Re: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.

To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
From: "Mark Odegard" <markodegard@...>
Date sent: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 21:15:55 -0500
Send reply to: cybalist@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.

The methodology used in establishing the Mitochondrial Eve
Hypothesis has been criticised by geneticists. Though beguiling
and often cited in the popular media, it's just a hypothesis, and not
a very solid one at that. A bottleneck about 75000 years ago?
Modern humans had spread all over Africa and much of Eurasia by
that time, and were just about to make their first inroads into
Australia. It was, on the whole, a very successful species, and the
people of 75 ky BP were pretty well like us, even if their
technologies were less advanced. Their behaviour and subsistence
methods were flexible; their survival strategies worked in the tropics
as well as along the edge of the northern ice cap. They had a
variety of flint implements, hunting weapons and clothes, knew how
to make a shelter if a natural one wasn't available, or how to light a
fire... Why should a volcano eruption on whatever imaginable scale
have significantly reduced the population of such a widely
distributed INTELLIGENT species without wiping most of the other
life forms on Earth?

Some people apparently cannot live without some "scientific"
version of Noah's story.

Piotr

> Mark wrote:
> From everything I've heard, humanity is not abnormally low in terms of
> genetic diversity, and certainly not when compared to cheetahs. At the
> same time, it's been suggested (on TV shows with not-quite impeccable
> credentials) that (1) Homo sapiens sapiens went through a genetic
> bottleneck ca. 75,000 years ago (perhaps correlated with the eruption
> of the Toba volcano on Sumatra -- this is a 'super-volcano' like the
> Yellowstone volcano) and (2) the probable population of the community
> ancestral to all living humans was about 2,000. Through chance, only
> one female stands at the head of this family tree as the ancestress of
> every female human on the planet (mitochondrial DNA).
>
> The concept of 'proto-World' is not improbable, though it might
> possibly be better called 'neo-proto-World' in that language may have
> been invented before this genetic bottleneck, and only one branch
> survived.
>
> When speaking of 'genetic diversity', everything I've read says we are
> a young species, and compared to other older species, we have
> considerably less diversity. We are at best 150,000 years old.
>
> I found a link for Toba Volcano. Unfortunately, it's from Discover
> magazine, which makes the conclusions somewhat suspect (this is
> tabloid science). The Britannica site, however, lists it:
> http://www.britannica.com/bcom/magazine/article/0,5744,59492,00.html



><><><PIOTR><><><

[pyotr gonshorofski]
School of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznan, Poland

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