Slashdot Mirror
Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago
Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups. Quoting:
"'This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history,' said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence. 'Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.'"
we will actually reach that population level again.
Environmental damage here we come!
Timely article. We're about to become nearly extinct again.
Wow, a horrible drought and a near-extinction event 70,000 years ago? I guess those ancient humans should have kept their CO2 emission levels under control!
Honestly, it depends on how liberally you define "found".
ArkLinux is one for sure. Arch comes close.
gtkaml.org
There's nothing new under the sun..
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Or it could be that maybe this story is not new, but I like the time travel theory. Time hopping deLoreans here we come!
I guess only 2,000 survivors made down to the planet's surface from the Battlestar Galactica. They should have listened to Starbuck earlier.
We were down to eight 7,774 years ago! http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060625150315AA1zuHb
When I was in middle school (private, christian middle school), my science teacher loved to take stories like this and adapt it to the bible. He spent a whole lot of time trying to disprove the age of the earth, and after that it wouldn't be much of as jump to just say "Oh, that 70,000 years was actually only 5,000, and the population went down so much because of the flood!"
Wow, I'm pretty glad I got out of there.
This event probably ended up establishing the concept of "races", meaning small groups of geographically isolated humans ended up having a lot of genetically distinct features. As their populations grew, they seemed very foreign to each other and only in modern times those barriers to gene flow seem to be falling.
I look forward to the day when people stop saying "I'm X race" and instead say "I carry the genetic markers for A, B, and C." Well, perhaps it's unlikely, but an ex-biologist can dream, can't he?
I thought the minimum number of individuals to avoid massive genetic problems was much larger than 2000. Interesting.
Going back 70,000 years, then, there were only 2,000 of us...and...let's be honest...we were probably a skinny, not-too-bright, not-too-strong, disease-ridden, sorry-assed bunch of H. Sapiens. The Neanderthals obviously outnumbered us by many times over and could have rid the world of our kind. Thank you Neanderthals for sparing us...and we're sorry about anything we might have done to you...later.
No, really. It's OLD news, really old news... really..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
...the human population was once chopped down to much less than 2000 survivors. Try only 8 survivors.
And some number of generations before that, it all started out with only two humans, and very shortly before that, there was only one, and before that, none.
Global warming religious fanatics will use this for more fear-mongering in the media and everywhere else in 4... 3... 2... 1...
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I have a whopping 10 mod points, but would rather participate in this discussion instead, so here goes:
:P
I think that this is actually plausible. Things to mull over that could make this an interesting topic:
1) What evidence, 70000 years later, would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought?
2) Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact to describe this event, with only the details mixed up? If so, what does that tell us about this story?
3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...
Love these topics. Go people, go!!
didn't you hear? that the world is only 6000 years old...
actually the whole almost dieing out thing just reeks of a total lack of intelligent design
This is neither news nor particularly informing. The population bottleneck has been known for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Maybe it's because I pay attention to genetics and genealogy (and I thought people were geekier than I am here) but I clearly remember this news from 2006. Why is it getting recycled now, two years later?
That's why my great-great-great^{875}-grandmother kept telling her husband Ugh not to burn black-rock-oil to make campfires, but he didn't listen...
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Read up on the supervolcanic event at Lake Toba, on Sumatra - via wikipedia
The humans are dead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64
They were all hairdressers and artists and the like. They probably banded together into groups that did specific useless functions: painters, hairdressers, designers, admins, short order cooks.
Isn't 2000 people about the capacity of Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B?
Just saying...
Remain calm! All is well!
Every /.er would want to be a part of those 2000; that would phenomenally increase their chances of getting laid. Err, not every /.er, may be just 50%.
you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree. Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.
Conversation with government clerk filling out official forms...
Clerk: Full name please?
Me: Allen Dale Douglas
Clerk: Date of Birth?
Me: June 12th, 1981
Clerk: Place of birth?
Me: In a hospital.
Clerk: Which city and state, Einstein?
Me: Oh, Dallas TX, Presbyterian Hospital
Clerk: Sex?
Me: Sometimes.
Clerk: (rolls eyes ) Sex?
Me: Male.
Clerk: Race?
Me: Human.
Clerk: No, I mean what ethnicity are you?
Me: Texan.
Clerk: (rolls eyes again, tosses pencil up into the air and walks away)
That's exactly what I was thinking.
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday.How does genetics indicate drought instead of flood (or something else)? Is this "analysis" or pure guessing?
Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions..."These are the clans of Noah's sons, according to their family records, in their nations. The nations on earth spread out from these after the flood." - Genesis 10:32
Further scattering: "So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth." - Genesis 11:8-9
You're trying too hard. I can think of a couple things it could explain better:
Adam and Eve: there were a few other people around for their kids to marry. And a "Garden of Eden" would be especially appealing after a drought.
It could also explain the loss of ancient technology, like space travel. That's just too small a population to maintain that kind of advanced knowledge.
-Uberhund
This whole article seems to rest on the premise that humans left Africa en masse about 60,000 years ago. This is likely, but still a hotly contested theory. A rival theory contends that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) originated about the same time from Homo erectus, whose bones have been found in Asia and Africa (the multiregional theory).
It stands to reason that the tests on mitochondrial DNA of a group in Africa is only useful if you assume everyone left Africa sometime after 60,000 years ago.
Given there are numerous sites in Australia that claim to have artefacts stretching back at least that far (and possibly 176,000 years ago) it is very likely there were pockets of humans in other parts of the world much earlier than 60,000 years.
This research actually only shows that there is evidence of a population crash in Africa. Not that homo sapiens across the world had a population crash.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Of course humans were extinct 70,000 years ago, they were extinct just until 6000 years ago. :)
...Could it have been a cataclysmic flood and not a drought?...
..through which the world that then was, being flooded by water, perished. 7 But the present heavens and the earth being kept in store by the same word, are being kept for fire until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
The same book where we may read about the (almost) extinction of humanity by water, informs us that the next time God will use fire!
2Peter 3:6
According to that book, Universe was stretched out (Big Bang) at the Beginning
Isaiah 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man on it; I with My hands have stretched out the heavens; and all their host have I commanded.
Isaiah 48:13 My hand also has laid the foundation of the earth, and My right hand has stretched out the heavens. I called; they stood up together.
And it will end up in "The Big Crunch" that follows "The Big Bang" that began it.
Isaiah 34:4 And all the host of the heavens shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled like a scroll; and all their host shall droop, as a leaf falls off from the vine, and as the falling from the fig tree.
2Peter 3:10 But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that day the heavens will disappear with a roaring sound, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be burnt.
Revelation 6:14 And the heaven departed like a scroll when it is rolled together. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
Now you don't HAVE to believe the things written in the Bible, but what if the above and everything else therein is true after all? Something to think about.
All theory is gray
Thank goodness we recovered, and became the fine species we are today.
Not.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Just in case you haven't noticed, the issues with gasoline and oil are not just environmental, but also political and economical.
With gas hitting $4 a gallon, a person's "choice" to drive, say, a Ford F-350 impacts everyone else. You can drive nearly five Priuses for the amount of fuel that one single vehicle consumes. I'm not too big on sending our children off to die halfway around the world in order find enough oil to support our current "way of life".
So if "global warming" also helps get people off the dime in terms of controlling pollution, considering and implementing alternative energy sources, energy conservation, and reducing our dependance on foreign oil, then "valid" science or not, I'm all for it. Especially as opposed to the "there's nothing wrong", "head in the sand" approach you seem to be advocating.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
2000 person orgy to save the species.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So does the humans were around 70,000 years ago thing...
... who says we escaped inbreeding as a species??
The problem is only that there are those who demand a special level of support only when something deduced through standard analysis and levels of support conflicts with revelation. It's pointless to raise the standard of support to 100%, but it's useful to keep the standard high, or to do what the parent did and continue creating an awareness that historical analysis and observation is never going to be 100% certain (or, since the Assyrian and Babylonian King Lists--recorded history--100% objective).
Actually...the reduction in human population correlates nicely with the eruption of the super volcano Toba. This is fairly old news, even by /. standards. Wake me when something fresh hits.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
One theory has that it was an eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra. that caused it.
There's also a good look at the event at http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/textr.htmwith a discussion of the genetic bottleneck effect in chapter 5.
This idea that we can prevent it, and then everything will be fine. Well there's two big problems with that:
1) What if even though we are the source, we can't stop it? What if it turns out there's just no way now to turn things around, we are too far down the road? What then?
2) Assuming historical extrapolations are right, the world has been much hotter and colder than it is now. Thus it is likely that will happen again. Thus no matter what we do, we are probably in for a big temperature change at some point.
So then if we assume it is true that a temperature shift of a few degrees will really screw us over, then we need to be preparing for it and figuring out how to deal with it. It really seems like a case of not if but when. Even if we are the cause and have the power to prevent this current change, a change that we can't will happen at some point. Also, just because we are the cause, doesn't mean we can prevent it.
Either way, the most sensible thing would seem to be to figure out what we need to do to be able to survive a temperature shift, not concern ourselves with what the cause is because unless we are extremely incorrect about past temperature, it is not a static function over any time period, and thus is not likely to remain so, regardless of what we do or don't do.
It bothers me that people keep talking about the hypothetical effects of global warming without any real data. CO2 levels have risen by 30%, and surface temperature have not shown enough of a trend that we can really say the temperature is even rising. Sure, there's less sea-ice than there was 30 years ago, but ocen levels have not risen.
Where's the beef? Why are people saying that we're going to see cataclysmic changes in our environment, when no appreciable changes have occured so far. What is the basis for all these predictions?
To see how we(life on Earth) would react to different ideas, over a life time of a star.
Warp your head around that!
the explosion of the Toba volcano, in Indonesia, that was believed to take humans to the brink of extinction:
Across the world the last eruption of a super volcano was the Toba volcano in Indonesia. This erupted around 75,000 years ago spewing out tremendous quantities of rock and ash and is thought to have reduced global temperatures by up to 21 degrees centigrade.
Here's a cute little rendition: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ which includes the 70K reduction along with a few others.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Answers: 1 - Geologic evidence. 2 - No. It tells us that the story's survival in ANY form after 65000 years of oral transmission defies probability? But we already knew that. 3 - None.
Interesting spin on that story, the BBC reports "Human line 'nearly split in two'" and only mentions "that modern humans had a close brush with extinction in the evolutionary past" as a footnote, something which I read before somewhere anyhow.
The finding that Eastern and Southen African populations might have diverged is the true news here, though much less eye catching.
I want to learn more than just a short article. Anyone know where I can read the scientific papers on this?
God spoke to me.
The most intelligent land animal almost went extinct, the second most intelligent land animal is an endangered species now, and a lot of the great apes are in trouble. Dolphins are doing OK, whales would be fine except for us, but neither is likely to develop technology.
Are we going to find life on other planets but discover that high intelligence is rare?
Boom! Two booms, in fact. Though in fact they're environmental damage scenarios caused by specific events.
One being a major meteor or asteroid strike similar to the present theory held regarding the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (Chicxulub). The second being a super-volcano erruption on the scale of the first Yellowstone event. Both of which could throw enough dirt, ash, and assorted junk into the atmosphere to cause serious climate change.
In fact, the 70,000 year old "near-extinction event" discussed in the article ties rather neatly into the massive Toba erruption that occurred in Sumatra, Indonesia right around 67,500 to 75,500 years ago.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
What, now all the "differently accomplished" should just hang their heads in shame? What did the slackers ever do to you? Bigot.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
> 1) What evidence, 70000 years later, would
> decisively display the difference between a flood
> and a drought?
Why balk at the idea of precise specification of causation? You've already bought into the idea that genetics can make such a pronouncement in the first place, which seem extremely unlikely to me.
If you've bought the farm why not buy the horse too?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Maybe it was a spaceship crash landing!
I think the 2000 were genetically different enough that evidence of 2000 people could be discerned several thousand years later. Had those 2000 been the descendants of one couple then genetic markers would show 2 descendants.
>Hunger is by far a distribution problem,
>not a food production problem.
This has only been true for a limited span of time, since the green revolution, which started in 1943, massively increased farming output, which had been only increasing at a steady linear pace in the past. Since then, populations have surged to meet the new level of food supply.
Historically (before 1943) population was kept in check by a limited supply of food. A large number of people would be born to each generation, more than could possibly be fed, and a certain percentage at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder would just starve to death.
Read Thomas Malthus' "The Principle of Population" to see how economics, agriculture, and famine worked in the 18th century.
In recent times, the massive increase in food raised the cap on the population, and birth rates skyrocketed. Between 1900 and now, the population moved from 1.6 billion to 6 billion, multiplying by 3.75 in only 100 years. In comparison, over the prior 100 years, the population only multiplied by 1.6.
Unfortunately, instead of food production growth, in many places food output is actually shrinking as populations displace prime farm land. The geometic growth rates of food production are nearing and end.
The question now is, do we go back to being the way we used to be, with society relatively impoverished and the bottom parts of society constantly starving to death?
Some people are hopeful that birth control and education will put a check on population growth, independent of food supply. Indeed, the united states, japan, and europe are all below replacement rates while at the same time being awash in food. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has yet to follow suit, so who knows?
Noah saw it all.
...would decisively display the difference between a flood and a drought...
Sedimentary rocks are evidence of water and the preservation of fine details of fossils preserved in these sediments is evidence of a sudden catastrophic death and burial. There are fossils of fish in the act of trying to swallow their just caught prey. There are also fossil footprints of dinosaurs and other creatures and fossil dinosaur eggs.
Today no fossils get made because living things simply decay almost immediately. Footprints in sand or mud are also rather transient and don't last long enough for any slow, gradual process over eons of time to preserve them in silt and mud turned to stone.
(..Could the Noah story be an allegory written after the fact..)
It is remarkable how consistent the flood legends are from cultures scattered all over the globe. Humans living on every continent, except Antarctica, have accounts of a water deluge and only a few people and animals saved in a boat. The details of these stories, passed by word of mouth for generations, have gotten a little muddled, but the essential elements of the waters and the boat holding only a few people to be saved are uncannily consistent. The old Chinese glyph for flood is a depiction of 8 people in a boat.
This forum would not be the place to go into more details, but there have been numerous books written on the evidence for a global flood. I'm sure that if you want to pursue this, you can find them on places like Amazon.
All theory is gray
Because the debate over the price and features of the horse in entertaining...
In other words, why not discuss it?
Or maybe one of the tribes got some technology and they took over the world together.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
...Could it have been a cataclysmic flood and not a drought?...Unlikely; there would be evidence of something like that.
Now you don't HAVE to believe the things written in the Bible, but what if the above and everything else therein is true after all? Something to think about.And really, who in their right mind would treat the collected stories of a bunch of nomadic tribes as the literal word of god? I may as well go in for scientology...
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Actually, there was a global flood 12000 years ago. The Laurentide Ice Sheet broke away and in the course of a few days the oceans rose over 100 feet.
Islands the size of those found in Indonesia disappeared in the Atlantic (the hoping points likely used by Clovis man to come to the Americas from Europe.) Entire groups of Flora and Fauna that lived on those Islands were wiped out as were any Human civilizations, unlikely to be found again due to their dept and location. The old coastal regions of the continents that were populated were wiped out as well. No wonder we have flood stories from all over the globe that are very similar.
There was a flood, but did God do it? no.
And I have to wonder if the author even read the original peer-reviewed article - which can be found at:
http://www.ajhg.org/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(08)00255-3
The actual study contrasts two complex hypotheses on early human populations in Africa. The major points are:
1. (Presented as the current consensus). Early humans lived in a one population in eastern or southern Africa. Around 90,000 years ago, this population splits. One of the daughter groups is the primary source of the Khoisan (a South African ethnic group with many "early" maternal lineages). The other is the source of the out-of-Africa migration 60-70,000 years ago. After the out-of-Africans leave, there is renewed migration between the two African groups.
2. (The new hypothesis proposed in this paper). Early humans split into two largely separate African groups starting around 150,000 years ago. Again, one of these is the primary source of the Khoisan and the other is the source of the out-of-Africans. Again, there is renewed migration between these groups after the out-of-Africans leave. (Also, this second hypothesis requires some limited migration from the Khoisan ancestors to the other group around 90,000 years ago to make the patterning of genetic variation work out).
The data which these hypotheses are trying to account for - in part - is that there is significantly more diversity in maternal lineages in Africa than out. In fact, all of the maternal lineages outside of Africa are a subset of *one* of the African lineages. So any explanation of this has to somehow derive a non-diverse population (the rest of the world) from a very diverse source population (Africans). Both of these hypotheses try to do this in fundamentally the same way (population splits in Africa), but the new paper argues that in order for the pattern to be as it is, a longer time of separation of populations in Africa is required.
There are no new population size estimates in the paper whatsoever. There is no discussion (other than an off-hand mention or two) of population sizes in the paper.
The CNN/Associated Press article is sensationalistic at best and misleading at worst.
And as an aside, whatever the "separate study by researchers at Stanford University" is - I couldn't figure out which one it was in the reference list - it is certainly about *effective* population size, which is _very_ different than census population size. For instance, the long-term effective population size of the entire human species is generally estimated to be around 10,000 *effective* individuals.
I used to get a very honest and insightful ecology magazine called "Garbage" edited by Patricia Poore. It did well for a year or so, then started getting angry letter campaign and boycotts because they didn't follow the party line on various issues. For instance, they actually did a life cycle analysis of disposable vs cloth diapers, and found that life cycle costs were less for cloth in areas with hydro power (New England) and plentiful water, less for disposable in arid areas (Arizona, California), and about the same everywhere else. That didn't sit well.
We are going down that path fast the way we are destroying our world. Global warming is one symptom of many that could cause the extinction of the human race or at least the majority of humans. Living things have can take much punishment from many environmental and genetic factors but there is point where anything will be destroyed... cockroaches included.
It is better question what caused the first "die-off" of the human race?
Put identity in the browser.
I wanted to read up on this one, so I tried to track down the paper. The CNN article says it was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. There is an article by Stephen Wells in Am. J. Hum. Gen. this month, but it doesn't seem to be the one in the article. The CNN article says the research was done on the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San in Africa. The article in Aprils Am. J. Hum. Gen. was done on Y chromosome DNA of Lebanese.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The fact that modern humans can be traced to a small group of ancestors does NOT imply that the race nearly went extinct. It just means that a small group of mutants 70,000 years ago went on to dominate the world. There were plenty of hominids that were driven to extinction not by a harsh environment but by these 2,000 and their descendants.
is that if it weren't for Global Warming we'd be getting fucked by the upcoming Ice Age!
... and that for the first time in many cyclic Ice Ages, we may have a chance to escape the planet (which couldn't possibly hold ALL of us, right?).
It sure would seem smarter to spend our resources towards building a space ark than building more and more and more military jets and ships.
As Fleetwood Mac sang, "Oh well."
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-flood.html
http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.asp
You know what made me decide? The lack of imperial evidence for a bunch of parts that the pro-flood people use. They think that all animals were herbivores back then. That's why the animals peacefully reproduced. No evidence needed. They simply make these "fit" statements and it's looked at as fact to some people. craziness. That's just one out of the many reasons why it's not believed as much, thanks to science. I don't even understand why christians get in an argument over this stuff, because with a supernatural god, empirical scientific evidence is no longer needed. Am I right with that one?
:)
And out of the blue, here's a link to an organized debate on the richarddawkins.net forum; the creationist using everything that arminw just stated, and shown that it is all old theories, quick assumptions, and unlinkable evidence.
http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10675
An interesting read to say the least.
Might have been just a bit of tweaking. You go for bipedalism and bigger brain with high hopes of something great emerging, and all you get is bipedal apes with big brains shrieking at each other and throwing feces. So you wipe out all but the brightest of them hoping to push the brainy thing, and lo, complex behaviours emerge shortly after, like art, and religion, and stuff, which seems like progress until you realize that now you have bipedal, big brained apes with art and religion and state level civilizations shrieking and throwing feces at one another.
I wonder what the next tweak will be.
Loose lips lose spit.
Did anyone else read this as "Hamas nearly went extenct"?
If you don't like Genesis, there is a Hungarian Myth that tells the story of the Huns (one of the language groups) beginning with the tower of Babel (the Genesis story above). The best telling, IMO, is The White Stag, by Kate Seredy.
You walk into a room and see a burning candle. You can measure the rate of burn, etc.
#1: How long has the candle been burning?
#2: How long was it originally?
I think these guys are mixing some facts with lots of conjecture. By looking at the DNA, we know that humans almost went extinct 70,000 years ago?
Anyone who uses Personals Ads services and sits in front of a computer all day hoping for their Knight In Shining Armor to come rescue them is contributing to the next possible extinction of the human race. It used to be that people met at Church, through school, through the extended family, and through REAL neighborhoods where people knew each other. Other than school, much of that inter-social infrastructure is gone. Couples move out of the city and into sterile suburbs where there is little social contact at all. They they get divorced and the woman is at home in front of her computer all day looking for Mr. Right all over again so the process can repeat itself.
What, you think He didn't step in and save (literally speaking, of course) those last 2000 H. Sapiens? Hmmm...
Fill a glass with ice water, like all ice up to the top and fill the rest with cold water. It'll be 32.1 degrees or so, just above freezing.
Now drop a shotglass of boiling water into it. What happens? A bunch of the ice melts, and the water's still 32.1 degrees.
In one sense this is not new. Geneticists have argued for some time that humans went through a population "bottle-neck" (less that 10,000 people) about 70,000 years ago. At the same time there was a super volcano eruption in the Pacific.
The interesting thing about this is that there is now 'evidence', obviously there will be continuing discussion about it, that humans almost split into two populations, but later merged again about 40,000 years ago. Though this isn't mentioned much in the linked article but you can find it here.
Bitter and proud of it.
This could roughly explain the story of Adam and Eve. Considering before the drought the world would have seemed like a large garden, vs during the drought which could seem like an expulsion from paradise. As well in this new tougher world the smartest needed to survive (the fruit of knowledge) as well a limited human population. And over many thousands of years of spoken stories they have changed into the bibles creation story.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good theory, but the United States wasn't around back then ;)
(Yep, that's gonna piss some people off ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Those Cylons didn't finish us off 70000 years ago, and they will fail again.
So say we all.
This is my point exactly. 'Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction."' There were successful bands of human relatives all over Europe and Asia, who this one lineage would eventually replace. To imagine that the Earth would be have been depeopled by the extinction of one regionally-isolated subpopulation is idiotic.
So you might want to take a look at the Georgia Guidestones
# Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature
# Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
# Unite humanity with a living new language.
# Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
# Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
# Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a one world court
# Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
# Balance personal rights with social duties.
# Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
# Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.
A lot of maintaining, guiding, uniting, ruling, protecting and balancing to be going on, hope you're all up for it.
Or the Science Channel or the History Channel? Can you say Toba? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_eruption The show, which has been on several times on one of these channels, associates this narrowing of our species genetic lineage with this super volcanic event. Forget asteroids, it is Yellowstone or something like Toba that is going to do us in.
Thank god that Cowboy Neal survived or who else could we pick on polls?
Remember that the Bible was not written in modern english and that even in modern US sports world means the USA+Canada. What we read of a worldwide flood is unlikely to mean the entire planet in Sumerian (they had the flood story) or possibly an earlier language that wasn't written.
Now this article is just stupid. Everyone knows that only 4000 years ago there were only two people on the planet, oh... and one talking snake.
Hmmm....this article from 2003 looks familiar....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm
Isn't this genetic bottleneck already credited to the Mt Toba explosion (Indonesia) which happened about 70,000 years ago?
The Mt Toba explosion is believed to have been so huge (vastly larger than Krakatoa) that it plunged the whole earth into a "nuclear winter"-like period (just look up "Mount Toba" or "Toba catastrophe theory" in Wikipedia).
In any event, we already knew that there was a genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago, as those Wikipedia articles indicate. What's the real genetics news here?
I am anarch of all I survey.
This study is based on Mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the female line. It's less than useful for determining the actual population, since the only population detectable through this technique is women who've not failed to have daughters. Note that my grandmother's mitochondrial DNA is going to be gone from the world after this generation, since she had only one daughter (plus two sons), that daughter had only two daughters (plus four sons), and those two daughters have only sons (two, last I counted). So, 60-odd descendents still living, but as far as this test is concerned, her entire family line is gone, or never was.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So it is good we humans have dispersed as we are not as tied to one area. Although it is clear that once humans entered the Middle East and the figurative "Middle of the Earth" they were onto something good. I will also have to check my references because it seems to me that all humans were not confined to Africa C. 70,000. Also one should be careful as one or two studies on the Mitochondrial DNA of some group in Africa might not the whole story tell. If it were say 200,000 years ago this happened then I'd have been really worried. Still it might be argued that any thing that gets the humans to tread a little more lightly on the planet might be a good thing.So this might be a good thing to think about as we persue our lives as sentient beings.
We already knew this. Watched a NG doc on it in school last year.
Beneath all the sectarian and racial tensions is a very real survival pressure for the people involved -- Sudan is going through a pretty bad drought, one which most observers believe is the result of climate change. Population pressures are helping to push people to kill each other for access to water and usable farmland.
I mean, you didn't think that half of the world's population is just going to sit there and let the other half live while they die, did you?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If your perspective is that the world is a couple weeks walking in either direction big, a large river flood is going to seem like quite the event and is going to be quite the tale to tell to the youngsters.
That doesn't invalidate consistent legends, but it raises the bar on the level of consistency needed to be interesting.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The only thing consistent about the last 20000 years is warming. While you're there, take note of T minus 70000 years. ROCK BOTTOM temperatures. The problem with global warming is that it won't last forever.
And as for this Slashdot discussion, how I'd love to mod all the crap from global warming deniers and creationists down to -1. They dominate so many threads here and provoke tedious debates on the same subjects over and over and over and over. Stay on topic or go somewhere else.
...they discovered a mini black-hole producing lab dated 70,000 years old.
Table-ized A.I.
...If your perspective is that the world is a couple weeks walking in either direction big...
If you saying it was only a small local flood, explain the fact that sedimentary rock and fossils are found on every continent, including Antarctica. This is also the case for even the highest mountains on earth, such as Mt. Everest.
We also find coal and oil all over the planet, made from suddenly destroyed plants and animals. Why do you think these energy sources are called FOSSIL fuel?
Slowly buried life forms decay. They never produce coal or oil. To do that takes quick burial and lots of heat and pressure.
The Biblical flood account tells us that the fountains of the deep broke open. There is evidence for MUCH more water is bound in the mantle of the earth, still today, than in all the oceans. Get out a geology text that has a drawing of the layers of the earth and compare their thicknesses. Also, volcanic action would have supplied plenty of heat. There are sill the dead or dormant volcanoes all over the whole earth.
Since we KNOW that the mantle of the earth is still rather hot even today. The water that come up from there was very hot and saturated by minerals. Those minerals acted as the cement, just like in concrete, that bound the soft mud and sand into stone in about the same amount of time it takes concrete to harden. The jumbled graveyards of creatures we find entombed were mineralized, petrified and we still find them that way, well protected, as if cast in concrete. We find these fossils in sandstone thus cemented together and also in other types of stone, such as limestone.
All theory is gray
I have read it. The evidence is flimsy. I work as an environmental engineer for god sake. I think I know a thing or two about the environment.
Seriously! Who gave the Fox News crew mod points?
thx e
The Cylons *are* our ancestors. We kicked those pesky humans with their stupid language ('frack' ?) from the face of the earth.
We should have kept the Centurions though, now the Japanese are reinventing the wheel.
To read more on this subject, see the text referencing "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", particularly the section regarding the Golgafrinchan civilization.
I have. I talked to a lot of them when I was getting my geology degree in college. You're right that the climate is constantly changing. You're wrong if you think that implies that humans cannot change the climate.
You're also wrong if you think that recorded human history is the only record of past climate that we can reference. There are numerous natural records of past climate that go back much further into the past. And by the way, the best estimate for an average global surface temp is actually about 14 degrees C, not 0. I have no idea where the grandparent got that number. Maybe they mistook temp anamoly for absolute temp.
Finally, it may surprise you to learn that many researchers of past and current climate do in fact hold geology degrees.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet broke away and in the course of a few days the oceans rose over 100 feet.... There was a flood, but did God do it? no.
Oh yeah? Well who broke the ice sheet? Perhaps "HE" didn't want to own up to it!!
Lol!
If you want the truth about this story, you should ask John McCain.
Welcome to the religion-ization of science.
Brought to you by the "you-can-pry-my-SUV-from-my-cold-dead-fingers" institute for the preservation of the status quo.
Wake me when an actual conversation starts...
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
Which segues to the other problem with that statement: this "sweet" spot is not at all unusual. First, it is cyclical, and second, the warm and cold periods are symmetric. The relative "sweet" climate is no more or less common than the colder parts.
BBC Take on it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358868.stm Tim S
think about one problem: ocean acidification.
this alone, of all the problems we're looking at, has the potential to severely disrupt human civilization.
this whole "productive northern wastelands" concept is completely uncritical and painfully ignorant. higher average humidity levels in no way imply higher moisture levels in current deserts. by your style of "logic," if heating bills decrease, cooling bills increase.
there is in fact evidence that oceans are being affected by climate change, though not in all cases in the painfully simplistic way you seem to expect. your understanding of ice dynamics is retarded - see a few other posts in this thread. consider for a moment the albedo change caused by the melting of the highly reflective arctic ice into the highly absorbent arctic ocean. and try to educate yourself about what a model actually is (hint: it's the best way we have to integrate knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines).
ugh. sorry i couldn't be more diplomatic about this. you're just terribly, terribly wrong. i hope all you're missing is enough information to develop an informed decision. please, please do some actual research. try journals in, oh, maybe half the geoscience-related disciplines... this stuff is showing up all over the scientific map.
Clerk: Race?
Call me naive, but is this a question that is actually asked? In what situations? For what purpose?
I'm not from the US and do not know all your local customs, but I find the idea quite absurd (bordering on offensive).
May we live long and die out
How about +5...
i mean, seriously. even dept of commerce branch NOAA *completely* disagrees with you.
please note this *peer-reviewed* info (yes, this entire site is a published study):
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect/indicators.shtml
and yes, this is merely the most digestible and easily accessible of the info out there.
[|]
You are saying that God would never let almost all of humanity die? Read Genesis, and Revelation, you're in for a real suprise. In Exodus God almost kills the entire hebrew people, until Moses begs him not to.
This is somewhat related to yor post, but also somewhat off topic. If there is some semblance of truth in the bible, and you don't have to give up atheism to believe this, then what has happened to the human lifespan? Almost everyone born before the flood lived to over 500 years, some 900. Later on, men whent to war at 80, and didn't blink at the idea of working 14 years to earn a bride.
Recently we've been expanding our lifespans to around 100 years with modern medicine and nutrition, but mightn't people from the middle ages lived even longer than us if they had access to the same technology as us? What I'm saying is, it's entirly possible that the the human genetic code is headed for trouble.
National Geographic Channel has a show title Naked Science. One of the episodes, Super Volcanoes, discusses this. It specifically talks about the particulate matter from a massive volcano and how it blocks so much of the sun's light or covers so much of the surface that almost all the people died. FWIW, volcano "ash" isn't really ash like that from a fire. It's more like very small particles of sharp glass.
There are some Biblical passages which some people take to be describing dinosaurs and very early people-like creatures. I don't remember the reference but it's translated as "leviathan" in some translations. I've wondered for quite a while if this starvation/drought period for humans is what those passages are describing. Maybe there are similar stories in various mythologies about a similar time, similar to the common theme of an all-world flood. There might also be a common thread to a Phoenix-like cycle of existence.
Well, a geological survey would definitely show you the difference between a drought (land drying up) and a flood (washing away the topsoil and adding a new layer of sediment as the water lowers again)
My guess is that the cause (drought) of the near-extinction didn't come from the genetic survey but from geological events matching that time frame.
The more we learn about ourselves and our planet, the more Dawkins is right: What really happened is just so much more interesting and fantastic than the fiction our ancestors put into their holy books.
This (hi-)story definitely beats the whole "flood and Noah's Ark" bullshit. Evolution is a lot more thrilling than creation. And quite frankly, being distantly related to the other animals creates a lot more emotional connection than being told "here, rule over them" by a fictional daddy-of-all.
Not to mention that even a short look into outer space beats the entire bible in amazement.
We need more science like this, and less funding for the outdated liars.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hmmmm, almost all early human populations lived as near to water as they could, rivers, lakes, the sea etc and from time to time it can happen that rivers flood, lakes flood or natural dams break and at sea there can be large storms, storm surges and tsunamis so its entirely likely that almost all societies were affected by flooding to some degree at some time.
I wonder if there is an alternative explanation for widespread sedimentary rock and fossils, one thats more plausible than some evil sicko from space somehow building enough "fountains of the deep" to flood the entire world except for some lecherous old drunk for whom the evil sky sicko has fashioned a Tardis like raft and helped, in between Noahs whoring and boozing, round up all the animals on Earth and get them into this mystical Tardis Raft. I wonder if there is any theory more plausible or supported with evidence than that ?
No wonder humans are such oddly behaving animals:
> as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups.
2000 total, in small isolated groups? There was a whole lot of inbreeding going on. The groups wouldn't have survived long enough to get back together if they hadn't. Sure, we may think we're the bee's knees, but we, as a species, are sitting on the porch, playing banjo against the rest of the planet's more reasonable but food-chain inferior guitar playing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Some people here believe in "affirmative action" which intends to grant special privilege to those who answer that question correctly. In college I accidentally made myself eligible for untold scholarships when I applied for some financial aid, read too fast, and put a check in the box next to "American". It turns out that the form was not so well formatted and the next line of the form started "Indian". After I got enough scholarship offers, I realized what had happened and how I remembered that "American" seemed a bit unusual for an answer to "Race" but that it seemed the most correct at the time.
Just callin' it like I see it.
In so far as decisive evidence for a drought rather than a flood from 70 000 years after the scene, I can answer that one:
A world wide drought is a fairly simple thing to recreate, all that is necessary is a small increase in global temperature (cough) to devastate crops and cause the poor farmers to die out (generally food is allocated to the rich, the powerful, and the military over the people that produce food). With the farmers dead and the rest sucking at farming, the natural response is to find new farmers to preside over, but with a global drought occurring they are a very rare commodity - and the result is massive food, water, and slave (farmer) wars which kill off the armies. This leaves only the rich and powerful, and if we are assuming that the previous population was something like 200 000, and only 2 000 survived, those 2 000 are likely to be the warlords and the wealthy who ran out of food last - just long enough to figure out either how to sustain themselves or to outlast the drought itself.
By contrast, a global flood could occur only if enormous volumes of water magically appeared to submerge much of the land. Considering I've been watching The Next Generation for the past few hours I immediately suspect a faulty replicator being left here endlessly producing water until the Enterprise turned around and beamed it into orbit and then tractor beamed it into a slingshot around the Earth that launched it into our sun. Truthfully I just don't see many real ways for that volume of water to suddenly appear and the detour illustrates the absurdity of a global flood.
Floods are regional, typically caused by flash flooding of basins emptying or heavy rainfall in regions upstream, or by monsoon type weather, which requires pushing enormous amounts of precipitation up the Himalayas. These methods by definition can't occur on global scales.
If memory serves me correctly there is one example in earth history of a global 'flood' so to speak, more of a monsoon really, and that is literally billions of years prior, while the atmosphere was being forged due to geothermal precipitation: creating the oceans.
As for remnants of an Ark, there wouldn't be any evidence unless the Ark happened to land in some sort of deep marsh capable of preserving and depriving the wood of oxygen long enough for it to petrify.
As for the Noah story being an allegory for an event occurring 70 000 years ago, there are far better examples of very large floods which could explain the situation that are more recent. Alternately, if we recognize that early agricultural populations gravitated towards river tributaries - innately susceptible to massive (but regional) floods - and that these cultures if any are the only ones efficient enough to allow for specialists in records and oral traditions or flood capable boats for that matter - then it is far and away easier to assume The Great Flood myth that occurs across so many civilizations is the result of many seperate survivors of agricultural societies suffering many seperate, regional floods throughout history than a single flood that magically increased the volume of water on Earth and then decreased it afterwards (we are after all, essentially a closed system).
A great drought? We might know what that is in a few years ourselves at the present rate of global warming, but a great flood? Practically impossible.
No I can explain it, Earth is Sim City for God, and his mother called him to help get groceries, and then he ate some food and saw Star Trek on TV (except his version is from the perspective of The Q, not humanity obviously) and he forgot he left the game running for a few hours and his society nearly died out.
2000, could 2000 people reproduce fast enough to get to our current population? 70,000 years ago, Australia was isolated. For the Aboriginal population to survive here, you would need at least 1000 people to repopulate. Something's wrong with the 2000 number...
Yeah, I don't know enough about fossilization to argue with you. My assumption is that you are defining conditions that are much more narrow than it actually takes. There is a boggy pond near here. It has the stink of anaerobic decay pretty much constantly(Sewer gas -- Hydrogen Sulfide). I don't pretend to understand what happens over thousands or millions of years in such a situation, but it amuses me to no end that there is a well head 100 feet off to the side of the pond.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans"
Damn those Republicans. Was Iraq not enough?
This has been around for several years. http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch5_bottleneck/textr5.htm
Tisha Hayes
I find it absurd that the clerk asked that and the gender question.
If you can see the person, odds are good you do not need to ask those questions.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Actually it reminds me a lot more of the noah's ark myth/legend/passed-down-and-mutilated-account.
Is it such a big stretch to imagine such a tough time in history being passed on through stories until it ended up in one of the main spiritual books around today?
It may be a response to a troll, but that doesn't automatically make this a troll. Parent just points out that the "global warming = religion" comparison doesn't work, and to do this he needs to say why not. Perhaps this was a predictable response (the parent *was* a troll after all) and perhaps he needn't have stated this (most of us would have recognized that troll even if parent didn't), but that doesn't make it a troll itself.
Sounds very similar to that thing that happened in the bible, where someone had to build an arc....
seems like this could give us better insight into timelines for humans, as the actual AWARENESS
of time relative to ours from the past might be hard for the people who wrote the bible to
guess. I imagine we are trying to reference the bible with other works from those eras, but,
I have yet to hear about someone discovering the real Arc used by Noah, and even then it would have to be proven that it was that perticular one...so I am right now almost ready to accept the stoy of Noah dates back to this age... and that some of the carbon dating done is faulty.
in recent years more and more outrageoous claims concerning human history are publicized often without scrutinty of the original articles: to me this is a good example of that. A single trait (mtDNA) is very unlikely to reveal very detailed historical patterns.
For me this falls into the catgory: "good data, lousy statistics".
I spent some time examining "skeptic" websites - and found some pretty convincing arguments - or so I thought. The problem is, that when you try to look for the proof that skeptics base their assertions on, you find nothing. zip. nada.
Further investigation reveals that a few well funded individuals (such as Steve Milloy) and a few "scientists" are creating a lot of noise, and publishing information that treads a fine line between outright lying and fraud.
Try it out for yourself. Get a skeptic website - an impressive one - and then try to find the evidence with which they base their conclusions on. If you need some help pulling apart a site, then feel free to contact me (reply to this post), and I'll give you a hand.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
the D and the A and the M and the N and the A and the T and the I O N.
-
Of course Im glad for the DDT ban and the bald eagle being back in the wild in large numbers. I average 2 a year, and if i really tried could probably bag 6 or 7. They are delicious. They are great with an apple cider glaze over them and make an excellent dinner for 2. Great thanksgiving feast for me and the wife, as theyre abundant that time of year due to migration patterns.
they only had to deal with drought, not Cylons.
if 2K can grow to 6B, 40K isn't a bad seed, then.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I read TFA and the comments and was astounded that nobody pointed out that without this drought, humans may well not have advanced at all and migt have become extinct at a later date, or without the species-killing drought 70,000 year ago we might still be stone age savages (rather than the sophisticated savages we have become).
It's survival of the fittest. Species evolve under pressure.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
3) What remnants of an Ark would one expect to find 70000, or even 5000 years after the fact? Conversely, what evidence could be shown that would decisively PROVE OR DISPROVE that the event happened? And I'm talking about scientific evidence here. Not anecdotal faith-based cruft. Not even science-based faith-based cruft, if you please...
I thought the Noah legend was just that the Jews borrowed a preexisting actual story and adding in some morality to the story so there would be point in telling it. If I recall correctly, the current theory was that there was a guy that had a grain ship that he lived on with all his various livestock. Big flash flood/storm happened and washed them out to see. Big storm several days and when storm cleared/moved on. They were in the middle of the sea. What's the answer to where the land went? The entire earth must have flooded. O.k. the guy had a big ship so his concept of the entire earth was where he sailed his craft and who he normally traded with. Obviously, the guy made land fall traded with the natives and became local rich guy. Guy shows up with huge ship with grain/animals of course he is rich in the ancient sense. The guy lives somewhat happily ever after. The world hardly noticed that it was supposedly ended during a storm. Of course "the world" for the villages that the guy normally traded with where ended, but that was due to the damn river flooding and a storm. Oh, yeah the local survivors can blame it on the local deity being mad at them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)
Remember POV in these stories is everything. "The World" as the town/village and everything that you are normally exposed to has ended millions of time in our history. It s just now that alot of people are actually being exposed to the concept of the actual entire world rather than the tiny portion of it that they live on be ravaged by war or something that we now have to worry about it. We love to expand what we worry about. 200 years ago we didn't worry about gaint rocks falling from the sky killing everyone.
If instead of focusing our efforts toward the arms race, we had been pushing toward the space race, we could've begun trying to terraform our planetary neighbors, Mars or Venus. The data we could've received from manipulating climates in those planets could have and still could help in our efforts to stabilize Earth's climate to sustain our existence on this planet.
Plus, if we succeed, we could just dump this place and move.
Mods, feel free to remove it... crap all that time for nothing
I can't really comment on it because I wasnt even born back then!
If you can see the person, odds are good you do not need to ask those questions. My ex qualified for metis status, and had blue eyes, blonde hair, and fair skin. How's that for visible minority?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I find it absurd that the clerk asked that and the gender question.
He did say government clerk... or did you miss that part?
Maybe you've never visited the local drivers license office, or you'd know what he was talking about.
Back in the 1960's and 1970's there were actually studies about redistributing the world's food wealth, and the executive summary is there ain't enough to go around and probably never will be even in the best of times. Much of the human population is going to have to subsist at 1100-1200 calorie levels.
Even scarier were some of the sideline studies: if the Indian monsoon were to move just 100 miles north or south, there would be a general crop shortfall of stupendous magnitude, and we would get to watch 100 million people starve to death live on TV. If you reduced the American population to 1200 calories and exported all the surplus this produced (in a bumper crop year), that would only delay the 100 million deaths from starvation by about 3 months. Somewhere around 3500 BC, in southern China there was a weather anomaly and in a region with 3 crops of rice per year there were 7 consecutive crop failures: they have a name for this that is something like the year of the jackal.
A lot of people assume that because of a few popular books (what most of us have time to read) and some science suggesting global warming is the result of human activity that this is so and scientifically proven. There is in fact much evidence contra, many plausible physical mechanisms which have no human input whatsoever. E.g., 6000 years ago northern Sweden and Norway had a climate (and tree species) similar to England today. When the unit of magnetic field strength was adopted around 1850, the strength of the earth's magnetic field was defined to be 1 gauss; today it is about 1/200th of a gauss. The earth's magnetic field traps solar particle radiation in the van Allen belts and steers these particles to the poles, where to a definite effect (of debated magnitude in all circumstances) the particles tend to form seed nuclei for storms in the Arctic. Thus, after a solar storm in a few days a terrestrial storm tends to form in the Gulf of Alaska, and this in a bit over a week becomes a cold front in the US. Ergo: weaker earth's magnetic field means fewer days of cloud in the Arctic and fewer strong cold fronts in the US.
If you are open minded, the debate on the human contributions to global warming is undecided, political correctness notwithstanding. There just isn't sufficient data to say definitely, which is exactly what you would expect with the weather - which is where we discovered mathematical chaos in the 1960's. Weather, and climate, is a chaotic system and inherently unpredictable, but there will always be a simple explanation viewed after the fact. Understand this mathematical truth: there can be no prediction of the future evolution of a chaotic system, which weather/climate is. All predictions are dubious! The arcane mathematics of solving nonlinear hyperbolic differential equations can give you accuracy estimates only if you know all the variables - every stinking one, with perfect precision in their inter-relationships. If you read and understand the Gilmore catastrophy theory book, now a Dover paperback, and otherwise understand chaos theory, you will see that there can really be no possibility of prediction in natural systems, but quite often there can be a simple retrodiction.
The reasons for following the recommendations of the the advocates of global warning (at least by and large) are
1. We ought to do it anyway. It cannot be beneficial to humans to live in a hazardous waste filled environment.
2. Even slight changes to global climate can have enormous consequences. Imagine 100 million deaths in India which could be traced scientifically after the fact to industrial pollution in the US, China, Europe, etc. There is no scientific basis for any prediction in chaotic systems, but there is perfectly sound retrodiction, and the explanations will always be fairly simple (this is a mathematical truth, see the Gilmore book on catastrophy theory).
3. We do have hard science in understanding many mechanisms attributable to human behavior which possibly can individually contribute to global warning. So
"They have ice core data that goes back over 100,000 years. I suppose it could be a coincidence that:
* The most dramatic CO2/Temperature increase in history just HAPPENS to coincide with mankind figuring out that they could burn shit from underground.
* Scientists have developed models that match this historic data quite well, and even when set to be as conservative as possible, STILL predict a warming trend based on CO2 input."
All of which is a wonderful waste of time, considering that in those ice core samples the CO2 content rises about 400-500 years AFTER the temperature rises - unless I miss my guess, that means that the rise in temperature causes a rise in CO2, not the other way around.
Frankly, I find the man-made global warming theory to be extremely arrogant for two reasons:
1. It assumes that climate change is not normal, and that it should be fixed in place for our benefit - I think a couple of ice ages and the periods in between might disagree with that.
2. That human beings with our industrialism are somehow powerful enough to impact the planet on a global level in a fundamental way, rewriting environmental laws (such as higher CO2 levels being caused by higher temperatures) in the process, when the sun and volcanoes are far more impressive and likely candidates for effecting climate change.
Seriously, the global warming nuts need to get over themselves in a really big way. All this arrogant fearmongering is drawing attention away from real environmental problems that need fixing, such as rivers becoming toxic, etc.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
which is Elephant, is also an endangered species. Interesting.
Only humans, apes, dolphins and elephants are self aware and can recognize themselves in the mirror and know it is them. But it seems all are ill adapted to deal with human technology as enemy #1. But on the other hand we have been superior for relatively short period of time.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
in the 1980s, Reagan almost made us extinct! The bombers are on the way, indeed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, okay, after reading the last three comments which all pounce of the same thing, I realize that I should've mentioned that I agree that we don't get down to 2,000 people.
I was just commenting on the concept that having half the food means only losing half the people isn't well grounded in reality.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...There is a boggy pond near here...
Good! Do some real, hands on science and see if you find some fossils in the making there or in any other bog you find. If you do, write a paper. I'm sure it'll be published by the most prestigious journals, if you find some fossils to be. You may even get a Nobel Prize.
All theory is gray
...I wonder if there is an alternative explanation for widespread sedimentary rock and fossils...
No matter what explanation is tried, the evidence clearly reveals that whatever took place, was a sudden world wide catastrophe involving lots of water. The ONLY way to make fossils out of living creatures, is by sudden death and immediate burial under sterilizing heat, not the millions of years postulated by evolutionists.
All theory is gray
Plate tectonics. Look it up.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Does it ? I suspect you are guilty of only paying heed to the opinions of those in whom believe rather than the evidence of those with whom you disagree.
I also meant to mention this...
Don't you think it's unlikely that it was only Noahs Ark which was able to survive this flood ? No doubt it will have occured to you that thousands of other communities across the globe possessed competent boat building skills and that they would surely have taken to these boats once the fountains of the deep began to fountain. What evidence have you found that proves this didn't happen and hundreds of thousands of accomplished sea farers and fishermen were killed in the flood when a lecherous and violent old drunk with no seamanship skills whatsoever was able to survive in a completely untested and unfeasibly large boat with the additional complications of keeping his mobile zoo in order ?
It's on private land that isn't mine.
Do you really think you understand 10,000 years so well?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
My wife is expecting our first, and possibly only, child next Tuesday! A girl!
While I might enjoy the caveman life, modern society is not all that bad. What would life be like after a Steven King The Stand sort of plague that wiped out about 90+% of the people on the planet? Would you really want to be a survivor of that, or any other ecological disaster?
You know, having a kid makes thinking about wild and crazy scenarios no where near as interesting.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Here's a link to the study about this: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1864
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
When Transhumans come into the picture, you chimps are history.
And Transhumans don't care about history.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I personally think there's a good chance that the Noah flood is loosely based on a real event. But it would be much more recent than 70,000 BCE.
Flood stories appear to be a pretty universal feature of the ancient world. For example, the Gilgamesh epic, which predates the Torah by some centuries, contains a divine worldwide flood that looks enough like the biblical one that the latter was likely inspired/influenced by the former (or they are both descendents of a 3rd story).
Given the universality of that kind of story, there's a decent chance there was some actual, awful flood in the middle east around say 3000 or 4000 BCE that eventually became embellished into all these stories.
However, 70,000 years ago seems far too early to me. By most accounts, that long predates the development of any kind of oral tradition, or symbolic record-keeping. By some accounts, that even predates the development of spoken language.
>flood vs drought, Noah story, And I'm talking about scientific evidence here.
One side is being rather less than honest and accurate on this subject. One side is shamelessly fudging the facts and warping the "science" to fraudulently push a model and worldview that is just plain wrong. And you don't need a PhD or any fancy science to spot which side is cooking their books.
If you go to the arctic and dig, there are visible yearly layers in the snowpack. In fact if you count down 1929 layers you can find faint traces of ash blown in from the 79 A.D. Pompeii volcano 1929 years ago. 1929 layers down = 1929 years ago. You can find every major volcano in history at the matching year layer.
If you keep digging, there are something like 123,000 layers visible in the arctic icepack. If you check the antarctic there are about 174,000 visible layers. So this clearly documents a minimum 174,000 year history, and thus a 174,000 absolutely minimum age for the earth.
It also documents there was no Global Flood, or to be precise it proves that if there was such a flood it had to be more than 174,000 years ago. Such a flood would have obviously melted the snow pack below it, and even if it only melted some off the top still leaving the icepack below it, such a flood would still leave a big fat layer of dirt and muck settled out. There's no layer of flood-dirt-and-muck in the arctic nor antarctic layers.
One side is totally cooking their "science" to say what they want it to say. It's call it "outright lying", except that most of the "scientists" involved are probably sincere, viewing reality though such intense distorting lenses that they are honestly unaware of how selective they are with the facts and how badly they are twisting them to manufacture the story they want. They search desperately for the faintest clue or anomaly that might point in the direction they seek, they seach desperately for a half-plausible explanation pointing in the direction they seek, and they just completely loose sight of anything that doesn't fit that narrow focus.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
So you wipe out all but the brightest of them hoping to push the brainy thing... which seems like progress until you realize that now you have bipedal, big brained apes with art and religion and state level civilizations shrieking and throwing feces at one another.
I wonder what the next tweak will be.
Wipe out all the assholes and hope they stop throwing feces at one another?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...are all the look-at-me abbreviations here on slashdot. Just making you type it out full was entirely worth my time.
You'll have to pay for it online (or find a print copy of the original issue) but this was speculated on in an article in Scientific American (Feb 1999): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=noahs-flood
...Citation needed...
/., supposedly a computer whiz and don't know how to look up things on Google? Maybe you're just lazy? Well look at this.
Your are on
http://www.physorg.com/news90171847.html
If you want more, google this: "water in the mantle"
Now that you know how to use Google, I'm sure you can find material on why living things decay rather quickly today, after they die. You can also learn what must be done to prevent this decay.
To turn a living creature into a fossil, it has to be killed quickly and the remains must be prevented from decaying. Tell me the process you propose to use that will make a fossil in a million years or even a week before decay destroys the remains or it gets eaten by some scavenger?
All theory is gray
....No doubt it will have occured to you that thousands of other communities across the globe possessed competent boat building skills...
If one can prepare of a disaster ahead of time, then it might be possible to survive such a catastrophe. We read that Noah preached for 120 years to the people around him, while building the Ark, and about what God had said would happen. They no doubt thought he was crazy, building a huge boat miles from the ocean.
We read that the animals came to Noah. He did not have to go and collect them. Further we read that God told Noah when to enter the Ark and specifically that God shut the door of the Ark. Noah sat locked into that ark for a whole week wondering. Then the flood suddenly came and there was no more time for those outside to prepare. Anyone who had some kind of boat might have lived a few days, weeks or even months, but before it was all over, more than a year later, they would have all died, just as we read happened.
Since the Ark was not designed to go anywhere or transport anything to some other place, Noah would not have needed any seafaring or navigating skills. All the ark needed to do is stay afloat on the rising waters. It did not even have to have a particular boat like shape.
All theory is gray
How does genetics indicate drought instead of flood (or something else)?
It doesn't.
First note that the article opens with:
Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests "
continues with:
apparently because of drought,
near the end
researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes,
in addition to a couple of other similar qualifications.
The media often blows limited or preliminary science work all out of proportion, but CNN appears to have done a reasonable job here.
What genetics evidence does indicate is the approximate size of the population bottleneck, about 2000 people, and the approximate date of that bottleneck, about 70,000 years ago.(*) Other evidence studied by other experts indicates severe drought conditions in Africa around the same time. It is not unusual for an expert in one area to note work in another area and comment on an "apparent" connection, but that falls WAY short of being well supported firmly established science. It's not a positive assertion, and even if it were, it takes more than the assertion of a single expert to constitute solid accepted science.
(*)Note that these results are subject to peer review and cross-confirmation. They should probably be considered relatively tentative or preliminary science. Science likes to see things verified and cross-verified six-ways-to-Sunday before moving it into the "established beyond any reasonable doubt" basket.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I've been tangentially involved with data collection for the health system in New Zealand. The 'race' issue is really very complicated, even if you're just collecting it for statistical purposes. Official forms in New Zealand never refer to race, the question is "What is your ethnicity? (select up to three)". Ethnicity is considered as a social group which you identify with, and is specifically not related to genetics. It is collected for such reasons as correlating illnesses with demographic groups, and I've never seen it used in a case where the ethnicity you selected would make any difference to your treatment.
Of course there are plenty of people who get snotty that there is a distinction between Pakeha/New Zealand European and Maori, and dutifully write in "I am a New Zealander!!1!"
It is a useful question to ask for statistical purposes, although I couldn't comment on how the data is treated in America.
Oh, and speaking of complicated questions, don't get me started on the problems of asking what sex a person is. If you think it's easy, you've never had a job where it mattered.
.evom ton seod gis eht
Yes, health care seems like an place where such a questions are actually warranted. Thank you for a good reply.
May we live long and die out
Back to the start. How on Earth (or anywhere else) can one be an Explorer in Residence? It's a contradiction in terms!
If this is what people actually believe then I really am amazed !
Why would Noah turn all the other people in boats away from his giant floating raft ? Why would they listen to what he had to say and not just turn pirates and capture his Ark and it's giant kilometres long food containment areas and the thousands of billions of mega litres of fresh water necessary for feeding and watering the billions of creatures on board. All the fishermen on the boats would surely have just attacked the ark and easily taken it over where they would have lived on the animals in lives of luxury until the year was up.
Also if you're saying that the on the one hand the flood is too stormy for professional fishermen to launch boats in how can you also claim that it's millpond calm so the ark doesn't have to be at all seaworthy. That just doesn't make sense and is clearly another massive hole in 'theory'.
I think you have to look at the article as a whole here. Disregard the 70,000 years or the 2000 people. They have no idea, these are just estimates based fallible dating methods. What we need to look at here is that this article is consistent (in general and not specifics) with the flood account in the Bible. After God destroyed the earth with a flood, the world re-populated via Noah and his family (a small group). The 70,000 years and extinction talk all comes from the Darwinian world view which is assumed in the article. The biblical world view is the one that best describes the data and their findings. This article is not about intelligent design, it's about a Holy God who judged the wicked in the past and Who will judge the wicked again through the return of Jesus Christ.
...ark doesn't have to be at all seaworthy...
A craft can be very seaworthy and not have a sail, rudder or propeller if all it has to do is stay afloat.
If you would read the story yourself, and pay careful attention to the details given, rather than speculate, you would not make the comments you did.
We read that Noah did not close the door to the ark, but God did and Noah was locked in there for a whole WEEK before the flood actually began. This flood was not a gentle rain and rain was not the major source of the water. Also, the ark was built miles from the ocean and any possible other boats and fishermen. By the time the ark floated, the sea coasts were already well under water. There may have been other boats floating on the water, but the people in these boats were miles from the ark and soon died.
(..for feeding and watering the billions of creatures on board...)
Again if you would actually read the account for yourself, you learn that Noah was instructed to bring only two of each air breathing creatures. You would also learn that Noah did not have to hunt these up, but that they came on their own to Noah. Once God gets involved in a situation, nothing is impossible, even if you and others think so.
All theory is gray
that "35 year high" for fertility is only 2.1 for each woman. That is extremely low by global standards. It is *only* a high for industrialized countries.
It's like saying that Anchorage is warm *compared to the rest of alaska* and concluding from that, that anchorage must be a tropical tourist resort.