon-dated tool or fossil.”
David Kindy, “Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors” at Smithsonian Magazine (March 22, 2022)
There should now be renewed interest in finding very early tools and fossils in North America.
You may also wish to read: What? Paper on human mutation admits to “fundamentally challenging” neo-Darwinism. But Darwinism about human beings is the bread and butter of pop science media! If that’s under threat now, what will become of, for example, evolutionary psychology?
So this research suggests that the original inhabitants of the Americas may have lived there for around 100 000 years before they were so rudely dispossessed of those lands by Christian, European colonists.
Nonetheless, they should still be grateful to a benevolent Christianity that shunted the indigenous survivors of near-genocide practiced against them into desolate reservations and forced their children into mostly Christian-run boarding schools to undergo a Borg-like program of cultural assimilation.
At some point the anthropologists will have to recognize that early humans had boats. If monkeys can raft across the Atlantic, why couldn’t humans raft across the much shorter paths in the Arctic area?
Seversky, since you went off topic, so will I. The Carib’s predated Europeans in the Americas. they were violent cannibals who killed off numerous tribes during their brutal expansion.
The Vikings were the first Europeans to make it and spent 10 years trying to build a settlement. As brutal fighters, the should not have had any problem subduing, or outright killing off, the local tribe. They were not peaceful, but ruthless warrior who attacked and killed many Vikings, forcing them to abandon the settlement.
Narrowing down the birthplace of man is a good thing. It was already known every person is descended from Africa, but the birthplace has always been a bit of a question mark. Some future evidence may move it somewhere else, but nice to know.
Polistra @ 2: Yes indeed. I’ve often wondered why “science” had to assume that humans crossed over the Bering strait via a land bridge, during an ice age. Given the seasons, why couldn’t they just walk across (or using dog sleds) on the the ice when the Bering strait was frozen? Or, as you say, take their boats during the short arctic summer?
@ Seversky
You are one bitter individual.
Thanks Bob Ryan for answering Sev’s nonsensical question. He acts like there was a such thing as loving innocent civilizations before that that were formed by peaceful acts…
And if I’m sev, I have to ask myself: By what standard is it wrong to displace another people group? Says who?
Zweston, you bring up an interesting point. Since everyone originated from the same general place, there were no original inhabitants anywhere else. How can someone be displaced if they did not, ancestrally, come from said location?
As for Europeans displacing or killing off various tribes, how many were displaced or killed off before Europeans ever left Europe, once they settled from movement out of Africa?
The Aztecs were not local to that region when the Spanish found them. They had only been there for a couple hundred years. Evidence suggests they were forced out of land further north and they took the city they resided in, which leads to a couple of important question. Who did they replace and who really built the city and calendar? With no wheels being used by the Aztecs, it stands to reason whoever was there before them had built everything they used.
Seversky, at 1, appeals to the objective morality of the golden rule, (i.e. love your neighbor as yourself), to try to bash Christianity.
Yet, this is a self-refuting position for Seversky, an atheist, to be in.
i.e. Seversky is appealing to morality yet his worldview denies the existence of morality.
Morality can only be based in Theism.
The moral argument for God is summed up at the 4:36 minute mark of the video and can be stated as such:
In short, Seversky is forced to presuppose the existence of a ‘moral universe’, i.e. of the reality of God, just to have the ability to try to argue against the reality of God in the first place.
As Cornelius Van Til put the self-refuting position that the atheist finds himself in, “As a child needs to sit on the lap of its father in order to slap the father’s face, so the unbeliever, as a creature, needs God the Creator and providential controller of the universe in order to oppose this God.”
it is simply impossible for Atheists to live their lives consistently as if atheistic materialism were actually true and as if there were no objective morality. As the following article states: Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.
Richard Dawkins himself honestly admitted that it would be quote unquote ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if atheistic materialism were actually true and that there actually was no moral accountability for our actions.
The impossibility for Atheists to live their lives consistently as if atheism were actually true directly undermines their claim that Atheism can possibly be true.
Specifically, as the following article points out, since it is impossible for atheists to live their lives consistently as if their worldview were actually true, then atheistic materialism cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but atheistic materialism must instead be based on a delusion.
Verses:
Zweston
Good point.
Evolution has a problem with one group violently displacing another?
BobRyan
True, and they even killed off (and ate) European Christians who were bringing the values and culture of the Gospels from which we still benefit today.
Silver Asiatic,
A rather unpleasant group that cannot be blamed on Europeans. In face, Europeans were not even close to having the first slaves in historical record. That would be the Middle East, in Asia.
Seems to me, one could argue the Europeans learned negative things from other Africa and Asia. It would not be factual, since man’s inhumanity to man is a constant, but far easier to make the case than Europeans bringing violence to places that were already violent.