Israeli researchers determine when Adam was born

[n2doc]

Published: 01.25.14, 19:28 / Israel News


"Adam," our oldest relative to date, finally has a date of birth, and it's not 5,764 years ago, when the world was created according to the Halacha. According to two Israeli researchers, the first human walked on earth 209,000 years ago – 9,000 years earlier than what scientists previously thought.


The study was conducted by Dr. Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield and by Professor Dan Grauer from the University of Houston and the Tel Aviv University. Their findings contradict a previous study that determined that the discovery of the Y chromosome (present only in men, while women have two X chromosome) predated humanity.


The two concluded that the first "genetic Adam" is now placed in his rightful place in evolutionary history.

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http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4480857,00.html

[longship]

1. Absolutely horrible reportage!!!!

I am aghast at how bad this is, posted in the science group, no less.

Mitochondria Eve was a horrible name to use. So now we have Genetic Adam.

Of course, when the scientists announced Mitochondria Eve we had Pat "Dumb as Shit" Robertson claiming that scientists had discovered the mother of all mankind and that her name was Eve.

This is an absolutely horrible article.

[defacto7]

2. It sure as hell ticks me off

when so called scientists use mythological names closely associated with belief systems that modern humans are still confused by.

Using names that can't be misunderstood by humans, E.G. the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian myths are not a problem. It's the association with still living myths that is a problem.

[longship]

3. Like, the God Particle.

My favorite is Neil deGrasse Tyson's commentary on Dark Matter and Dark Energy -- both horribly named. Dr. Tyson says they should have been named Fred and Wilma.

That's perfect!

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Even worse, from a reporting point of view - they spelled the name of one scientist wrong

which means you can't find the paper online. It's not 'Grauer', it's 'Graur'.

The paper:

Eran Elhaik, Tatiana V Tatarinova, Anatole A Klyosov and Dan Graur
Abstract

Mendez and colleagues reported the identification of a Y chromosome haplotype (the A00 lineage) that lies at the basal position of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. Incorporating this haplotype, the authors estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree to be 338 000 years ago (95% CI=237 000–581 000). Such an extraordinarily early estimate contradicts all previous estimates in the literature and is over a 100 000 years older than the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans. This estimate raises two astonishing possibilities, either the novel Y chromosome was inherited after ancestral humans interbred with another species, or anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged earlier than previously estimated and quickly became subdivided into genetically differentiated subpopulations. We demonstrate that the TMRCA estimate was reached through inadequate statistical and analytical methods, each of which contributed to its inflation. We show that the authors ignored previously inferred Y-specific rates of substitution, incorrectly derived the Y-specific substitution rate from autosomal mutation rates, and compared unequal lengths of the novel Y chromosome with the previously recognized basal lineage. Our analysis indicates that the A00 lineage was derived from all the other lineages 208 300 (95% CI=163 900–260 200) years ago.

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/ejhg2013303a.pdf

But there's other crappy reporting going on, apart from spelling and the repeated 'Adam' and 'Eve' use. Saying "they say 209,000 years, 9,000 years earlier than previously thought" is not what their paper says at all. That implies a disagreement about 5% - which would be ridiculous when you're estimating generation ages and mutation rates. We can see their 95% confidence interval is about 50,000 years either side anyway. What they're arguing with is the 338,000 years estimate. This silly emphasis on the '9,000 years earlier' idea is in the crappy Daily Mail article this one is based on too.