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Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans
Taco Cowboy writes "'While the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups in Africa took 12 thousand years to spread, those in Europe started from around 3rd millennium.' The speed of spread of the European haplogroups was totally astounding, to say the least. 'There was no R1b found in Europe before a Bell Beaker site from the 3rd millennium BC and today many Europeans (most in western Europe) belong to this haplogroup. 'We used coalescent simulations to investigate the range of demographic models most likely to produce the phylogenetic structures observed in Africa and Europe, assessing the starting and ending genetic effective population sizes, duration of the expansion, and time when expansion ended. The best-fitting models in Africa and Europe are very different. In Africa, the expansion took about 12 thousand years, ending very recently; it started from approximately 40 men and numbers expanded approximately 50-fold. In Europe, the expansion was much more rapid, taking only a few generations and occurring as soon as the major R1b lineage entered Europe; it started from just one to three men, whose numbers expanded more than a thousandfold.'"
This proves it! Noah and his sons have been found through genetics.
What now atheists? You better hope it doesn't flood again.
...your mother.
Isn't this really what this is all about? Not the research, but **why** the research is noteworthy...
There are **alot** of people who believe the Torah, New Testament, etc not as litteral truth but as mythology which can represent truthful stories under a layer of abstraction.
I don't believe science can prove OR disprove a god or buddah or FSM or anything beyond the natural world. Supernatural is unprovable scientifically by definition....**super** natural.
Why not talk about the mythology?
Are we projecting (because the Noah story is still widely told) onto this finding if we compare it to the Torah's account of Noah and the repopulation of the world after?
There are several ancient maps showing **very testable** notions of population distribution. If these are anywhere near accurate in explaining human population distribution why not do more science based on it?
Is anyone really concerned about proving god exists somehow? what's the downside if the ancient mythology correlates with modern science?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Well, that way they get their first citation right on publication. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Must have been quite a night!
The truth comes out. Most of you are a bunch of inbred bastards.
Actually the neanderthal DNA is primarily in Europeans.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The problem with claiming that all Europeans came from a small number of people based upon a Y-chromosome study is that such a study, by design, misses many men who failed to leave male descendants. If, for example, I have four children, but they are all daughters, then my Y chromosome dies with me, even though many other of my genes will still live on in my daughters (in aggregate, if I had four children, around 94% of my genes would survive into the next generation).
This means that over time, we lose the Y chromosomes of many ancestral men just due to random chance. Those 1-3 men might well have been traveling in a group of 200 or so, and Europeans may still carry many genes from many of the other men in that group. But because the other members of the group didn't leave behind Y chromosomes, we don't see them in a Y-chromosome analysis.
The study seems to have found good evidence that Europeans are all descended from a small group, but 1-3 men seems to be stretching it.
All but four of those people have a notable lack of y-chromosomes, and the four remaining all share theirs (well, in the context of the bible, perhaps not).
It's probably modded up because when someone makes an assertive post that categorizes other people and comments on the state of humanity and research and mythology in an authoritative tone while using extra keystrokes to emphasize the badly used non-word, it undermines the credibility of whatever point was rattling around in there somewhere. It's like lecturing a group of people about what they should be thinking about, but having walked into the room trailing toilet paper.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That doesn't make any sense. The conversation ended up being about spelling instead of your point, which is completely opposite from what you wanted it to be.
You don't make your words "grating" by misspelling them, you make them irrelevant... unfortunately.
Following that up with an argument that you did it on purpose certainly doesn't help your cause. It only leads it us even further astray from the topic.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.
A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.