Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans 253
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.'"
Re:Proof! (Score:4, Interesting)
That always struck me as a bit of an empty promise. God said he'd never destroy the world by flood - but he still has fire, massive tectonic activity, meteor impact, quantum vacuum collapse, wandering microsingularity, atmopheric poisoning, extreme heat...
Re:Proof! (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that this gene is primarily found in Western Europeans [wikipedia.org] and is non-existent in Asians and other races on the planet. The flood that supposedly took out everyone on the planet would have left everyone sharing the same genetic code which is absolutely not the case here.
Re:Proof! (Score:5, Interesting)
So did most Europeans. It's one of the reasons that European history is such an unmitigated meatgrinder
Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (which also thoroughly discusses the demons of our nature) argues that the idea that a belief in God's favor caused the violence is false. Tribalism and lack of empathy (the evolution of empathy, especially empathy for people outside of your closest circle, is fascinating and non-obvious) were the cause of the unmitigated meatgrinder, and it wasn't just Europe, it was everywhere. In fact, recorded European history is mild compared to the pre-history archaeology shows us came before it.
I could try to summarize the arguments, but I wouldn't do them justice. I highly recommend the book.
grammar nazi gets +4 Insightful (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm asking for some mods to get a handle on this...
Is this post really being modded up to +4 Insightful b/c of a spelling correction?
If so this is complete lunacy...
Also, how do you know I didn't just mispell it...b/c I do that alot too
Re:thanks for the feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: Proof! (Score:4, Interesting)
The experiment quoted only indicated the breakdown of social structures after straining resource availability through sufficiently high population density. Prior to this, the "culture" wasn't in a state of war and turmoil.
Human social structures may be an order of magnitude bigger, but we've also got a few orders of magnitude bigger brains. This includes the critical ability to intellectually analyze the functioning of social structures and make changes, rather than rolling along with instinct until all hell breaks loose. Those who consider a state of war and brutality to be inevitable among humans are those who want to deny the existence of human minds, and their ability to analyze and alter social arrangements (denial of which is usually prompted by the brain-denying party profiting from a current state of violence and dysfunction).