Adam, Genetics and Armstrongism
Back in the Seventies, the views of Herman Hoeh and Dean Blackwell were the Worldwide Church of God’s answer to anthropology. From Hoeh and Blackwell I learned that Adam was a Caucasian and non-Caucasian races seemed to be unanticipated mutations and not a part of God’s original intention. The latter idea was eventually dropped. The former has always remained in place. Since those days anthropology has been revolutionized by the rising field of Genetics. In this article, I am going to use the findings of Genetics as an exegetical tool to interpret the account of Adam as it relates to human origins.
A Word on Haplogroups
In greatly simplified terms, haplogoups are genetic configurations that may be used as traceable markers. Haplogroups are contained within the DNA of our cells. The rules of the tracing game are that Y-haplogroups are inherited only through the masculine line and mitochondrial haplogroups are inherited only through the female line. These haplogroups are related to one another in a tree structure that encompasses all of mankind. The overwhelmingly prevalent Y-haplogroup in the British Isles is R1b, for instance. My Y-haplogroup is R1b1a2a1a1b4. The additional characters in the string after R1b reflect finer genetic detail.
The Man Adam
If Adam was the first man and a Caucasian, where did all the varied races come from? Herman Hoeh explained the racial diversity of mankind by positing the idea that Ham married a Black woman and Japheth married an Asian woman and this was followed by some kind of genetic drift among their offspring that produced all the races. Genetics will lead us to a much different conclusion.
The Biblical Adam was Y-haplogroup J. As Spencer Wells (geneticist, anthropologist) has pointed out, both the Jews and the Adnanite Arabs claim descent from Abraham. Both groups are Y-haplogroup J. (No population is pure. Intermarriage will always introduce some “foreign” haplogroups into populations.) The Bible, by including genealogies, conveniently gives us the ability to trace genetic descent. Tracing Abraham’s Y-haplogroup backward through the masculine line, we can know that Adam was Y-haplogroup J. If Adam of Genesis lived within the last 6,000 years (or even if he lived much earlier) there has been insufficient time for Adam to be different from Abraham in haplogroup based on mutational rates of change. Haplogroups diversify very slowly – 6,000 years is just a small duration on that timescale.
Noah, as a descendent of Adam in the masculine line, was also Y-haplogroup J, as were Shem, Ham and Japheth. If the Flood were global and only the riders on the Ark survived, all the human males in the world now would be uniformly Y-haplogroup J. Instead we have a broad range of other Y-haplogroups. And these other Y haplogroups did not originate after the Flood (if we accept the typical dates for the Flood). This is established through both mutational rate studies and the excavation of ancient DNA. Y-haplogroup R, predominant now in Europe, for instance, was found in a skeleton in Siberia dating from 24,000 years ago, millennia before the putative date of the Flood. The earliest haplogroup, A00, originated about 270,000 years ago.
Conclusions
Though the material above is briefly presented, a number of conclusions may be drawn.
1. Adam was not the progenitor of all mankind. Human Y-haplogroups predate Adam significantly. Adam was the progenitor of the Jews and the Bible is about the Jews. Genesis 10 does not reflect the races of man but, as the passage states, the “clans of Noah’s sons.” (It is interesting that the Hebrew term “goyim” used for Gentile nations may mean something like “a bunch of animals.”)
2. The descendants of Adam were a collection of Middle Eastern peoples, surrounded by other tribes and nations, who all carried Adam’s Y-haplogroup. Some apparently dispersed among other peoples; hence, we may read about their migrations in classical literature.
3. The Flood was not global. Had the Flood been global, all of the Y-haplogroups we have now would have vanished and been replaced by just Y-haplogroup J carried by Noah and his sons.
4. The people of Britain, Ireland and Northwest Europe are predominantly Y-haplogroup R1b and are not descended from Jacob of the Bible because Jacob was Y-haplogroup J as we have seen. Their genetic status incontrovertibly places them in the Gentile category. Further, Adam is not the father of these Gentiles “physically” though one could effectively defend the idea that Adam is their father “spiritually”.
In this article, I did not present a model of human origins that reconciles the Bible with Genetics in any detail. I just sketched out a macro perspective. And any such detailed model developed will always be contestable, but it is clear that, for a model to be credible, it must conform to the science of Genetics. Even though there is much yet to be understood about this, what we can now most certainly conclude is that Herbert W. Armstrong and Herman Hoeh were wrong in their ideas about the origin and races of mankind.
submitted by Neo
30 comments:
An ACOG member can answer all of this with one simple proposition: "We have no reason to be sure that the haplogroups worked the same way in pre-Flood humans, who lived for hundreds of years and differed from today's humans in who-knows-how-many other ways. Eight sets of mitochondrial haplogroups and eight sets of Y-haplogroups survived the Flood. and we don't know how many post-Flood generations came and went before the haplogroups worked as they do today, nor do we know how often and how quickly mutations may take place."
I gave up on the evolution-ISM versus Intelligent Design debate because so many people on both sides were lying that I decided there are more important rabbit holes to get to the bottom of.
I like the writings of Hugh Ross, and he makes an excellent case for the flood to be localized, like a global warming event and the flooding of the Black Sea region, and for it to be somewhere around 15 to 40k years ago. This would help with a lot of the problems discussed in the original post.
From a scientific perspective this article is an atrocity.
However, to put lipstick on the pig, you do admit that for a model to be credible, it must conform to the science, and at least you've abandoned British Israelism. So I guess you're still ahead of the COG crowd. Baby steps.
I see a glimmer of hope you'll eventually reach a credible model, but you've still got a long way to go.
I am curious about how we would get enough water to top Mount Everest at almost 6 miles high, and how long would it take land to recover from being flooded by salt water, since a universal flood would have mingled fresh water with sea water.
I'm of the R1b hapologroup too NEO! Woohoo! :-) It's supposedly the most common Y-haplogroup of northwestern Europe.
NEO and Tonto re a local flood I have to disagree with your view. I accept the veracity of the Bible, including Genesis 1-11, and that Noah's flood was global. Otherwise your view promotes a form of cognitive dissonance that makes God out to be a liar (Num 23:19; Tit 1:2; Heb 6:18) when He promised "neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth" (9:11) since local floods occur across the world even today. Even the apostle Peter refers to Noah's flood as global ("Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished"--2 Pet 3:6) connecting it to a future destruction of the ungodly, but this time via a global fire not flood.
TLA wrote:
"I am curious about how we would get enough water to top Mount Everest at almost 6 miles high..."
Short answer: you wouldn't.
It would take the water we have on earth plus at least 2 1/2 times that much water again to rise to that height above present sea level.
And to where would that water have gone to restore sea level back to present levels? Perhaps if the world actually looked like the biblical cosmogony, but unfortunately the biblical authors didn't know that there is no tehom.
And where would the signature of such a vast hydrological event be hiding in the geological record? How come Egypt and China just kept on going, unaware of such a catastrophe? And we have far too much biological diversity for that.
Over 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered so far. A few of them are rather earthlike. If the bible is to be believed, and a global flood did occur, maybe it occurred on one of those planets? It certainly didn't happen on this one.
Interesing point, TLA @ 7:37. Anyone who has kept both tropical fish and saltwater fish realizes that there is a huge difference in the chemistries and conditions involved to support each of the two life forms.
From our own current news, we know there is a virtual creature holocaust ongoing in part of the Gulf of Mexico right now, due to the massive runoff of fresh water from the historic flooding of the Mississippi River basin. Of course in our era, it’s not only pure fresh water, as there are pesticides, agricultural, and industrial wastes involved. But, the runoff has caused a dead zone. Dolphin skin is blistering, fish are dying off. The balance needed to support their lives has been altered. Visualize that on a global scale!
BB
Theological history
Jos 11:23 So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.
Jos 13:1 Now Joshua was old and stricken in years; and the LORD said unto him, Thou art old and stricken in years, and there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.
“A Bible atlas will show visually that this description [Josh 13:1-6] encompasses quite a bit of land. Indeed, a rough estimate would place the success level at around 50 percent at the highest... As a matter of fact, Canaan was not completely subdued until the time of David a number of centuries later. The author is intentionally using universalistic language and intends to convey rhetorically, that the conquest was complete, but did not correspond to the actual geographical scope of the conquest. Thus it uses hyperbole to make a theological point...
“Thus, we are brought to the conclusion that Genesis 6-9 pertains to a local flood described rhetorically as a worldwide flood to make a theological point...
“We cannot derive the physical scope or range of the event from the literary-theological presentation chosen by the biblical author. If asked, Was the flood global? our answer would be, Yes it is global in is impact and significance, yet we have no reason to think that its physical scope and range was global. Since the Bible uses the rhetoric of hyperbole to describer the flood, it does not claim that the flood was universal in its physical scope and range; it rather portrays it in universalistic terms for rhetorical effect. If we turn to science, we find no evidence that suggests a global deluge. If science does not suggest a universal event, and the Bible (in our nuanced interpretation) does not claim a universal event, we have no reason to conclude that it was a universal event. Such a conclusion would diminish neither the authority of the text nor the significance of the event as unfolded in the interpretation of the author of Genesis...
“That the biblical authors are giving us a selective and interpretative accounting of the past to present their theological message is well confirmed by the following quote by the Gospel writer: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:30-31)” (Tremper Longman III & John H. Walton, The Lost World of the Flood, pp.32, 93, 178, 22-23).
7:35, please go deeper if you have additional information. Don’t just tease us by stating that NEO’s article is a scientific atrocity. If you have a more comprehensive fund of knowledge, please do share so that there can be further discussion. If you are going to dismiss something, tell us why. Or at least give us the Cliff’s Notes! One vague sentence doesn’t cut it here as it did when the ACOG ministers used that technique on us.
BB
I believe that fossils (animals and human) are evidence of a catastrophic event that occurred at the same time. These fossils have been discovered on every continent of earth. I believe that Noah's flood was this catastrophic event and it was a global not local event.
BB@9:28PM wrote:
"...The balance needed to support their lives has been altered. Visualize that on a global scale!"
A global flood would wipe out all aquatic (fresh water) environments thus ensuring the destruction of all aquatic organisms due to the osmotic gradient causing them to die from dehydration.
Furthermore, a global flood would introduce vast quantities of sediment into the water column. The turbidity would extinguish virtually all marine (salt water) multicellular life as well.
The extinction of marine life would cause a global collapse of the food chain and would probably return the planet to it's state roughly 600 million years ago when bacteria and single-celled eukaryotes were the only forms of life on earth.
For a fairly exhaustive summary of why Noah's ark cannot be a true story and why a global flood never occurred on planet earth see The National Center for Science Education.
Interesting comment - disbelieving parts of the Bible makes out God to be a liar.
Maybe it is men who are the liars?
We have been known to lie once in a while - except for politics and religion where everyone is virtuous of course....
Byker Bob said...
7:35, please go deeper if you have additional information. Don’t just tease us by stating that NEO’s article is a scientific atrocity. If you have a more comprehensive fund of knowledge, please do share so that there can be further discussion. If you are going to dismiss something, tell us why. Or at least give us the Cliff’s Notes! One vague sentence doesn’t cut it here as it did when the ACOG ministers used that technique on us.
BB
Gee Bob, you never defend me like that! lol :)
I based the model I used on these three constraints:
1. Dating methods used by scientists are correct and yield reasonably accurate results.
2. Genetics is an established science.
3. Adam was a literal person - a Neolithic farmer living in the Middle East who had a DNA and a genome like everyone else.
Points 1 and 2 are unassailable given our present state of science. Point 3 is not within the scope of the article. I am practicing exegesis on what the Bible states. Certainly, this model supports the plausibility of a literal Adam.
A piece I did not include in the article is a conjecture about the creation of Adam in Genesis. I believe the Genesis account describes the transformation of Adam as a sentient hominid, the result of evolution, to Adam as a hominid with a special, advanced sentience. I believe that all of mankind received this advanced sentience or this mind nouveau at the same time during the Neolithic, hence, the sudden rise of the high cultures in the Middle East.
This model will not be popular with Armstrongists, Christians or Non-believers. Everyone loses some cherished ideas.
A note: Peter used the term "kosmos" and this was translated as "world". This term can also be used to mean the entire Universe. Did the Flood affect the entire Universe? How are we to scale the scope of this term? It contains a spectrum of meaning. It can also mean "an apt and harmonious arrangement or constitution, order, government." The Flood certainly upset the order of things for the proto-Jews and it is only their history that really counts in the Bible.
Thank you, BB, then at your behest I will try to explain as briefly as I can.
I have a host of problems with NEO's underlying assumptions, methodology, and inconsistencies, but I'll try to stick to the trunk of the tree.
There are three strong signals in the Jewish Y-DNA genetic profile which make up the majority, indeed, this is so in middle eastern and northern African populations generally, and they are J1 (J-M267), J2 (J-M172) and E1b1b. (Haplogroup J (J-M304) is relatively rare in modern populations.) Due to the diaspora, the Jewish profile is more varied than other related populations, but across that entire region, these are the spikes you see repeatedly reoccurring in the data.
J1 and J2 both arose from J, to the best of our knowledge somewhere between 15,000 and 24,000 years ago in western Asia. E1b1b arose in the Horn of Africa between 26,000 and 42,000 years ago and it's populations in the middle east represent a direct migration out of Africa. Across the middle east and north Africa, we see these three distinct populations comingled.
NEO writes, "The Bible, by including genealogies, conveniently gives us the ability to trace genetic descent. Tracing Abraham’s Y-haplogroup backward through the masculine line, we can know that Adam was Y-haplogroup J."
We know no such thing. The data does not jive with the narrative NEO is trying to construct. If I were to adopt the poetic language of Genesis, there were three different "Abrahams," not just one. Why NEO has omitted E1b1b, I cannot say.
Also, the concept of an "Adam," which often gets adapted quite liberally, doesn't map nicely onto the data if he isn't a progenitor of the entire human race. Abraham is the patriarch of the Jewish people. To make Adam into a another Abraham is odd, because once again, either we need three of them, or we have to go all the way back into Africa 70,000 years ago, at least as far as where J and E branch, in which case he'll be haplogroup CT. It's either that, or NEO is rewriting the story such that he thinks the Jewish people have an entirely separate genesis from all the other life on this planet. But all of this is getting very fanciful.
NEO assumes the bible is history, so he assumes the bible is telling the same story as the science, so they can be reconciled, but it isn't, so they can't. Every field of scientific research that has a magisteria upon which the bible's claims overlap has shown the bible cannot be reconciled with the history of this planet.
I like how Israel Finkelstein has expressed similar sentiments about how people in the past have approached archaeology the same way NEO is approaching genetics:
"In the classical form of biblical archeology, archaeology was expected to decorate the story. Archaeology was not expected to give its own testimony. Archaeologists started their investigation from the biblcal story, and archaeology was expected to give some sort of illustration, nice slides for a talk. My opinion is that archaeology is not in the business of decorating any text, a biblical text or another text. Archaeology has its own voice."
NEO is using the field of genetics to decorate a biblical story. It is nice slides for his talk. My opinion is that genetics is not in the business of decorating a text, a biblical text or another text. But in stating that he's trying to use genetics as "an exegetical tool," NEO gives away his hand, that he's really doing theology. It's fine if NEO wants to rewrite a new bible. and it's fine to be inspired by outside facts to do it. But genetics has it's own voice. It's deceitful to try to make genetics do the bible's bidding, and try to pass it off as though you're doing science.
In response to Anonymous 7:11
Most of what you have written is a subjective diatribe against the Bible. You presume the Bible to be false and then categorize what I have written as an ornamentation on a mythology. This is a proposition that you do not seek to support only assert.
The one thing you wrote that has any substance is why I did not account for E1b. Outside of North Africa where it is largely represented, E1b is present in small numbers throughout the circum-Mediterranean area and Europe and represents an ancient invasion of agriculturalists. Albert Einstein, a Jew, was E1b. Many non-Jewish people on the Grecian Peninsula are E1b. The paradigm Wells used is that Jews and Adnanite Arabs are both principally Haplogroup J. Modern day Jewish and Arab populations no doubt include some other haplogroups such as E and R. But there is sufficient population momentum behind J among the Arabs and the Jews to state that Abraham was haplogroup J. You may not believe so but Spencer Wells did. If we find that Clan Calhoun in the Highlands is E1b, do we then deny that R1b cannot really be identified with the British people?
Also, I am not saying that the line of Adam, Noah, Abraham is the sole source of haplogroup J in the Middle East. This seems to be implied in what you wrote. The descendants of Adam represented only a small part of the haplogroup J demographic. Other bearers of haplogroup J would have then survived outside the range of the local flood.
It is not necessary for me to "give away my hand." It is obvious that I am writing in that area with science and theology connect.
Dennis @5:47 ~ It’s topical, Dennis. Nothing to do with personalities.
A partial list of the conclusions I’ve reached from my own research and journey:
Dna science provides one additional basis for debunking and disproving British Israelism. Many others methods have existed prior to the mapping of the human genome, but dna is the shortest distance between two points, the most efficient.
Archaeology, geology, and other branches of science do not support a global flood. It was a local Mesopotamian event involving the known world at that point in the Hebrew experience.
God used a guided, orderly, intercommunicational evolutionary process as His primary method of creation. Evidence points to old Earth, not young Earth.
I am a panentheist, who also believes that God created the universe not from nothing, but from elements of Himself, and that this is why He is not only omnipresent and all-knowing, but also hidden in plain site. To use one of your own terms, He is the star dust.
Also, if you go deeper into your memory banks, you will realize that I have defended you many times over the years, and I’ve also disagreed with you many times. That’s the way I react with every other human.
BB
An issue I should mention. It may not play a role here. Atheists have used the argument that there is no Jewish people. There is not now and never has been. They want to instead maintain that these Jews are just a mix of various peoples and do not constitute a race or ethnic group. Then the argument is that the Bible is a fantasy focused on a non-existent racial group. And, also, my model could not work because Adam, Noah and Abraham are mythic figures. And even if these people might be found to exist, their haplogroups could have been anything. This is a highly idiosyncratic view with undertones of Anti-Semitism and most anthropologists and historians would not agree with it.
BB - does your belief system included Jesus, or is it limited to God only?
Scientists believe that most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, which to me ties in with your belief system.
We do not seem to have any of the miracles happening that are described in the Bible, which seems to indicate one of two things:
1) What happened in the past no longer happens today
or 2) It never happened - just stories added to add color.
TLA, I believe that God can manifest Himself any way in which He deems puposeful. In the Old Testament, two elements are described, God (known by many Hebrew descriptives), and the Spirit of God. In the New Testament, we see three elements, God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit (fully interactive personally in the development of the human mind, not an impersonal force).
I believe in Father God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, although it is impossible for humans to fully quantify or fully conceptualize Them. The moment we attempt that, we automatically limit Them.
Dennis may not realize this, but his arrowheads, meteorites, and other artifacts?
They’re a piece of God!
BB
As for miracles? I believe they still happen, mostly on a small scale, but there is nothing humans can do to make them a certainty.
I am Y haplogroup J-M172 myself. I do not know exactly why or how, since my paternal grandfather's family is not very documented and I have yet to make a closely-related contact among them that actually knows anything of their history.
In the meantime, I joke to myself that some ministurds would have lost their shit if they learned that some of those assumed "Gentiles" in the congregation actually were more genetically "Israelite" than the Europeans surrounding them. :)
BB, it appears that you left out from the OT the God-being who we now know as Jesus Christ.
Ge 48:15 And he blessed Joseph, and said, God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto this day,
In v.15 Jacob addressed God and in v.16 we find out which God-being it is:
Ge 48:16 The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads;... (cp. “the Lord”, Acts 1:24).
The Angel of the Lord/The Angel of God was the preincarnate Jesus Christ - cp. the “Angel of the Covenant” (Mal 3:1).
The Angel of the Lord is also known as the Name of the Lord, the Voice of the Lord, the Presence (lit., “Face”; cp. Jn 14:9) of the Lord and the Glory of the Lord - though others equate the Angel of the Lord and the Voice of the Lord.
Ro 1:7b Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
1Jn 1:3b and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.
I see only two God-beings.
Ge 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Typology suggests that Adam was created before Eve, as it pictures God without a help meet.
“In v.27 it is stated twice that man was created (bara’) in God’s image and a third time that man was created (bara’) “male and female.” The same pattern is found in Genesis 5:1-2a... The singular man (’adam) is created as a plurality, “male and female”... in a similar way the one God ... created man through an expression of his plurality (...“let us make man in our image”). Following this clue the divine plurality expressed in v.26 is seen as an anticipation of the human plurality of the man and woman, thus casting the human relationship between man and woman in the role reflecting God’s own relationship with himself” (John H. Sailhamer, Genesis, EBC., Vol.2, p.38).
Sailhamer comes close to drawing the right conclusion. But right when using ANE concepts -cp. the “he” of Rev 11:15b, after 11:15a; Dt 6:4 with 1 Cor 8:6.
I also see that the Holy Spirit as the power and presence of God as seen in this synonymous parallelism:
Lk 1:35b The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and
the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee:
therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
C. Aplantinga, Jr., wrote the article on the “Trinity” in the 4 volume International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, and this was his conclusion:
“In sum, the NT does [sic] testify to the Spirit’s distinct personhood and divinity, but mutedly and ambiguously. The Spirit is the NT is personally less distinct than the Father and Son, and His divinity less clearly stated; He appears as nearly transparent agent for God and Christ. One properly concludes that the NT is overall clearly binitarian in its data, and probably trinitarian” (C. Aplantinga, Jr., “Trinity,” ISBE, Vol.4, pp.916-17).
I would suggest that if C. Aplantiga, Jr. was not influenced by the trinitarian worldview of traditional Christianity he would not have concluded that the NT is “probably trinitarian” - for I believe it is not.
Ge 1:2b And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Rom 8:9a But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit,
Rom 8:9b if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.
Ro 8:9 if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you
Ro 8:10 And if Christ be in you
“In Romans 8:9-10 the Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and Christ all seem to be used interchangeably” (NIVSB, Kenneth Barker, Gen Editor, p.1766, note on 2 Corinthians 3:17).
I would suggest that the Spirit of God/Holy Spirit in nearly all cases refers to Christ’s Spirit.
Gal 4:6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.
Ge 48:5 And now thy two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh ... are mine; as Reuben and Simeon, they shall be mine.
I would also suggest that the “Saints” are God’s sons through God’s adoption of Christ’s sons - cp. Jacob adopting Joseph’s sons.
I am Y haplogroup J-M172 myself. I do not know exactly why or how, since my paternal grandfather's family is not very documented and I have yet to make a closely-related contact among them that actually knows anything of their history.
Ancestry tests aren't perfect. A quick Google search will show you plenty of cases where twins and triplets were given quite different results from the same DNA-testing companies.
Modern humans all have a most recent common ancestor (MRCA) who has been calculated to have lived 2000-5000 years ago (see the Rohde et al article cited on the Wikipedia MRCA page, and their other work). The MRCA shifts forwards in time as people die and others are born. 2000 years ago the MRCA was a different person further back in time. And, if the MRCA was monogamous, the MRCA is a couple. It's not unreasonable to say there was an Adam/Eve couple 10000-100000 years ago. There certainly were people who existed back then who were our common ancestors, if they lived prior to our current MRCA and were his/her/their ancestor.
Assuming there was such a couple, multiple Y haplogroups are easily explained by Adam's daughters marrying other extant humans with different haplogroups, especially if they were outside their small community. Adam's descendants through his daughters and granddaughters and greatgranddaughters would not necessarily share his haplogroup. If those females joined the tribes of their husbands, slowly Adam and Eve could become the common ancestor couple of all alive today while retaining multiple Y haplogroups. Same applies to mitochondrial haplogroups.
Anonymous 4:00 wrote: "Ancestry tests aren't perfect. A quick Google search will show you plenty of cases where twins and triplets were given quite different results from the same DNA-testing companies."
There are two popular commercial genetic test types. One type tests for haplogroups, Y Chromosome or Mitochondrial. The other test is autosomal and tests genetic sequences against a database of collected sequences from different people in different locations. In effect, they scan your DNA and look for matches with, say, German sequences they have collected. These tests may have widely varying results. Different companies have different databases. I have results from three of these tests and some of the results are odd. I have a result on one test that is not on the other two, for instance.
The tests that identify haplogroups, such as the haplogroups used in this article, are accurate and repeatable.
S. Korsman wrote: "Assuming there was such a couple, multiple Y haplogroups are easily explained by Adam's daughters marrying other extant humans with different haplogroups, especially if they were outside their small community. Adam's descendants through his daughters and granddaughters and greatgranddaughters would not necessarily share his haplogroup. If those females joined the tribes of their husbands, slowly Adam and Eve could become the common ancestor couple of all alive today while retaining multiple Y haplogroups. Same applies to mitochondrial haplogroups."
Many of the Clans of the Son's of Noah likely migrated out of the Middle East and settled among other populations. This is based on references in classical history (see articles about Tarshish in Wikipedia, for instance). And from the Middle Eastern, Hebrew perspective, the only perspective the Bible is concerned with, their names were given to the regions where they migrated. This is very difficult to nail down because historical information is usually scant. My guess is that they became dispersed and were absorbed into other, larger co-resident populations and are now extinct as Adamic tribes. There still are some haplogroup J people dispersed around the Mediterranean and Europe but I would expect that their history is difficult to establish.
But I really doubt that there was ever enough population momentum so that everyone today is descended from Adam. I would expect most people are not descended from Adam just based on the limited presence of haplogroup J as an index.
(I just saw a snippet of the Mike Wallace interview with Stanley Rader on CBS Sunday Morning. It must by now be a part of the Nation's historical memory.)
@Near_Earth_Object - Most of Adam's descendants would not share his haplogroup - only those in the pure male lineage, and the progeny of any female descendants who married back into his haplogroup. Adam's Y haplogroup could even die out without him losing his status as a common ancestor - simplest scenario being if he only had daughters.
If Rohde et al's calculations are correct, and all modern humans do have an MRCA as recent as a few thousand years ago, then not only are we all descended from Adam, whenever he lived, but we're all descended from one of his distant descendants. That means there are many couples prior to our MRCA who could qualify as Adam and Eve. Their calculations are not based on genetics, but rather population dynamics. As you say, there must be sufficient population momentum, but I think they've taken that into account. They show that, with complete random mating independent of geography, our MRCA would have been in the 1200s AD. Decreasing that momentum to more reasonable estimates, they reach a few centuries BC. Anyway, they convince me :-)
Forget adoption, the book says we're His sons because His Seed is in us. Greek sperma for seed.
2:44
Does that mean the Holy Spirit? I don't recall a Merovingian ancestor.
Nck
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