From Adam and Eve to the Present

to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species, by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. One of two tests was offered.

Men could select an analysis of the Y-chromosome, which is found only in males.  The National Geographic website explains why the Y-chromosome was analyzed. The human body is made of some 50 to 100 trillion cells.  Most cells have a similar basic structure.  An outer layer called the cell membrane and a nucleus that controls the cell and houses the genetic material in structures called chromosomes.  Chromosomes carry hereditary genetic information in long strings of DNA called genes. Each human cell has 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs – 22 numbered pairs of chromosomes and a single set of sex chromosomes xx in women and xy in men. Why focus on the Y chromosome?  The Y-chromosome is passed on intact through the male line, changed only by random mutational events. It is thus used to trace genetic lineages far back in time. Spencer Wells, the director of the Genographic Project, in his book Deep Ancestry adds:

Some regions of shuffled chromosomes maintain themselves for many generations before they are broken up.  These are called haplotype blocks.  People who share markers have a common ancestor.

The second test, which men and women could select, was an analysis of the mtDNA.  Once again, Wells explains:

The mtDNA is actually a piece of DNA that falls outside of the nucleus where the genome proper (like the chromosomes, such as the Y) is found.  The mtDNA is found inside a structure known as a mitochondrion, which lives out in the cytoplasm (or main body) of the cell.  The mitochondrion has its own membrane and DNA.

Your results will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths ancestors followed over time.  Your results also place you on a particular branch of the human family tree.

The analysis of my DNA showed that I belonged to Y-chromosome Haplogroup R1b, M343 (subclade R1b1b2, M269).

This haplogroup, R1b, M343 (subclade R1b1b2, M269), is very common in parts of Spain and Ireland, where more than 90% of men belong to it.  Therefore, whether you are a Redmond, Hennessey, Walsh, McGuire, Corbett, O’Leary, Kinsley, Murphy, O’Grady, Currie, Collins or Ross or any other Irish family, this history applies to you, with rare exceptions.

Initial Thoughts on Analysis

The results of the DNA analysis were intriguing. They showed clearly the dispersion of modern humans from the Near East throughout the entire world.  Indeed, the DNA analysis suggested that humans had their origin in the Near East, even though the National Geographic Society, which interpreted the DNA analysis provided by IBM, claimed human origins were in Eastern Africa.

Is the Near East is a more likely Origin than East Africa?

Researchers who analyze only the DNA evidence often do not claim an African origin for modern man.  They stop in the Near East.

Patricia Balaresque and others state, when discussing the same lineage I have:

Haplogroup R1b1b2 (R-M269) is the commonest European Y – chromosomal lineage, increasing in frequency from east to west, and carried by 110 million European men.  The geographical distribution of its microsatellite diversity is best explained by spread from a single source in the Near East via Anatolia during the Neolithic.

(They continue) The distribution of this lineage (paternally inherited Y chromosome), the diversity within it, and estimates of its age all suggest that it spread with farming from the Near East.  Taken with evidence on the origins of other lineages, this indicates that most European Y chromosomes descend from Near East farmers.

Professor Mark Jobling also notes movement from the Near East:

European farming began around 9,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent – a region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and which includes modern day Iraq, Syria, Israel and southeast Turkey.

Some studies, using DNA evidence, show movements from the Middle East to Africa.  For example, Fulvio Cruciani and others write about what they refer to as a back migration:

Evidence of a migration from Asia to sub-Saharan Africa that is fully supported by Y-chromosome data relies, at least for the moment, on the finding of haplogroup IX chromosomes in Cameroon.  An ancient human back migration from Asia to Africa has already been proposed by Altheide and Hammer (1997) and Hammer et al (1998, 2001) on the basis of nested cladistic analysis of Y-chromosome data.

Hammer and others also show migration into Africa, though they do note some out of Africa.

Hammer explains the thick black line showing movement out of Africa as:

The widest solid arrow denotes early range expansion out of Africa at the level of the total cladogram.

A cladogram is a tree diagram used to illustrate phylogenetic relationships. This is discussed more below.

Hammer further states:

Our present NRY tree and that of Underhill et al. (2000) clearly indicate that haplotypes found outside of Africa are not a subset of those found within Africa.

This shows that some geneticists do not accept the views of Wells, the National Geographic Society and others who support evolution, that because two haplogroups, A, with marker M91, and haplogroup B, with marker M60, are found only in Africa, everyone originates in Africa. Wells gives additional reasons why he makes these two African markers the oldest. One is the fossil evidence.  Another is the practice of ancient cultural traditions by people with markers M60 and M91, such as being hunter-food gatherers.  A third is greater genetic diversity with age.  A fourth is having an ancient language, specifically one with clicks.

These reasons are not convincing.

Genetic diversity may not increase with age, as we shall discuss below, when commenting on the mtDNA data. The practice of cultural traditions, such as being hunter-food gatherers can be a result of population pressures on small groups, forcing them to inhospitable fringes and limiting their ability to develop their economies, rather than prove the antiquity of the group.

Also, while click languages may be considered complex, they cannot, as a result, be identified as the oldest.  Fred Field, of the California State University, writes that within linguistics, there are at least four commonly held principles concerning the nature of language: 1. every language is, in principle, infinite; 2. all human languages are equally complex or challenging; 3. there are no primitive languages; 4. wherever humans have been found to exist, there is language.  He notes that language and the language facility reflect the cognitive abilities that every human being shares.  Assuming his second principle, other languages such as Sanskrit or Hebrew can readily replace click languages as the most ancient language.  Indeed, as we shall see below, the earliest probable language has been called by some as pre-Sanskrit and identified by others as Hebrew.

John Baumgardner, a geophysicist and space physicist and member of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory, goes deeper into the language issue, identifying language as an important reason to reject evolution:

The simplest bacteria have genomes consisting of roughly a million codons.  (Each codon, or genetic word, consists of three letters from the four-letter genetic alphabet). Do coded algorithms which are a million words in length arise spontaneously by any known naturalistic process?  Is there anything in the laws of physics that suggests how such structures might arise in a spontaneous fashion?  The honest answer is simple.  What we presently understand from thermodynamics and information theory argues persuasively that they do not and cannot!

Language involves a symbolic code, a vocabulary, and a set of grammatical rules to relay or record thought….language structures are clear manifestations of non-material reality….language represents a category of reality distinct from matter and energy…Life depends on complex non-material language structures for its detailed specification. Material processes are utterly impotent to create such structures or to modify them to specify some novel function.

We shall discuss language in greater detail below. Fossil claims for a human origin in Eastern Africa are very dubious.

Stephen Jay Gould, professor at Harvard, writes in the May 1977 issue of Natural History:

It is essentially an open confession that, although evolutionary trees are displayed in every textbook, it was a ‘trade secret of paleontology’ that these were based on inference and not on fossil evidence.

Richard Leakey who, with his father, was one of the leading archaeologists in East Africa and who was well aware of some of the Ethiopian fossils, wrote:

Echoing the criticism made of his father’s habilis skulls, he added that Lucy’s skull was so incomplete that most of it was “imagination made of plaster of Paris,” thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusions about what species she belonged to.

Phillip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, and a specialist in evidence and logic, writes:

The fossil record today on the whole looks very much as it did in 1859, despite the fact that an enormous amount of fossil hunting has gone on in the intervening years… In short, if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution.

Nonetheless fossil finds keep being announced.  More recent finds have been made at other sites in Ethiopia such as Herto, Middle Awash.  Many of these are intermediate hominid fossils, claimed to be “immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans.” Other finds have been made in Israel, China and Spain of fossils that are claimed to be older than the African ones.  The Israeli findings, for example, at Qesem Cave near Rosh Ha’ayin, are of fossils dated as older than the African ones from Ethiopia.  This has led to claims of a Middle East origin for modern man:

The findings of Professor Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East.

In an interesting article that supports the views of those who accept a Creationist interpretation and who accept that modern man goes back to Noah and the Flood, Andrew Snelling and Mike Matthews show an expansion from Babel, after the Flood, and not from East Africa.  They start by saying that the earliest human remains are found in the Ice Age deposits near Babel.  By the middle of the Ice Age, however, human remains were scattered over Asia, Africa and Europe.  Numerous variations of humans start appearing in different regions, such as those classified as Neanderthals in Europe and Asia, Homo erectus in Africa and Asia, Homo floresienses (hobbit) in Asia and Denisovans in Asia.  The fossils and their tools are strikingly similar everywhere. These people had large brow ridges, small chins and receding foreheads. Fossils are found in surface deposits associated with the post-flood Ice Age.  Their bones appear alongside extinct Ice Age mammals, such as mammoths and stegodons.  Many of the fossils are found in caves.

Life became so difficult during the Ice Age that caves became a respite for people.  In upper Pleistocene deposits, the late Ice Age, remains are found in a much wider area.  Fossils include those identified as Neanderthals, Denisovians and others. By the end of the Ice Age, most of these variations disappeared.  By now, people with high foreheads and protruding chins are filling the globe including the Americas. The Ice Age, as we shall discuss below, lasted from app. 2000 BC to 1300 BC. No fossils are found associated with the early cities that started emerging.  For example, Neanderthal fossils found in Shanidar Cave in Iraq, near Babel, date before any city in this region.  Snelling concludes:

Not a single Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or hobbit fossil has ever been found in the topmost layers.  They only appear with Ice Age plants and animals, which are now extinct.  The last Neanderthal fossils are found in locations in southern France and Gibraltar, while Cro-Magnons appear in the more recent layers, above them.  The same pattern is repeated elsewhere.  Apparently, Neanderthals and their cousins died off about the same time that the Ice Age ended. Not only is an East African origin being questioned, but the very value of fossil evidence has come under considerable critical examination. Taylor writes that the actual fossils are so incomplete they are open to any interpretation. Erick Von Fange, a professor at Concordia University in Ann Arbour, writes:

Hard work for the past 150 years has brought scientists no closer to finding the so-called “missing link” between man and animal than when the search began. Every year or two another article appears in National Geographic with spectacular new discoveries about human evolution. Without exception they are without substance. The fossils are either fully human or fully apelike with nothing in between.

In summary, doubts on the antiquity of the M91 and M60 Y- chromosome haplotypes, as well as on dating and other aspects of the archaeological and fossil evidence for Eastern Africa are convincing enough to allow one to reject the Eastern African origin of the first modern man, Adam.