Recent Common Ancestors?
In 2004, the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, published an article suggesting that humans share a common ancestor only a few thousand years ago (Rohde et al., 2004). It is based on an improved statistical model that takes into account how genes flow through marriage and travel. Though it has some flaws, it makes a valuable contribution – and has been the subject of much publicity). Here is the beginning of the paper : If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. However, the random mating model ignores essential aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups. Here we show that recent common ancestors also emerge from two models incorporating substantial pop
In 2004, the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, published an article suggesting that humans share a common ancestor only a few thousand years ago (Rohde et al., 2004). It is based on an improved statistical model that takes into account how genes flow through marriage and travel. Though it has some flaws, it makes a valuable contribution – and has been the subject of much publicity). Here is the beginning of the paper: If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past. However, the random mating model ignores essential aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups. Here we show that recent common ancestors also emerge from two models incorporating substantial popu
