A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf? 277
Phoghat sends news of a new theory that a once-fertile landmass beneath the Persian Gulf may have supported some of the earliest humans outside of Africa. "Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago... These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."
this land is a fertile land... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:this land is a fertile land... (Score:4, Funny)
I think we should call it... "your grave"!
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It's the lost city... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:this land is a fertile land... (Score:4, Informative)
You said it all wrong! What Wash said next was [youtube.com]:
"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal"
A book? (Score:2)
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It was a work of fiction by HP Lovecraft called "The Nameless City"
Cool story - a lot of his stuff can be found fulltext on the internet, but here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nameless_City [wikipedia.org]
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Atlantis [hatrack.com], by Orson Scott Card.
The gist is, Science(tm) has invented a machine that can view backwards in time, scientist finds society under the Red Sea. Cue up ancient barbarian, who leaves his crocodile worshiping village in a right of manhood, goes to the Indian Ocean, finds that the ancient floodwall is about to break in the monsoon, returns to his village warning everyone, builds a Super-boat, he and a small group survive while the city sinks beneath the waves. Amalgamation of Gilgamesh, Noah's Ark,
So... (Score:2)
Is this place which was flooded where the Indo-European language roots come from?
And when Helen sank a thousand ships, was she really just sending them home?
Is Captain Jack Sparrow upside down in the Med?
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the original PIE speakers were from Eastern Europe near the Caspian Sea
I've heard of Klipsche, Mission, and PSB, but you must be talking about some kind of hardcore audiophile gear there.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this place which was flooded where the Indo-European language roots come from?
No. There are too many cold weather/northern animal words shared across IE languages. The north Caspian Sea area is the most likely, though there are other possibilities. Any area as far south as the Persian Gulf though is highly unlikely based on weather/animal words shared across IE languages.
Though it may be where Proto-Semitic language roots come from (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, Assryian, etc.), but there is extensive debate on that as well (whether Afroasiatic languages like the Semitic family formed in Africa and moved north, or the Middle East and moved south).
Also, Helen didn't sink any ships. The phrase is 'launched a thousand ships.'
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The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are Semitic, so it's unlikely the forerunners of the Indo-Europeans lived in the hypothetical valley now sitting under the waves.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are not Semitic. The oldest language that can be attested are Sumerian and Elamite, which are both isolates, with know perceivable connection to any other spoken language. The Akkadians and other Semitic tribes were later invaders that seized Sumer, though they largely retained the Sumerian religion and the language as a sort of liturgical language (much like Latin was to become after the fall of Rome). No one can be quite certain where the Semitic languages arose, though the parent Afro-Asiatic family appears to come East Africa, and the Semitic languages may have arisen in the Arabian Peninsula.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are Semitic, so it's unlikely the forerunners of the Indo-Europeans lived in the hypothetical valley now sitting under the waves.
The Sumerians, the Hurrians and the Elamites want to have a word with you. (None of their languages were remotely Indo-European, but they weren't Semitic, either.)
EGADS!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't forget CNN.
Ah!!! Throw it back! Throw it back! :-D
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A Delta hub?
Noah, etc (Score:5, Interesting)
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If I had a nickel for every ancient civilization that had a flood myth...
Re:Noah, etc (Score:5, Funny)
You'd have what, 60 cents at most? ;-)
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So is this the origin of the flood myth?
Or another attempt at lending credence to the myth, by people of a faith where it's central?
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Or just more shitty science journalism?
This is like saying "lost civilization suspected on Beringia!" Well, the fact is that in both cases, the landmasses in question would likely have been home to nomadic hunter-gatherers. I'm not trying to sound snobbish or pejorative, but generally we apply the name "civilization" to settled, agriculturally-depndent, centralized, urbanized societies.
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There was actually a considerable amount of flooding in our ancient past, that the flood myth is quite clearly based off. No the entire world wasn't covered in water. No there weren't only two survivors along with many animals on a single boat. But the terror inspired by the rising water is quite clearly what inspired those myths.
Unscientific to dismiss legends and myth ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So is this the origin of the flood myth?
Or another attempt at lending credence to the myth, by people of a faith where it's central?
It is unscientific to dismiss a theory because it lends credence to religious beliefs. Do you realize that the current cosmological theory for the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was initially dismissed by the "leading scientists" of the day because (1) it was developed by a roman catholic priest and (2) it seemed too close to the "creation myth of genesis". The term "big bang" was coined by these "leading scientists" to mock the theory.
Secondly, many myths and legends have a bit of truth behind them. Sometimes based on a multigenerational telling of historical events and sometimes as an attempt to explain things beyond a culture's scientific understanding. A real scientist tries to interpret myths and legends, not ignore or dismiss them.
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What? Perposterous! Next you'll be claiming they found Troy or some such by looking where Greek Mythology said it was.
Re:Unscientific to dismiss legends and myth ... (Score:5, Informative)
Citation please. Seriously. This would be very useful these days.
"Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (helpinfo) July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur. Lemaître was the first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre [wikipedia.org]
"The Big Bang is a scientific theory, and as such is dependent on its agreement with observations. But as a theory which addresses the origins of reality, it has always carried theological and philosophical implications. In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state Universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang [wikipedia.org]
Re:Noah, etc (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Noah, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
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We're the most technologically advanced civilization that ever was
Well, obviously you haven't been watching Ancient Aliens lately!
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I would say that New Orleans was destroyed in a flood.
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After the Great Flood of 1993 (in the midwest of the US), several towns were not rebuilt in their original locations, but rather were moved to another location several miles away.
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Tell that to 80% of the people living in New Orleans in August of 2005. That could easily qualify as a "city-destroying" flood.
Sure, hey, 80% of NO, you weren't in a city-destroying flood. Given that New Orleans is still there, it wasn't a city-destroying flood.
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Do you have sources for that? I just asked two Chinese coworkers and they have no idea what you're talking about and google doesn't turn up anything about a "Nue" in Hawaiian culture.
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Even the man's name is Nue in Hawaii and Nuah in China.
Do you have sources for that? I just asked two Chinese coworkers and they have no idea what you're talking about and google doesn't turn up anything about a "Nue" in Hawaiian culture.
Wikipedia's list of flood myths has a Chinese "Nüwa". Unfortunately for the GP, it's the name of a Goddess that created mankind.
Re:Noah, etc (Score:5, Informative)
It refers to a goddess named Nuwa [wikipedia.org]: It sounds like just cherry-picking of selected elements that are convenient. The Chinese myth of Nuwa seems superficially similar in pronunciation to Noah, but the myth is nothing like Noah. For one thing, Nuwa is a woman, not a man, and is a creator-deity, which is expressly counter to Christian theology.
Chinese mythology does have some myths about floods, but they involve the Yellow Emperor [wikipedia.org] teaching the commoners irrigation and flood control (of the Yellow River, not the sea) in order to bring about the creation of civilization.
Christian creationists like to mix and match selected similar elements from myths, ignoring the rest, and use that as reason to support the "fact" of the Great Flood. At best this is ignorant, and at worse sheer dishonesty.
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Christian creationists like to mix and match selected similar elements from myths, ignoring the rest, and use that as reason to support the "fact" of the Great Flood. At best this is ignorant, and at worse sheer dishonesty.
Usually, it is outright dishonesty. They desperately want something to be true, so it must be no matter how far they have to twist or ignore the facts.
Or, as I have heard it before, there are liars, damned liars, and creationists.
Re:Noah, etc (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Noah, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of the "Telephone" game. Start by saying something in one person's ear and go in a circle. What do you get at the end? Not the same story. Now, let's try a variation of this with something modern. Like JFK's assassination. Most people agree he was shot and killed, but that is where the agreement ends. But it still happened. So if you have 200+ different stories, but they all agree on flood and humans survive, 1)expect differences and 2) they might be onto something.
Or another way, 200 people run out of a building and tell you, "there's a fire" and then you get 4 or 5 different basic scenarios from the 200.... It's highly likely that there is a fire.
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Occam's Razor says that evangelical Christians, whose always predate the retelling of the Bible stories in any civilization, simply told the story as part of the various biblical myths and that the locals simply pronounce "Noah" in the best rendition the foibles of their language allow. Every Evangelical is hoping to see a native populace that automatically accepts and corroborates their myths, so the first ones to arrive find similar local tales (what! You had a flood many years ago too! Damn, must be t
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- Why do we have different languages?
The Tower of Babel scenario happened after the Flood. Between those two events everybody spoke the same language.
- Who (other than Noah and his wife) was a witness to these events?
Nobody, obviously, since the rest of them died.
- Why do we have different races/colors of people? I though Man was incapable of genetic drift, being made in the image of God and all, but if there were only two survivors of the Flood...?
Noah apparently had kids of different races (wife must've really got around). Ham went south after the flood and from him came the Hamites (Africans). Shem went east after the flood and from him came the Semites ("Asians", meaning the near east, not
Re:Noah, etc (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, over 200 civilizations have the same flood myth with similar details: one man (couple, family, etc.) is told by God that he will flood the entire earth. He builds a wooden vessel and survives (with or without animals) and everyone else dies. Even the man's name is Nue in Hawaii and Nuah in China.
This kind of correlation between people speaking different languages living in all continents is hard to ignore. Occam's razor says there was a global flood and the man (probably named Noah) saw everyone around him die and believed that God's forewarning saved him, at the very least.
Before we apply Ockham's Razor we have to filter out the made-up evidence. Yes, there are lots of flood myths and some have interesting elements in common. But no, there's not the kind of consistency biblical literalists like to believe there is.
Then, for whatever similar myths remain, Ockham's Razor would probably recommend cultural dissemination. That might be problematic in some cases, but then any claim that the myths represent the same event require an equal degree of dissemination.
Occam's razor says there was a global flood and the man (probably named Noah) saw everyone around him die and believed that God's forewarning saved him, at the very least.
Both geology and genetics tell us that there has never been a global flood. Every living species would have a genetic bottleneck from the time of the flood, and that isn't what we find.
More importantly, the biblical flood story portrays YHWH as an evil fuck-up. Why bother with a flood when he could just wish the evildoers out of existence? Why drown all the world's babies and kittens? Why didn't this solution to the problem of evil actually work???
If apologists for divinity had any sense they would distance themselves from the flood story even faster than the more secular minded do.
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More importantly, the biblical flood story portrays YHWH as an evil fuck-up. Why bother with a flood when he could just wish the evildoers out of existence?
Perhaps YHWH was not an omnipotent god. An alien would certainly be able to project holograms from time to time, verbally command locals, and sometimes even do neat tricks using the machinery of his spaceship. For example, he could "stop the Sun" by sending a shuttle with a good searchlight, or even hanging a small artificial Sun in the atmosphere for
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So is this the origin of the flood myth?
Yes, this is the only time any ancient civilization experienced a flood, so it must be.
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I don't see any evidence of anything. Okay, there was more land exposed during the Glacial Maximum in the Persian Gulf, hardly a surprise. There were early humans, both pre-H. sapien migrations and H. sapiens for extended periods in the region... known for a long time. There were people camping along the shores of the Persian Gulf... well known and fits into the general theory that early migrations of modern humans out of Africa were along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
Where this totally runs of the rai
Perhaps "eden" ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So is this the origin of the flood myth?
The folks who once lived in what is now the Black Sea would probably want to share the credit for that one. They seem to have had a similar flood event.
FWIW some geologists who compared the old testament to satellite images found some evidence suggesting that the rivers identifying the location of eden are consistent with rivers (current and ancient) converging on a location now in the Persian Gulf.
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IF the bible was correct, then they would need to see a big wall of flame.
Also, I can compare text in Moby dick and find correlations to the bible. BFD
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IF the bible was correct ...
Correct as in a people's ancestors once lived in a region where five major rivers flowed but they had to leave?
A "big wall of flame" sounds like a phrase we use today when describing a forest fire? Like a flood, a big forest fire could inspire people to leave an area.
Also, I can compare text in Moby dick and find correlations to the bible. BFD
Moby Dick was not a collection of ancestral observations and rules for survival in a given region, the old testament may be so to some degree. Consider a pre-literate pre-scientific society passing along historical observations from one generat
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Every human living near a coast line 8-12000 BCE would have a flood event.
Even here in North America, the coast lines were 50-200 miles further out than they are now.
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Re:Noah, etc (Score:5, Insightful)
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No. the origin is most likely dealing with a heavy rain and flood that cause a major merchant house to move.
It's more likely it was just made up out of whole cloth to make a point.
The land is under water... (Score:2)
because of global warming.
--
BMO
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because of global warming.
-- BMO
Or alternatively, because we are not amidst a severe ice age.
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It was an almost troll. I'm kinda bitchy these days about how I turn on PRI's "Living on Earth" and how everything is tied to global warming somehow, no matter how tenuous the link. And NPR+PRI are supposed to be the smarter end of the spectrum of mainstream media. It's no wonder that the public in the US thinks that most of climate change science is a lot of "sky is falling" chicken-little fear mongering if that's the best US media has to offer.
BBC programs are much more sane, but we don't get them much
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BBC programs are much more sane, but we don't get them much on this side of the pond.
-- BMO
easy..... go download Expatshield [expatshield.com] and you can watch all the BBC, Channel 4 and brit programs you want :P
you are very welcome!
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Atlantis? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps this is the fabled Atlantis [wikipedia.org] described in Plato's accounts?
Scholars dispute whether and how much Plato's story or account was inspired by older traditions. Some scholars argue Plato drew upon memories of past events such as the Thera eruption or the Trojan War, while others insist that he took inspiration from contemporary events like the destruction of Helike in 373 BC[1] or the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415–413 BC.
Alternatively it may be the basis of the Noah's Ark / Flood mythology.
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Didn't Plato explicitly state his account described a fictional utopic civilization?
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Here's the situation. Atlantis is described in two fictional dialogues by Plato -- the Timaeus and its sequel, the Critias. In these dialogues, a character, Critias, gives a story, which he says he received from his grandfather (also named Critias, which is not unusual for the Greeks), who received it from his father, Dropides, who received it from the famed (and mysterious) Solon, who received it from an "old priest" in a
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Not really. It would be fair to say that Atlantis is described as a utopia at first, but then declined.
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Plato said it was an alagory, and there is no evidence of Noah, his ark, or global flooding.
So, please, leave the myths out of science, mkay?
Quick! (Score:3, Funny)
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Yes.
IIRC the exclusive economic zones meet in the middle so we're going to have to pay the bastards.
We drill just on the Saudi side of the line and horizontal drill as far into Iran as technically possible.
And of course they had advanced technology, (Score:2)
but a cataclysm destroyed their civilization and the landform it was built upon. A few survivors made it to Egypt,where they built the pyramids and started an occult tradition of secret knowledge that has been passed down to this very day.
I know this because my insurance agent told me. He belongs to this fraternal organization where they dress up in robes and are instructed in that secret knowledge by the guy who sold me my house.
Garden of Eden? (Score:2)
Not that I necessarily believe in that, but two of the 4 rivers near the Garden of Eden were supposedly the Tigris and Euphrates, and the other 2, as far as I know, have not entirely been explained, though there are some theories.
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The word you are looking for is 'hypothesis', not theories.
Not meant as a dig against you personally, but you probably grew up surrounded by people who do believe that myth, and it can be hard to realize that it really is just a story.
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no,it doesn't even qualify as a hypotheses.
Stupid ass idea is more like it.
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Considerable effort was put into proving Ye Olde Flood, but even da Vinci recognized the problems, and by the end of the 18th century, it was known to have been just a story that could not in any way explain the geological observations. Still, a lot of Creationists and semi-Creationists put a helluva lot of effort into trying to prove the veracity of the Genesis flood myth. Just as bad are those people like Robert Ballard, who, looking for sexy headlines, promote daft ideas.
Knock it off with the pseudoscience (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to the abstract just to nip all this 3rd and 4th hand speculation about flood myths and Atlantis: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/657397 [uchicago.edu]
It's great for bringing public attention but not so great for highlighting the actual science behind the pop sci article.
Underworld? (Score:2)
It sounds like some "real" archaeologists might owe Graham Hancock an apology. He's been saying for years that entire civilizations were swallowed up and lost at the end of the last ice age:
http://www.grahamhancock.com/archive/underworld/ [grahamhancock.com]
I take his theories with a really large grain of salt, but it seems the basic idea isn't so crazy anymore.
Necron69
the important question (Score:2)
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That is pure bullcrap. The time scales increased because our understanding of various geological processes increased, not to mention our understanding of various decay rates. But the age of the Earth being pegged at about 4.5 billion years has been accepted for decades now.
But please, don't let the facts get in the way of your paranoid anti-science rantings.
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That the Persian Gulf was once smaller and dry where it is now wet is not in dispute, as far as I know.
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Silly to assume bias because scientist has faith (Score:5, Insightful)
>Until I hear about a few geologists supporting this, I read this as Yet Another attempt at trying to legitimize the Abrahamic religion flood myth. That the man behind this was educated at the Southern Methodist University makes it, in my opinion, more likely that there's a bias here.
You realize you are engaging in the same bias practiced by those who dismissed the big bang theory because it was formulated by a roman catholic priest and seemed too close to the story of genesis? I am not vouching for this guy from SMU, just offering something for you to consider when you learn that a scientist has faith. Newton comes to mind too.
Also what is wrong with myth? They are sometimes a pre-literate pre-scientific civilization's attempt to pass along observations from one generation to the next. A real scientist would try to interpret the myth, not dismiss it.
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Archaeologists study Geology intensely, and any team of size will include a Geologist.
Also Southern Methodist is a great place for archæology, home to Lewis Binford among others. The Methodist church isnt fundamentalist and doesnt have a problem with science.
So you were offbase on every point.
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Um, and?
Why should that be a problem?
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:4, Informative)
There was not a single female ("Eve") alive at that time, there were at least thousands of females, and those females were all reproducing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve [wikipedia.org]
This image explains it pretty well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG [wikipedia.org]
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I could draw a cartoon and call it proof too, it doesn't mean that it's accurate.
It's not the drawing, but the logic behind it.
Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest (i.e. the best adapter). If Eve's descendants had even a minute advantage, that would in not too many generations make it more likely than not that everyone were descended from Eve.
That doesn't mean that mitochondrial Eve was the only woman who had children, nor that we aren't descended from her contemporary females along any of the billions of lines with paternal elements.
The picture makes sense because it mak
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You cannot prove a "father of us all" through DNA because of the nature of the male chromosomes
Actually, you can, via Y chromosome. And it is far more recent than the mitochondrial Eve (~60,000 years instead of ~300,000 years).
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Not quite. Mitochondrial Eve is a last common matrilineal ancestor, but that is NOT the same as saying that we are all descended from her, and her alone, in the way the biblical story goes, with the children of Eve interbreeding, and so on. What does mean is that if you trace any matrilineal line of descent, it goes back to her. If you trace a mixed line, it may (and some mixed lines definitely will) lead back to a different woman living at the same time.
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, all the Y chromosomes trace back to a single male, too. The only problem for the Adam-Eve myth is that they lived 150,000 years apart, so likely they were not married.
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Well, all the Y chromosomes trace back to a single male, too. The only problem for the Adam-Eve myth is that they lived 150,000 years apart, so likely they were not married.
That is actually not a problem. According to the Bible, everyone alive today is descended from Noah. According to the Biblical flood story, all male genetic material would come from Noah, but not all female genetic material would come from his wife. According to the Biblical account, Noah survived the flood along with his sons and their wives. Noah's sons were married before the flood. So, according to the Biblical account, while the most recent common source of all female human genetic material is Eve, the
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:4, Informative)
Except that it's hard to reconcile the story with the fact that Noah and the "Eve" figure lived over a hundred thousand years apart.
The Noah story is a myth. The Flood story is a myth. The Adam and Eve story is a myth. It's pointless to try to force fit science to myth, or myth to science.
ONE != ONLY ancestor (Score:5, Informative)
No matter how you try to spin it, the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans trace back to "ONE" female.
To say we all descend from ONE woman does not mean she was the ONLY woman on earth at the time.
Look at it this way: all my brothers, sisters, and cousins descend from my grandmother. But we have TWO grandmothers. Capisce?
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It simply means that all living humans have some mitochondrial DNA in common, which they all inherited from a single female ancestor.
It does not mean there was only one female ancestor.
That common ancestor lived at the same time with other females (and males), some of which passed on their mitochondrial DNA to people living today, just not to all of them.
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Sorry, but you slightly misunderstand "Mitochondrial Eve". It doesn't prove that we can all trace our bloodline back to one female, but rather that along the ancestral line that has only females in it's component, all the ancestors at one point in time had identical (or almost identical) mitochondria. This could be a small group of closely related women as well as one woman. And it's quite possible that no other gene of that particular set of women survived to present day.
It's very close to what you inte
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Re:Old testament .... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that we'll have radicals from major religions rowing around the indian ocean in dinghies, firing mortars at eachother while screaming "GET OFF MY HOLY WATER, INFIDEL!"
?
'Cuz its honestly not a bad idea.
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Hey, whatever keeps them from immigrating to the civilized world, I'm all for it!
Re:Old testament .... (Score:4, Funny)
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