Did a mysterious extinction event precede Adam and Eve? – Brinkwire

In one of the most challenging and misunderstood studies of the year, American and Swiss scientists made an astonishing discovery: All humans alive today are the children of a common father and mother – a Adam and Eve – who traveled the planet 200,000 years ago, which, according to the standards of evolution, is like yesterday. Likewise, nine out of ten animal species do so, meaning that almost all terrestrial creatures that live today have recently emerged as a major event, similar to the Big Bang.

Mark Stoeckle of Rockefeller University and David Thaler of the University of Basel came to this striking conclusion after analyzing the "barcodes" of five million animals' DNA. 100,000 different species. Barcodes are DNA fragments that lie outside the living cell nucleus – so-called mitochondrial DNA, which mothers transmit from generation to generation.

With each reproduction, errors are insinuated into the barcode, as in the case of a repeated photocopy of a document. By measuring accumulated errors – blur or "diversity" among barcodes, scientists can deduce the time that passes.

For example, Stoeckle and Thaler concluded that 90% of all live animal species today come from parents who all started calving at about the same time, less than a quarter of a million years. "This conclusion is very surprising," says Thaler, "and I fought it as hard as I could."

Why was animal life on Earth almost completely renewed just a short time ago? For the moment, this remains a mystery.

It is possible that something much more powerful than the H bombs decimated life and that only one group of parents for each species survived to live and procreate another day. But the last major extinction event we know – the one that stifled the mighty dinosaurs – happened 65 million years ago.

It is also possible that something in nature limits the size of an animal population. It may be an inherent process of evolution that, when a population becomes too large, collapses and must start from scratch.

In their report, published in Human Evolution, Stoeckle and Thaler offer other possible explanations, including, Thaler explains, "glacial ages and other forms of environmental change, infections, predation, competition from other species and for limited resources, as well as interactions between these forces. . "Whatever the explanation," he adds, "the conclusion to be retained is this:" All animal life experiences growth and stasis or near-extinction impulses at similar timescales. . "

In other words, humans, elephants, birds, terrestrial creatures tend to stand up and fall in unison, like rising and falling tides. And although we do not know what Svengali is currently running, we now have scientific evidence that he is wiping out the slate far more often than we ever imagined.

Many religious commentators mistakenly understand that this study means that the species was created only sharply recently. To be clear: according to evolutionary biologists, the species have developed gradually over several million years. The discovery of Stoeckle and Thaler is that something happened about 100,000 years ago that created entirely new populations from existing species.

That said, Stoeckle and Thaler's studies align with the Bible in at least two remarkable ways. First, he claims that we and our fellow creatures on Earth are the result of a recent and profound creative event orchestrated by an unknown mechanism. And second, the DNA barcodes reveal that species are quantized. Instead of creating a continuum of animal varieties, as one would expect from millions of years of progressive evolution, creatures fall into very distinct and very separate populations – what the Bible describes as "genera", from the Hebrew word min.

"Darwin has struggled to understand the lack of intermediaries and his questions remain fruitful [to this day]Thaler said. He explains that the new study revealed that "If individuals are stars, the species are galaxies. These are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space. "

The intriguing study by Stoeckle and Thaler provides foremost irrefutable evidence of the astonishing fragility of life and a humbling lesson for the most powerful among us. This proves that we are at the mercy of forces that we do not see or understand; Forces that made our existence possible a few hundred thousand years ago and that, just as quickly – in the blink of an eye – can and will one day make us disappear.