50,000BC - Population 2... really???
Discussion
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
Mr Happy said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
No it isn't.According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
HTH.
TheHeretic said:
Mr Happy said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
No it isn't.According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
HTH.
davepoth said:
BBC were trying to work out what proportion of the human race is alive right now. Obviously for pre-history they had to take a guess at when Homo Sapiens evolved, and at some point there must have been just one breeding pair.
No particular need for there to be just one breeding pair. There could have been others but their lines may have ended. I do not think that the article is saying at one point we were down to 2 people.TheHeretic said:
No particular need for there to be just one breeding pair. There could have been others but their lines may have ended. I do not think that the article is saying at one point we were down to 2 people.
There must have been one female ancestor but there could have been more than one mal. So we could be descended from a slut.Apparently we went from just a few hundred ancestors a few million years ago and then were reduced to this level a second time circa 75000 years ago due to a massive volcano in Indonesia.
So with two very small populations in our genetic past it is entirely possible for a very recent common ancestral couple to exist.
Regarding Adam and Eve, there is no reason at all why they could not be real ancestors of semitic tribes circa 3000 to 4000BC. Though the Bible itself refers to other people being around at the time they could still be the first people from a tribal point of view which is how it would have been viewed at the time.
So with two very small populations in our genetic past it is entirely possible for a very recent common ancestral couple to exist.
Regarding Adam and Eve, there is no reason at all why they could not be real ancestors of semitic tribes circa 3000 to 4000BC. Though the Bible itself refers to other people being around at the time they could still be the first people from a tribal point of view which is how it would have been viewed at the time.
There is the Toba catastrophe theory.
"resulted in the world's human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution"
I'm sure many Bottlenecks have happened in pre-history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theo...
"resulted in the world's human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution"
I'm sure many Bottlenecks have happened in pre-history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theo...
..... 
Derek Smith said:
TheHeretic said:
No particular need for there to be just one breeding pair. There could have been others but their lines may have ended. I do not think that the article is saying at one point we were down to 2 people.
There must have been one female ancestor but there could have been more than one mal. So we could be descended from a slut.
Mr Happy said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
Does this mean that everyone in the world is somehow related, and we're all committing some form of incest? I can hear the banjo alreadyAccording to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
DanB7290 said:
Mr Happy said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579
According to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
Does this mean that everyone in the world is somehow related, and we're all committing some form of incest? I can hear the banjo alreadyAccording to the BBC and the Population Reference Bureau, the world's population was 2 in 50,000BC... is that creationism at work??
carmonk said:
And at some point the population was one and before that, zero. It's not something that would be objectively measurable, any more than you can measure the difference between a frog and a tadpole at every stage, rather a baseline that says modern man emerged around 50K years ago.
Richard Dawkins explains it brilliantly in his book The Magic of Reality. The population was never one or zero, because there never was a first man, or first cat, or frog or camel. Evolution doesn't work like that.Imagine someone you know aged 70. Then imagine that since they were born, a picture was taken of them every minute of their lives. Stack all the pics together like a pack of playing cars, except instead of 52 cards, there will be around 35 million.
Pick out any card random, and look at the picture of the person. Then pick out 1500 pictures either side (which is about a day either way, and the person looks exactly the same. They look entirely different as a 2 y/old than when they are 64, but from minute to minute, day to day, they look identical. You can't pull out a picture of when they went grey, or got wrinkles, or started shaving. They are grey with wrinkles, but there is not one picture of that starting, it's a slow process over weeks of months, tens of thousands of pictures.
That's the same with evolution. Have a picture of you, next to it your dad, then grandad, great grandad, but instead of doing 35 million pics, do 185 million. At one end of the pile is you, at the other end is a boney
fish. You and the fish look completely different, but the point is, pull out a picture anywhere on the line, and then pull out 1000 pics either side, so you have a spread of 2000 generations, and they will all look the same. Because evolution works so slowly.
So there never was a first human. Homo erectus never gave birth to a homo sapien.
TwigtheWonderkid said:
Richard Dawkins explains it brilliantly in his book The Magic of Reality. The population was never one or zero, because there never was a first man, or first cat, or frog or camel. Evolution doesn't work like that.
Imagine someone you know aged 70. Then imagine that since they were born, a picture was taken of them every minute of their lives. Stack all the pics together like a pack of playing cars, except instead of 52 cards, there will be around 35 million.
Pick out any card random, and look at the picture of the person. Then pick out 1500 pictures either side (which is about a day either way, and the person looks exactly the same. They look entirely different as a 2 y/old than when they are 64, but from minute to minute, day to day, they look identical. You can't pull out a picture of when they went grey, or got wrinkles, or started shaving. They are grey with wrinkles, but there is not one picture of that starting, it's a slow process over weeks of months, tens of thousands of pictures.
That's the same with evolution. Have a picture of you, next to it your dad, then grandad, great grandad, but instead of doing 35 million pics, do 185 million. At one end of the pile is you, at the other end is a boney
fish. You and the fish look completely different, but the point is, pull out a picture anywhere on the line, and then pull out 1000 pics either side, so you have a spread of 2000 generations, and they will all look the same. Because evolution works so slowly.
So there never was a first human. Homo erectus never gave birth to a homo sapien.
Essentially there was no 'first mother'. Any line between HS and the race we descended from is all but arbitrary. The person rejected as the last of the pre HS would be upset and would, if he could afford a lawyer, probably present a really good case for being promoted. However, using mitochondrial DNA (or something spelt similarly) we have been able to trace ancestry back to one woman in Africa about 150,000 years ago, known as the acestrial slut.Imagine someone you know aged 70. Then imagine that since they were born, a picture was taken of them every minute of their lives. Stack all the pics together like a pack of playing cars, except instead of 52 cards, there will be around 35 million.
Pick out any card random, and look at the picture of the person. Then pick out 1500 pictures either side (which is about a day either way, and the person looks exactly the same. They look entirely different as a 2 y/old than when they are 64, but from minute to minute, day to day, they look identical. You can't pull out a picture of when they went grey, or got wrinkles, or started shaving. They are grey with wrinkles, but there is not one picture of that starting, it's a slow process over weeks of months, tens of thousands of pictures.
That's the same with evolution. Have a picture of you, next to it your dad, then grandad, great grandad, but instead of doing 35 million pics, do 185 million. At one end of the pile is you, at the other end is a boney
fish. You and the fish look completely different, but the point is, pull out a picture anywhere on the line, and then pull out 1000 pics either side, so you have a spread of 2000 generations, and they will all look the same. Because evolution works so slowly.
So there never was a first human. Homo erectus never gave birth to a homo sapien.
She no doubt had it off with various approximation of homo sapiens and she probably wasn't all that fussy. Some of the offspring got a tick and some didn't quite make it. There were, no doubt, some terrible domestic arguments.
But not only that of course, but she differed from us as well. Although 150k isn't all that long, it has given us different skin colours, height limits, fat desposits, that sort of thing. Fascinating.
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