Skip to main content

One thing I can tell you: this man was NOT your ancestor



This is Oetzi--the famous ice-man mummy found a few years back in the Tyrolean Alps.

New genetic testing--specifically mitochondrial DNA analysis--has shown that it is statistically highly unlikely that any modern human alive is descended from him or his immediate kin.

This is actually pretty important stuff, because it raises points about genetic diversity, genetic drift, and the idea that the human race periodically passes through very narrow choke points where lots and lots of lines simply ... don't make it.

Oetzi is probably about 5,300 years old. That means he died in his Alpine cave when Egyptians in the Middle Kingdom were carving out gigantic statues of Ramses II, and only a smallish minority of the people alive then are actually the ancestors of the folks around today.

For the past thousand years, however, we've been undergoing a massive population boom, driven by better farming methods, better medicine, and a lot of religious with the old go-out-and-out-multiply-the-heathens mentality. There is probably at least as much if not more diversity in the human genome today [with over 6 billion of the 80-100 billion of all the people who have ever lived walking around right now] than there has been throughout the entirety of human history.

But I have my doubts that in 2108 my grandchildren will be able to make the same boast.

This should [but probably won't] temper your sense that which party controls the Delaware legislature in 2009 is going to make a hell of a lot of difference 100 years from now, let alone 5,000 years out.

[h/t ScienceDaily]

Comments

Anonymous said…
Is Jason Scott that dude's direct descendant?

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?