BadComrade wrote:Don't you have like... a show that you should be at right now?

Waiting on my drummer and bass player to show up. We load in at 5, play at 6:30 with two or three hours of bands to go after us, That's plenty of music for one day.

krakabash wrote:the Bible does not say that Adam ("the Man") and Eve ("the mother of humanity") were the first or only humans created by God or that Cain and Abel where their only children at the time of Abel's death or that the creation discussed was the first ever or only creation or that the story is literal in a honky evangelical fundamentalist way.

And the notion that all humans alive today can be traced back to one female is a modern scientific fact so the Bible is correct in that general notion.

I saw a doco about the evolution of man and as part of it they genetically traced our ancestors to this small tribe in africa that are still around. They had facial features from all different races, it was really strange. They also mentioned that they could trace everyone back to a single women in that particular tribe.

h8 m0dems wrote:

krakabash wrote:the Bible does not say that Adam ("the Man") and Eve ("the mother of humanity") were the first or only humans created by God or that Cain and Abel where their only children at the time of Abel's death or that the creation discussed was the first ever or only creation or that the story is literal in a honky evangelical fundamentalist way.

And the notion that all humans alive today can be traced back to one female is a modern scientific fact so the Bible is correct in that general notion.

I saw a doco about the evolution of man and as part of it they genetically traced our ancestors to this small tribe in africa that are still around. They had facial features from all different races, it was really strange. They also mentioned that they could trace everyone back to a single women in that particular tribe.

So it was like some sort of reverse Mormonism?

It's the truth.

"Humanity" as we know it is not that old in the grand scheme of things, and all humans could be traced back to one human female.

(No, I am not someone who thinks the world is less than 12,000 years old or anything like that, so please don't label me a Religious Wacko. The Bible has lots of cool shit in it that is true. If it didn't there wouldn't be thousands of Ph.D. level scholars all over the world who dedicate a big part of their lives to studying it. Anyone who discounts the Bible as 100% fabrication is an illiterate/uneducated boob.)

(Example: In evolution theory, one of the things that make us "human" is the size of our brains. The growth of our brains led to us having a large head in relation to our mothers birth canal. Human Beings have one of the most dangerous live births of all living organizms. Before the advances of modern heath care, child birth resulted in death for the mother on a regular basis. Even horses give birth to baby HORSES easier than human mothers give birth to human babies. As a species our increase in brain size (and therefore knowledge) directly lead to lots of trouble for our women kind. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis contains a story of this in the idea that the punishment for the original sin (which led to a gain of knowledge) was that Eve and her female progeny would have difficulty and pain in childbirth. Regardless of whether the entire Bible is true or not, someone 4000 or more years ago knew this this basic fact and wrote about it. I think it's cool that they knew that, and that's why I think the Bible is cool, because it has stuff like that in it. It's an amazing book and collection of books of literature, history, comentary on relationships between people, etc. To just say you trust science and completely discount everything in the Bible is just plain arrogant and dumb.)

Isn't it true that cousins can legally marry in Colorado?

Christopher J. McGarvey wrote:

h8 m0dems wrote:I saw a doco about the evolution of man and as part of it they genetically traced our ancestors to this small tribe in africa that are still around. They had facial features from all different races, it was really strange. They also mentioned that they could trace everyone back to a single women in that particular tribe.

So it was like some sort of reverse Mormonism?

Man, what the hell are you smoking up there in Wisconsin? Must be some really good shit.

krakabash wrote:It's the truth.

"Humanity" as we know it is not that old in the grand scheme of things, and all humans could be traced back to one human female.

You assume there is a cutoff point at which we became "human." That's not how biology functions. There were several pre-Sapiens lineages and they interbred for some time.

Try this instead: take any two primate females (including any two humans), and have each of them take hold of her mother's hand. Then have their mothers take hold of their own mothers' hands, and then their mothers. Continue the regressing chain long enough, and the two lines will eventually converge at a single female with both hands held by her daughters.

Even if the two primates that started the chain were human, this distant grandmother is not necessarily "human."

Right, but is she still the sole individual whose genes have been carried forth to the present day? Or are there multiple lineages that have run concurrently throughout the process of evolution?

I would think these multiple threads would intermingle frequently as interbreeding happened--their genes basically becoming mixed and blurred over the millennia into a single strain--if humans really descended from a single small source group.

It seems that the only way humans could really be descended from a single individual would be if there were some sort of disastrous event in the history of our lineage that left only one female alive who was capable of bearing children.

Colonel Panic wrote:I'd think that humanity, like any species, would have to be traceable back to a single organism, the first of the species.

The only reason they trace it back to a woman (the real "Eve") is because they're using mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother. MtDNA is the only kind of DNA that can be used to make a 100% positive identification. Also, trace amounts of mtDNA have been found in the found teeth of hominids and early humans, where nuclear DNA would have broken down.

That's partially correct. However, just focusing on Mitochondrial Eve ignores the fact that there is also a single male ancestor who is sometimes called Y-Chromosome Adam. MtEve lived in Africa, about 160,000 years ago, while YcAdam only lived about 60,000 years ago. So, strictly speaking, we are mixtures of both of them even though MtEve came first.

"Mitochondrial Eve" was the first member of the homo sapiens sapiens species, which is what we are today. Homo sapiens sapiens are the latest descendent of the "homo sapiens species", and their earliest fossils are found in Africa and dated to around 130,000 years ago. Since MtEve only lived a relatively short while before that, we can say that she was probably identical in many respects to our physiological make-up today (although minor evolution of some aspects has occurred, of course, such as height growth).

Colonel Panic wrote:Right, but is she still the sole individual whose genes have been carried forth to the present day? Or are there multiple lineages that have run concurrently throughout the process of evolution?

Yes. All multiple lineages apart from today's homo sapiens sapiens have died out (such as homo sapiens idaltu). She is the one common mitochondrial ancestor.

It seems that the only way humans could really be descended from a single individual would be if there were some sort of disastrous event in the history of our lineage that left only one female alive who was capable of bearing children.

No, the MtEve and YcAdam did not live on their own. They were the products of slight genetic development who lived among similar homo sapiens. If they had been the only homo sapiens alive at that time, there would have been a population bottleneck. They were the first off-shoot of homosapiens, however: what we today call homo sapiens sapiens (us, basicaly).

Keep in mind that MtEve was not the first "human" if you want to define that word as including homo erectus and homo sapiens. She was the first *modern* human.

Interestingly enough, this provides strong evidence for the "Out of Africa" theory, which postulates that we are all Africans at our core. If this hadn't been already definitively proven by James Brown's "Sex Machine," I might have been surprised to learn it.