Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old

If you find this kind of thing interesting I can strongly recommend "The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins which looks at ~40 common ancestors we have, not just the common ancestors of all humanity, but common ancestors with chimps, gorillas, all the way back to the Last Universal Ancestor - the beastie that all life has as an ancestor:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale</a>

You might wonder: why should there be a single common-father in the first place? Why not a non-singleton set of common fathers all the way back to near the point where the questions becomes odd because you're dealing with hermaphrodites and/or asexual reproduction?<p>See: Galton-Watson process ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process</a> )<p>&#62; The Galton–Watson process is a branching stochastic process arising from Francis Galton's statistical investigation of the extinction of family names.

Just a side note: They quote a person from the Ronin Institute, which is a virtual research institute for independent academics. They've received a fair amount of press as an alternative model for scholarship / academia.<p><a href="http://ronininstitute.org" rel="nofollow">http://ronininstitute.org</a>

Honest question: Let X be the single common-father. What was X-1? That is, what was X's dad? Not human?

Please understand this correctly. This refers to the "Y-cromosomal Adam", or the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) patrilinearly [1]. It is important to understand that some contemporaries of the MRCA are ancestors of no one in the current population. In other words, when that human lived, there were humans living concurrently that represented the same species (Homo) but their family line does not reach the current time.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam</a>

340,000 years as of the time yahoo posted this story, or as of the time the study paper was published, or what? At what time was he born (UTC)?<p>Not so long ago it was proven "The father of all men is 170,000 years old."<p>If we determine every time that the most recent research is correct, we make all future research obsolete.<p>Here is a much better link : <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-all-men-is-340000-years-old.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-al...</a><p>Scientific Paper : <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.02.002" rel="nofollow">http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.02.002</a>

It concerns me that a single individual's chromosome can bump up the common ancestry age estimate from 170,000 to 340,000 – doubling it. That indicates that this estimate is incredibly sensitive to outliers. How can we know that finding another person with interesting ancestry isn't going to bump up the estimate by another factor of two?<p>Also: regarding "The Ancestor's Tale" – this is probably the best non-fiction book I've ever read. If this kind of thing interests you at all, do yourself a favor and read it.

Does any one know, is there any chance that any advanced, isolated civilisations arose-- tens of thousands of years before the agricultural revolution that we know of?

Interesting to think that if there were a disaster that killed off a whole continent of people, the title of most-recent-ancestor of all <i>living</i> humans would move to someone else.<p>That's, after all, what we'd be primarily thinking about in that event.

I wonder what the bible thumpers have to say about this.