Trade Secrets

[Mick Harper]

When they say dna is old what I think they mean is that certain dna groups die out because for example some women have sons or do not have children which means that their mitochondrial dna is not passed on. The same goes for men and sons.

This is completely idoiotic (either you or them). a) What groups of people have sons and not daughters? b) what groups of people do not have children? If you can name either perhaps you can a) tell us and b) tell the relevant academics. But in any case what such groups of people can claim by way of an effect on the human race is irrelevant since they can't have had any effect.

As for Out of Africa, there's a study by Russian academics which is on the web somewhere claiming that humans started off in eastern Europe and the middle east rather than Africa..

People can claim whatever they like as long as they don't say the humans of Eastern Europe (or the Middle East) have an older DNA than anybody else.

[macausland]

Women who have sons and not daughters do not have daughters.

Women who only have daughters do not have sons.

Women who have sons and daughters have sons and daughters.

Women who are childless have neither daughters nor sons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_ ... ansmission

[Mick Harper]

What is this got to do with genetic populations?

[macausland]

A population of one hundred women for example.

Ninety nine have only sons and one has only daughters.

All women pass on their mitochondrial dna but the sons do not pass it on.

Only the woman with daughters is successful in passing her mitochondrial dna on.

The other womens' dna will be lost and disappear.

[Mick Harper]

Good grief, Mac, are you losing your marbles? Oh look, over there, it's a genetic population of a hundred women. Blimey, ninety-nine of them have only had sons. What are the chances of that? Err ... one in eighty-seven zillion to be exact.

[Boreades]

This is no good. What do any of us know about genetics. Time to call a cease-fire and read (or re-read) The Origins Of The British, by Stephen Oppenheimer. In which DNA detective work is used to debunk a great many ortho-myths.

[Mick Harper]

You are too timorous, Boreades. Knowing nothing about genetics appears to be something of an advantage since it is geneticists that insist you can gauge the age of a population by counting the number of mitochondrial mutations. The more, the older. This is clearly untrue if my argument holds. It is worth arguing it out.

[Boreades]

Forgive me, I've not grasped the basis of your argument, or the evidence for it. Can we try again?

[Mick Harper]

Geneticists claim that you can measure the age of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) by counting the number of mutations (which are said to occur on a regular basis -- averaging every fifteen thousand years, they say). You take a population in, say, the Great Rift Valley, count the mutations and come up with an age of, say, 200,000 years. You then compare this with every other population which (surprise!) turn out to have fewer mutations. You then declare that the inhabitants of the Great Rift Valley are the oldest population on earth and hence Out-of-Africa is confirmed.

M J Harper comes along and points out that every population on earth has mtDNA of exactly the same age since everybody on earth is derived from a common ancestor. Unless one of your ancestors was made afresh by God along the way you must have an mtDNA the same age as everybody else. It follows therefore that if there is any variation in the number of mutations this must be down to some other factor. The most obvious would be population genetic mixing. Which would suggest that the most mutations equals the most travelling from the point of origin. Which would mean the Great Rift Valley population is the youngest not the oldest population on earth (in terms of when it was established, it is overall the same age as everybody else.)

[macausland]

Everybody is derived from a common ancestor.

Recent findings have shown that Europeans have Neanderthal dna which is not present in African populations.

Does that mean that some of us have two common ancestors?

Africans have one, we have two.

And then we have evidence of Denisovan dna.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... an-genome/

Which, if true, adds another human ancestor into the mix.

Unless we believe that there was once a couple of ape like beings which produced many children which turned into a wide variety of apes, several of which left the tree and became a varied selection of humans.

Then there are the findings by Israelis that humans may have originated in the middle east

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... n-man.html

I suppose they would be biased though as they had the serial rights to human creation in the Old Testament a long time ago.

And fighting the corner for Europe we have

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/short ... n-eur.html

Or perhaps we were all the creation of the Annunaki unless we are just part of a cosmic matrix and only exist as holograms. Which must explain Stonehenge at least.