© Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty ImagesScientists have unearthed new evidence in Greece proving that the island of Naxos was inhabited by Neanderthals and earlier humans at least 200,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.
According to a new study, people who claim that modern-day animals have evolved
over millions of years have some rethinking to do. The study examined
mitochondrial DNA from thousands of different animal species and humans only to find that virtually all current animal species only date back 100,000 to 200,000 years.
Mark Young Stoeckle of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University and David S. Thaler of the University of Basel authored the study, titled, "
Why should mitochondria define species?" Stoeckle told
The Christian Post:
Our findings challenge the idea that present-day animal species are millions of years old. A short summary of our view is "life keeps evolving." What we show is that most (90 percent) of animal species have similarly low mitochondrial DNA variation. This is surprising because theory predicts that older species and species with large populations should have more genetic variation. We propose that most present-day animal species, including humans, arose in the past 100,000 to 200,000 years.
Thaler added, "We studied the amount of a certain type of variation that occurs within each of many thousands of different animal species. We found that measured in this way humans are an average animal species. We humans are used to looking 'close in' and being very sensitive to differences among people. The approach we used allows one to 'zoom out' and see variation in humans on the same scale as variation within other species."
The study writes of humans:
More approaches have been brought to bear on the emergence and outgrowth of Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., modern humans) than any other species including full genome sequence analysis of thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of mitochondria, paleontology, anthropology, history and linguistics.The congruence of these fields supports the view that modern human mitochondria and Y chromosome originated from conditions that imposed a single sequence on these genetic elements between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
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Comment: Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe chimed in on the finding for the
Cosmic Tusk:
The recent work (1) involving "DNA barcoding" of some five million specimens covering over 100,000 animal species, including humans, has been claimed to yield a result utterly incompatible with Darwinian evolution confined to the Earth. Humans, house sparrows, sandpipers are just a few examples of species that have been found - according to this paper - to display an exceedingly narrow range of genetic diversity, and this data is claimed to be consistent with all the crucial genes of 90 percent of all animal species arriving on the Earth 100,000-200,000 years ago. You could not ask for a more startling demonstration of the validity of the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe model of panspermia that was recently reviewed in an article by Steele et al (2). Evolution can only take place on a scale that vastly transcends the size of our planet, the size of our solar system, even perhaps that of the galaxy. The Earth receives injections of "evolved" genes sporadically from the cosmos at large (3). We now know that there are over 100 billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone so exchanges of material between them is well nigh impossible to avoid. It is only in such a way that all the facts about life on our planet can be understood. Viva Panspermia!
Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe
References
- Stoeckle, M.Y. and Thaler, D.S., 2018. Human Evolution, 33 (1-2), 1-30
- Steele, E.J., et al.,2018. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (http://www.panspermia.org/causeofcambrianexplosion.pdf)
- Hoyle, F. and Wickramasinghe, N.C. 1980. Evolution from Space (J.M. Dent, Lond)
Perhaps not the only explanation of the data, but interesting nonetheless.
Comment: Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe chimed in on the finding for the Cosmic Tusk: Perhaps not the only explanation of the data, but interesting nonetheless.