Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Did an event precede Adam and Eve?

In one of the most provocative and misunderstood studies of the year, scientists in the U.S. and Switzerland have made an astonishing discovery:

All humans alive today are the offspring of a common father and mother – an Adam and Eve – who walked the planet 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, which by evolutionary standards is like yesterday. Moreover, the same is true of nine out of every 10 animal species, meaning that nearly all of Earth’s creatures living today sprang into being recently from some seminal, Big Bang-like event.

Mark Stoeckle at Rockefeller University and David Thaler at the University of Basel reached this striking conclusion after analyzing the DNA “bar codes” of five million animals from 100,000 different species. The bar codes are snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells – so-called mitochondrial DNA, which mothers pass down from generation to generation.

With each reproduction, errors creep into the bar code, as they do when you repeatedly photocopy a document. By measuring the accumulated errors – the blurriness or “diversity” among the bar codes – scientists are able to infer the passage of time.

That’s how Stoeckle and Thaler concluded that ninety percent of all animal species alive today come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than a quarter-million years ago. “This conclusion is very surprising,” Thaler avers, “and I fought against it as hard as I could.”
What caused animal life on Earth to be almost completely renewed such a short time ago? For now, it remains a mystery.

It’s possible something far more powerful than H-bombs decimated life and only a single set of parents for each species survived to live and procreate another day. But the last major extinction event we know about – the one that snuffed out the mighty dinosaurs – happened a full 65 million years ago.
It’s also possible there is something in nature that limits the size of an animal population. Perhaps it’s some built-in evolutionary process that when a population gets too big, it crashes and must restart itself from scratch.

In their report, published in Human Evolution, Stoeckle and Thaler offer other possible explanations, including, Thaler explains, “ice ages and other forms of environmental change, infections, predation, competition from other species and for limited resources, and interactions among these forces.” Whatever the explanation, he adds, the takeaway is this: “all of animal life experiences pulses of growth and stasis or near extinction on similar time scales.”

That is, humans, elephants, birds, you name it – Earth’s creatures tend to stand and fall in unison, like the rising and falling of the tides. And even though we don’t know what Svengali is directing the show, we now have scientific evidence that it wipes the slate clean far more frequently than we ever imagined.

Many religious commentators misunderstand this study to mean that species abruptly came into being only recently. To be clear: according to evolutionary biologists, species developed gradually over many millions of years. Stoeckle and Thaler’s discovery is that something happened roughly 100,000 years ago that created entirely new populations from long-existing species.

That said, Stoeckle and Thaler’s study does line up with the Bible in at least two notable ways. First, it affirms that we and our fellow creatures on Earth arose from a recent and profound creation event, orchestrated by some unknown mechanism. And second, the DNA bar codes reveal that species are quantized. Instead of there being a continuum of animal varieties, as one might expect from millions of years of gradual evolution, creatures fall into very distinct, widely separated populations – what the Bible describes as “kinds,” from the Hebrew word min.

“Darwin struggled to understand the absence of intermediates and his questions remain fruitful [to this day],” says Thaler. What the new study discovered, he explains, is that “If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies. They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

Above all, Stoeckle and Thaler’s intriguing study serves up hard evidence for the astonishing fragility of life and a humbling lesson for the high-and-mighty among us. It proves we are at the mercy of forces we do not see nor understand; forces that made our existence possible a few hundred thousand years ago and that just as quickly – in the twinkling of an eye – can and will one day take us out.

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/news/wp...ion-PHE-news-release-spring-2018-002.pdf

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/did...ipqDPBzNtwVi-2akKD6qxoJ-Nszd3yfzeaEU2NMM

Interesting thought, as the fossil records suggest it's happened several times on the planet.

The better question is, did Adam, Eve, the talking snake, and the Garden of Eden ever exist as portrayed in Genesis, or is the story entirely allegory?

I weren't there.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.


Kind of sounds like reincarnation don't it.

That verse if from the end of Revelations, it's about the ending, not the beginning.

Scientist's get so butthurt when they can't deny the presence of God. “and I fought against it as hard as I could.”

You must be an interpreter

So uh, my great great great grampa wasnt an amoeba? I wzs hoping my great great great grandson would have wingd and xray vision. Crap.

Looks like someone rained on their parade. Thinking the dinos got their parade rained on as well (Gen.7).

As much as I would love to see some entertaining and semi intelligent discourse about divine creation vs creation vs evolution vs witchcraft vs Remington auto-bang triggers, this thread will be a chit slinging match within the next page.

Mostly because folks either believe the earth is a few thousand years old, or a few billion years old, and neither can convince each other which is more believable.

So we're all a bunch of inbreds. No wonder people are so fugked up.

According to generally accepted thought, the age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years. That's a long damn time. Measured history is just a few million if you go back to the age of the dinosaurs. That's a grain of sand on the beach compared to 4.5 billion years.

Who's to say that a dozen or so advanced civilizations didn't spring up and disappear over the course of 4.5 billion years?

Every one of us on this board will know the truth - some day.

Man made global warming caused the destruction of those advanced civilizations....at least that’s what the core samples show.

They don't call it global warming anymore. Calling it climate change covers those times when it is colder, wetter, drier, etc.

I don't think Charlton Heston would argue against such possibility.

who knows how many re-sets/ re-starts have come from the primordial slime state, after all the dominoes were knocked down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGodDOLvBxw

The Fox news write up is a mischaracterisation. There is nothing that indicates a sensational cataclysmic event in that paper.

The scientists actual interpretation of why the species all seem so young, which Fox didn't include in their article:


"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.

"It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.


Life changes faster than we thought. Evolution is nimble, in life and death.


(Also, the whole human race did not arise from two people a 100,000 years ago. That is simply as far back as they can trace a common ancestor to all us. Obviously there were people before them, and others with them - we are just not directly related to those people. There will mathematically always be a pair at some point. It's a sleight of hand to present those people as a genetic "Adam and Eve". What is interesting is how recent that point is. The simple explanation is that the human population in prehistory was very small for a very long time.)

I totally Agree!!!!!

Excellent article.