Re: Searching for Adam

Stephen Jones (sjones@iinet.net.au)
Wed, 20 Mar 96 22:18:17 EST

Group

Here is an other article from Hugh Ross' recent Facts & Faith, which
claims that molecular biological findings from the human male Y-
chromosome tie in with a reasonably recent date (37,000 and 49,000
years ago), for Homo sapiens' last common ancestor (ie. "Adam"?).

God bless.

Steve

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SEARCHING FOR ADAM

As Y-chromosome studies continue, researchers give new perspective
to the word "modern" in modern man. The Y-chromosome research
on which I reported a few months ago fixed the date of the first male
Homo sapiens at 270,000 years ago or less.1 More recent studies
have shrunk that number significantly and are revealing how much
less it may be.

Making the same assumption as the previous researchers did,
specifically that any divergence in Y- chromosomes found among
men alive today must have arisen through natural evolutionary
processes, American molecular biologist Michael Hammer examined
2,600 nucleotide base pair segments of the chromosome in 16
ethnically distinct men. His calculations suggested that the 16
descended from one man living betwecn 51,000 to 411,000 years
ago.2 A British team composed of geneticists Simon Whitfield, John
Sulston, and Peter Goodfellow examined a much larger segment of
the human Y chromosome, a segment composed of 100,000
nucleotide base pairs, in 5 ethnically distinct men. The divergence
they observed was so small as to shrink that date projection to
somewhere between 37,000 and 49,000 years ago.3 This newest date
for man's s progenitor has come within the range of Biblically
determined dates for Adam. If the Genesis genealogies are anywhere
from 10 to 80 percent complete, as most conservative scholars
suggest, the Adam of Eden lived between 7,500 and 60,000 years
ago.

What is more, the paper by Whitfield, Sulston. and Goodfellow
explains how the integration of their Y-chromosome data with a
variety of other data on such factors as bone morphology and
geographic distribution, among others, shows that Homo sapiens
could not have evolved by natural processes from Homo erectus.

REFERENCES:
1 Hugh Ross. Chromosome Study Stuns Evolutionists," Facts &
Faith, volume 9, number 3 (1995), p. 2.
2 Michael Hammer, "A Recent Common Ancestry for Human Y
chromosomes," Nature, 378 (1995), pp. 376-378
3. L. Simon Whitfield, John E.Sulston, and Peter N. (GoodFellow,
"Sequence Variation of the Human Y Chromosome," Nature 378
(1995), pp 379-380

(Ross H, "Searching For Adam", Facts & Faith, Reasons To Believe:
Pasadena CA, Vol. 10, No. 1, First
Quarter 1996, p4)
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