Y-Chromosome Adam & Mitochondrial Eve: Is science confirming Genesis?

MRCAs Most Recent Common Ancestors are not a surprise. In fact they are predicted by population genetics. At some point in the past there will exist an individual whose offspring will have reproductive success unto the present day, while the offspring of everyone else in their population will, at some point, die before fecundity and successful mating or who will fail to mate.

Geneticists didn't need research to discover that there was a mtEve and a Y-Adam -- we always knew they would have existed. There is also nothing special about them as most recent common ancestors, except the happenstance of purely female and purely male descent from them. We have lots and lots of other most recent common ancestors, ones that represent the rest of our genomes; most of them lived long before either of those two individuals, and long before anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene.

Michie said:

*You are in the Catholic forum*

First, they said Genesis, Eden, and Adam and Eve were just a "miserable myth". Then something strange started to happen...

Continued below.
Y-Chromosome Adam & Mitochondrial Eve: Is Science Confirming Genesis? - All Roads Lead to Rome

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That article seems to indicate it's somehow important that science gets y-chromosome Adam and mitochondrial Eve to be contemporaries living at the same time to support the idea all humanity has common parents. Frankly, that doesn't really matter. MRCA is the "most recent" common male or female ancestor, the one who is closest to us in time. Technically speaking from the Bible, Eve is the most recent common female ancestor. However, the most recent common male ancestor is Noah, because while his sons brought wives from other parentage onto the ark to tie them back to Eve, all people living after that time would have Noah as a common male ancestor. However, Noah's father is still a common ancestor, as is his father, as is his, until you get back to Adam.

So it doesn't matter if they lived at the same time or not, because eventually you get back to a common male and common female ancestor in the same generation of people.

The science also does not prove in any way that they were the only two people there. However, I've never seen anything in Catholic teaching that requires that be the case, nor does the Bible really support that idea. In Genesis 4:1, Cain is born. In Genesis 4:2, Abel is born. In Genesis 4:17, Cain has a wife and is having children. In Genesis 4:25 Adam and Eve have Seth. In Genesis 5:4 we learn that Adam and Eve have other sons and daughters.

The obvious question is, where did Cain's wife come from? Fundamentalists assume she is his sister, but nowhere does Scripture indicate that. And to my knowledge, all that Catholic teaching requires us to believe is we have a set of common parents, which science now seems to support. Not that Adam and Eve were the only humans around.

My understanding is that
1. Y chromosome Adam and mt Eve didn't live at the same time
2. Both lived hundreds of thousands of years ago