30-09-2004 11:00									#91
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quote: I'd say the Middle and Near East have seen more traffic more consistently...

or the Central Asian Steppe... the Caucasus mountains also saw quite a bit of movement

	30-09-2004 11:04									#92
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I heard SE Asia on NPR. Dunno which one it is. The guy seemed pretty unsure about it himself.

It hasn't seen the most migrations of people, it just will get your genes distributed around the world the quickest (since the Americas, and Oceania are nearby - and the ocean route needs to compete with the land route to Africa).

	30-09-2004 11:14									#93
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quote: Everything in science is a model based on assumptions.

And not every model is factual because some assumptions are false.

quote: You say that, yet you don't have a single clue as to what the assumptions are, much less whether or not they are wild.

We know a few:

1) The geographic location was not based on some "genetic center" but a perceived highway conveniently located between the New World and Australasia.

2) They haven't found genetic evidence for this claim, just a model that allegedly shows it could have happened.

3) They claim isolated populations weren't really isolated enough and use the recent European invasion of Tasmania as evidence, but they ignore this invasion was a result of improved sailing vessels and unlikely the further back we go.

I'm sure there's more, but a simple logic test should do...

Someone in E Asia had a child who went to SE Asia, had a child who went to New Guinea. Another child left there for Australia and produced children who spread out across the continent procreating with every tribe - and this was done all over the world. One child even found his way to Easter Island and Hawaii... Like I said, mathematically possible but extremely unlikely...

	30-09-2004 11:31									#94
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quote: Originally posted by Ramo quote: What I was questioning, is if this shows that HOMO SAPIENS were not the ones who actually founded the first civilizations, but that a different Homo species did. No, that has absolutely nothing to do with what the article refers to.

	30-09-2004 12:42									#95
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I don't understand why it's so controversial that most of us have some common ancestors just a few thousand years back. Just think about the six degrees of separation rule. This is basically the same thing.

For each generation back, you double the number of ancestors. You have two parents, four grandparents and so on. After 100 generations you have 2¹⁰⁰ (10³⁰) ancestors. Lets say one of your ancestors 50 generations back married a Chinese, you would suddenly have 2⁵⁰ (10¹⁵) Chinese ancestors. Conversely, one single person doesn't need to procreate much as the number of descendants will increase in a similar manner.

	30-09-2004 13:06									#96
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quote: Originally posted by Combat Ingrid I don't understand why it's so controversial that most of us have some common ancestors just a few thousand years back. Just think about the six degrees of separation rule. This is basically the same thing. For each generation back, you double the number of ancestors. You have two parents, four grandparents and so on. After 100 generations you have 2100 (1030) ancestors. Lets say one of your ancestors 50 generations back married a Chinese, you would suddenly have 250 (1015) Chinese ancestors. Conversely, one single person doesn't need to procreate much as the number of descendants will increase in a similar manner.

10^30 is more than the combined sum of all people who ever lived. So it can't be as simple as 2^100.

	30-09-2004 13:10									#97
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That's because the same ancestors will show up over and over again, in different branches of the family tree. We're all inbred you know

	30-09-2004 14:12									#98
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quote: Originally posted by Gangerolf quote: Nonetheless, the results show that we are one big family, Rohde says. As he and his colleagues write: "No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors with those who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu." Kumbaya

	30-09-2004 15:23									#99
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If it's published in Nature, it carries some dignity, but I am sceptic for reasons others already pointed out. If you look at a certain region, you could expect this, but significant migration and cross-breeding on a global scale is a quite new phenomenon.

	30-09-2004 17:34									#100
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This is the craziest thread I have ever seen. Everyone discussing an study which no one has read. Has any one read the study? I do however find it hard to believe.

	30-09-2004 17:47									#101
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quote: Originally posted by Caligastia You actually believe that everyone alive today is descended from one person. Your delusion has reached new heights. It's actually pretty sad to see someone so blind.

This is not what the article claims. You need to read a bit more closely.

	30-09-2004 17:48									#102
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quote: Originally posted by Caligastia You actually believe that everyone alive today is descended from one person. Your delusion has reached new heights. It's actually pretty sad to see someone so blind.

That's not what it says. It says we all share 1 common ancestor which means that out of the several million people in everyones family tree going back 3,500 years there is likely to be one person who appears in all of them.

This is a hard concept to understand possibly if you don't know much about statistics but I think it's quite possible.

Let's look at the maths.

Say one person has 2 children who survive to reproduve and their children have 2 children each who survive to reproduce, and so on for 3,500 years.

Take the age of a generation as 25 (only in the last 100 years has it got much bigger).

3500/25 = 140

So there have been 140 generations. If we assume that each offspring has 2 children who survive to reproduce then by the year 2000 the descendents of that person would number 2^140 (2*2*2... 140 times).

That gives you

1.4*10^42 descendents
In other words one person whos family had reproduced 2 children every generation would have descendents numbering 2*10^32 times more people than the current population of the earth.

Even if you reduced it to an average of 1.5 surviving children or something the numbers are vastly bigger than the population of the planet. It's actually not just possible but it'd be amazing if most of us didn't share one or two ancestors.

	30-09-2004 18:07									#103
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Using a mathematical model that ignores imbalances in global migration and breeding patterns would get a result like this. I don't want to spend my whole coffe break to find out which model they have used, but I'm sure it's more complicated than the one MikeH showed. I don't think a study based on an over-simplified mathematical model would be published in Nature. But I do think that any in-data would be guesses and rough estimations, so a very complicated model could still give false results.

There is a generic rule that I try to keep in mind whenever I'm involved in science or music recordings and a lot of other situations: No matter how sophisticated systems you have, if you feed them with crap they will give you crap back.

	30-09-2004 18:31									#104
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The central point, I guess, is that you don't need massive migrations to spread the genes around on a global scale. For example, about 10% of all Asian males are descendants of Genghis Khan, IIRC.

Let's make a thought experiment. Imagine a Roman who meets a Chinese woman (who is a descendant of the "common ancestor") during a trading trip to Central Asia. She follows him home and they have two sons. One ends up as a soldier in Britain, and has a few kids with local women. The other one ends up in Spain, likewise having a few kids with local women. Fast forward a thousand years. There will now be thousands of descendants of the original Chinese woman living in Britain and Spain, ready to spread the genes around in the British and Spanish empires. In other words, on a global scale. All that from just one single person.

I'm not arguing it has happened like that, it's just an example to prove my point

	30-09-2004 19:05									#105
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Agreed.

Also, we have to remember that we are talking about living populations- remember for example that the vast majority of the Naitve Populations of some iolated areas were wiped out by disease when peoples from Eurasia-Africa arrived, lowering the possibility that decendents would be born utterly isolated from the new populations.

	30-09-2004 19:06									#106
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quote: Originally posted by notyoueither There were barriers to interbreeding that were as much cultural as based on distance, maybe more.

There were barriers to peaceful interbreeding. Captives were often taken and made into wives, children taken and raised as your own, etc.

Also consider that most people in North America who call themselves Indians today are at least partly white. It's possible some groups got introduced to the 'family' later rather than earlier.

	30-09-2004 20:00									#107
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quote: Originally posted by Chemical Ollie Using a mathematical model that ignores imbalances in global migration and breeding patterns would get a result like this. I don't want to spend my whole coffe break to find out which model they have used, but I'm sure it's more complicated than the one MikeH showed.[/b]

Of course. I'm just showing the kind of scale of population that one person could produce at a relatively slow rate of breeding. After about 1000 years his potential descendents are so much larger than the population of the planet that even if there is only a tiny amount of migration and interbreeding with other populations the relationships would be passed on.

The only controversial thing is whether any group of humans were alone and not interbreeding in the past 3500 years, if even one of the common ancestor's descendent came from outside a remote group and bred with them the dna strand would be part of the whole population within an amazingly small number of generations.

	30-09-2004 21:22									#108
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To work out how much different groups of humans mingled, Rohde's team simulated the rates at which a few pioneering people made journeys across the world to meet and breed with other populations. Their model gave each individual a certain probability of quitting their home town, country or continent and striking out for pastures new.

interesting - they modeled migratory behavior - could have used economic models, biological models, or perhaps anthropological models. The question is how did the assumptions in this model match actual historical behavior of the most likely source of old world genetic material into the americas, the inuit? How was the model validated? Surviving neolithic populations? Would these match actual new world conditions 1000 to 3000 years ago? Animal migrations? can these be extrapolated to neolithic humans?

	30-09-2004 21:29									#109
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Interesting... Probably not true. I don't think they made all the right assumptions, but using the number of assumptions they did that is quite a feat of organizing "randomness"

	30-09-2004 22:38									#110
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I'm sceptical, for reasons others have stated. Their claim that ALL humans have a common ancestor 3500 years really sounds far too strong, given the isolation that many segments of the world had until recently. New Guinea is one example, and remember that the Incas and the Aztecs had no knowledge of each other's existence, so presumably trans-American interbreeding was pretty minimal.

Also, just because every person COULD have however many ten to the nth ancestors/descendants doesn't mean that they did. Inbreeding and assorted barriers could have easily limited the spread of descendants of this mythical person, and such limitations could easily occur for everyone alive 3500 years ago.

For simply Eurasia, it's not quite so unlikely, given the profusion of expansionist peoples which have shaped its history. But Africa and America... nah.

	30-09-2004 22:45									#111
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They also had to assume migratory patterns, which are obviously way wrong considering the proven existence of isolated civilizations prior to that time.

	30-09-2004 22:54									#112
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quote: For simply Eurasia, it's not quite so unlikely, given the profusion of expansionist peoples which have shaped its history. But Africa and America... nah.

likely true for Eurasia and N. Africa as people got around quite a bit and every civilization in that area had at least vague knowledge of the existance of other civilizations on the other side of the continent... traditional history claimed bronze age Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, and Chinese were oblivious to each other, but since the 1950's, this has been disproven and it was found there was a great deal of contact and trade between the Egyptians and the Indians for example.

its also likely that this holds true for Africa as Africa had perhaps the most migratory people ever: the Bantu. As diverse as african cultures are and as diverse as their languages were in 1 AD, almost all of them speak a Bantu-derived language now and this has been true for centuries. I bet the Bushmen, pygmies, and a few others remained isolated, but the Bantu got around quite well and the areas where Bantu-derived languages don't dominate (Ethiopia, Somalia, etc.) were at the border of the ancient crossroads of civilization so they are clearly of mixed race

for the americas, though... i'm sure all american indians were descended from the same handful of people who crossed the strait 40K-10K years ago, but not as recently as 3500 years ago... that's crazy.

	30-09-2004 23:02									#113
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Oh, yeah, forgot the Bantu. Although their contact with the rest of the world was patchy until the Arabs turned up, which might not have been long enough for a common ancestor to work its way right through Bantu lands.

	30-09-2004 23:05									#114
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Sandman, yeah. they got around quite a bit and completely wiped out all previous African peoples (kind of like the indo-europeans into Europe) but they had very limited contact with the rest of the world after that... i mean the whole thing is conceivable that some Egyptians bred with some Sudanese who in turn bred with Ethiopians, who did it with Somalis who did it with the Zanj... and so on but i dont think that could possibly have as great an effect.

	30-09-2004 23:35									#115
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quote: Originally posted by Albert Speer for the americas, though... i'm sure all american indians were descended from the same handful of people who crossed the strait 40K-10K years ago, but not as recently as 3500 years ago... that's crazy.

Thats not what the model says-the model is not saying there was one common ancestor 3500 years ago- its saying you would have at least one common ancestor with every human being living on the planet if you and them searched your family trees far enough back, and that by the time you reached 1500 BC you would have found one common ancestor with everyone else.

How would this work with the Americas?

Well, first, most Native American populations were killed off. So talking about the remants, the idea is that along the line, in the heritage of any of them, somebody walked in who was the decendent of someone born who had one parent from Eurasia-perhaps some native woman raped by a European, or a Zambo (slave mixed with Indian), or a meztizo, whatever.

	30-09-2004 23:37									#116
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quote: Originally posted by Sandman (...) and remember that the Incas and the Aztecs had no knowledge of each other's existence, so presumably trans-American interbreeding was pretty minimal.

Which is obviously irrelevant, since this theory talks about the people today. How many Aztecs and Incas are there alive now, who haven't in some distant past "mingled" with Europeans?

Say, if that 3,500 year old Asian dude already was an ancestor of all Europeans, most of the Americas basically already come for free, with the exception of some really isolated tribes.

	30-09-2004 23:39									#117
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If that's the case this entire 4 page argument is really a big stupid miscommunication. It's not difficult to imagine then. I mean in my case every 6th person I meet is somehow related to me by a common ancestor during the British/Portuguese/Spanish colonial era.

	30-09-2004 23:41									#118
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Much of the same arguement would apply to most Africans given that the Bantu migration wped out most non-Bantu populations in southern Africa.

The only possible outliers are trully isolated tribes, like in the Amazon, but even there some meztizo must have come by and done the deed with the local babes.

	30-09-2004 23:48									#119
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I've just read page one of this thread. Though I was amused by Speer being as dumb as a sack of hammers, I was also disturbed by the suggestion that I'm related to him.

	30-09-2004 23:54									#120
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He might well be your second Cousin, 36 removed.