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Have Humans Come Close To Extinction?
waytoomuchcoffee writes "According to a new study, our virtually identical DNA indicates humans were close to extinction about 70,000 years ago. Another take on the same study tells how being lactose intolerant in adulthood was normal, and being able to digest lactose became a survival advantage after dairy farming was invented."
So do your part to ensure diversity, and make sweet love with someone genetically different (read: hot) under some power lines near a microwave running with the door open. "For the sake of the species" never made a better pick-up line.
(Just don't give her your name--she might expect you to help raise your special freak).
But being lactose intolerant was an advantage once fart-lighting was invented.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
being able to digest lactose became a survival advantage after dairy farming was invented.
So at some point some humans said:
"Hey lets invent dairy farming!"
"Hmm, but we're all lactose intolerant..."
"What the heck, if we take this crap every day we'll eventually mutate and some generations down they will be thanking us."
Nice long-term thinking there, thanks!
Within the next 50 years, about half of us will be dead!
"I dare you to drink that."
"No, I dare you."
"Ok, we all dared, so we all drink."
Then they all got sick except one who not only brained them with a club and sired children with thier wives... After that, he taught his sons how he got all the foxy wives and they went to neighboring villiages...
The gene study only suggests that we all have common ancestors from a small group (perhaps only few thousand) which was pretty geneticaly homogennous and lived maybe 70 000 years ago.
There are many possible scenarios: one possibility is that tribes originating from an isolated small group of individuals got lucky for some random reason, while the other prehistoric people did not make it to the current gene pool. But it does not necesserily follow that everybody other must have died at once, exactly around that time. Maybe the other prehistoric people were living happily along for millenia, just thinking that hunting with the handaxe is a good idea and did-not want to have anything to do with those imbred short-sighted teet-seeking inovators with narrow shoulders and concave rib-cage. But the lactose tolerancy incidentaly infered immunity against bad infection outbreak caused by canibalism, which in turn was a result of sudden unability to hunt because of the hand-axe repeated strain injury.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I think it is, in fact, the wolves who domesticated us; well, domesticated our chimpanzee ancestors. Through careful breeding they were able to create an entirely new species which they called "Aaaaooooooooooooooo!!!!!" (which is also their name for everything else). But they quickly became bored with us, sniffed one another's asses, and then chased down a gazelle for an early supper.
Wear uranium underwear!
Eat at Joe's.
I'm just trying to imagine how milk was harvested before the domestication of cattle...
I'm picturing a mass army of hunters, with painted bodies to blend in to the environment, silently stalking the herd of cows. Suddenly, a violent explosion of activity occurs, and thousands of hunters bolt towards the herd with bucket in hand, tackling the slower cows and draining the milk from their teets.
That, my friend, is Darwin in action =)
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> As I remember from high school biology, doesn't only a small percentage of our DNA code for useful information? The reset was just junk that is cut out during protein synthesis (introns? extrons? I forget the terms...)
I think they call the junk "enrons".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
all animals would also have to have genetic bottlenecks at the same time
except fish, obviously!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.