[Ax]

Originally Posted by S.B.Nichols

That's actually kinda what it means, except that m-Eve would have only had to have had one (or more) daughter, granddaughter, etc.... who would have gotten it on with a descendants of y-Adam

I guess that makes sense...

[BillSPrestonEsq]

Thread is not theological. Thus, to science we go... ...Sorry, the closure was just so we didn't get 10 more people commenting on locations.

Okay, I have a question. Other than early evolutionists racism, (not confined to evolutionists, of the day mind you) why is the theory always out of Africa, and not out of the fertile crescent, or out of Asia.

I ask out of genuine interest. I understand the interest of a nineteenth century white guy declaring black people closer to monkeys as an impetus for a theory. Is there good anthropological evidence to support this?

I ask because of the large number of ancient civilizations seem to stem more from Babylon, Anatolia, and India, with Egypt as another early player.

[thesteve]

Hasn't the out of Africa hypothesis always just come from the oldest transitional fossils being found in the Great Rift Valley?

[BillSPrestonEsq]

Originally Posted by thesteve

Hasn't the out of Africa hypothesis always just come from the oldest transitional fossils being found in the Great Rift Valley?

...sort of.

If you read much of the early literature, it started out as an apologetic for British racial superiority.

And... you would expect the oldest fossils out of areas with low annual rainfall. I would wager, you could find killer fossils in Australia.

As a creationist of a sort, I would think that it makes good sense to find ape fossils where apes live today if the climate has not too drastically changed and this stuff does not bother me in the least.

I am wondering if somebody has some good info on why it holds. I like a good read on fossils and paleontology. I know its start is rather dubious, but I am wondering if it has just gone unchecked, or whether there is some validity.

[Rainer.]

Originally Posted by Ax

I find it very hard to believe that our Y Chromosomal Adam and our Mitochondrial Eve lived that far apart, unless "Eve" was a major prostitute. This seems like a silly concept to me.

One of the issues of this is one that I raised in this thread already. The thought of Mitochondrial Eve/Y Chromosomal Adam gets confusing because it's simply a silly idea to be looking for an individual who was the "ancestor of all humans". Evolution is a process that works on populations not individuals.

As an answer to Bill's question, my idea of the matter is that after the theorized Toba catastrophe, the small human population grew and spread from Africa to the Middle East. While the African population was still largely hunter-gatherer at the time, the resources available in the Fertile Crescent/Middle East were significant enough for humans to begin agriculture, which was the key to civilization. The spread of agriculture was a separate spread from the actual spread of the human race.