News Report with Commentary by Larry R. Lasiter
Scientists in the US and Switzerland have announced an amazing revelation – all modern humans are descended from a common father and mother who appeared on the scene 100,000 to 200,000 years ago after a cataclysmic event almost wiped out the human race. Science doesn’t know of such an event but is compelled to make this assertion due to the accepted belief in evolution. The alternative of just believing that a Creator made both humans and animals at the same time would be anathema to most scientists today.
Although the researchers believe in an evolutionary explanation and are not pointing to the biblical Adam and Eve, or even to Noah and his wife, their DNA discovery following ten years of work has stirred a lot of debate. It may prove to be one of the most challenging studies ever undertaken and it brings up a huge mystery. What happened to wipe out almost all life on the planet, leaving behind the people who would become the mother and father to us all? "This conclusion is very surprising," Thaler stated, "and I fought against it as hard as I could."
The Daily Mail reports that these new findings throw into doubt the patterns of evolution currently accepted by the scientific community at large. The separation of each kind from another is as vast as the galaxies are from each other. After looking over this extensive study one observed -it would be as difficult for a kind to evolve into a new kind as it would be for one galaxy to merge with another and forming a separate and new galaxy -there are just vast distances between.
The research was led by Senior Research Associate Mark Stoeckle of the Rockefeller University in NY and Research Associate David Thaler of the University of Basel, Switzerland and was published in the journal Human Evolution.
Researchers say they studied the genetic "barcodes" from five million types of animals and humans – some 100,000 species – to reach their conclusions. The barcodes are snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells – so-called mitochondrial DNA, which mothers pass down from generation to generation.
Stoeckle and Thaler also found that 90 percent of all animal species alive today come from parents who all began giving birth around the same time, somewhere between 100,000 - 200,000 years ago. From a biblical standpoint this is exactly what we would expect to see if the world were destroyed by a flood. In the Genesis account Noah took only two, a male and female aboard the Ark with the exception of the animals God had declared to be clean to eat -Noah took seven pairs of the clean animals. This would account for the 10 percent of animals that did not descend from a single pair.
Fox News reports the study does line up with the Bible in two notable ways. Fox states:
1. It confirms that we and our fellow creatures on Earth arose from a recent and profound creation event, orchestrated by some unknown mechanism.
2. The DNA barcodes reveal that species are quantized. Instead of there being a continuum of animal varieties, as one might expect from millions of years of gradual evolution, creatures fall into very distinct, widely separated populations – what the Bible describes as "kinds," from the Hebrew word "min."
So at a time when people tend to look at the differences in each other in terms of race, social status, etc., scientists suggest that when we refer to our fellow man, we're actually referring to our genetic brothers and sisters.
"At a time when humans place so much emphasis on individual and group differences, maybe we should spend more time on the ways in which we resemble one another and the rest of the animal kingdom," Dr. Mark Stoeckle told The Daily Mail.
Critics in the scientific community pushed back against the authors’ conclusions. "There is no trace in the geological record of any such global event in the last 200,000 years," notes Michael Marshall in Forbes. Marshall is currently working on a book about the origins of life.
"Any event that slashed populations that significantly would surely have led to a noticeable spike in the extinction rate, and there isn’t one. There are of course the extinctions linked to humans, but those occurred at separate times and locations, not simultaneously across the planet," he wrote.
Man and animals appeared at the same time in history. Consider that it’s easier to believe that a Creator made the first man and woman along with the animals at the same time than it is to believe that a global extinction event occurred which left only one male and one female of childbearing age, and one male and one female each of the countless animal kinds. The study showed that 90 percent of all animal kinds also descended from a single male and female pair. What are the odds in that happening? The odds are virtually zero. Had it occurred that way, well then it would be an even greater miracle because only God can do the impossible.
