• Biblical Families is not a dating website. It is a forum to discuss issues relating to marriage and the Bible, and to offer guidance and support, not to find a wife. Click here for more information.

Question about "Answers In Genesis", Nathaniel Jeanson, Mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome based genetic research

Bartato

Seasoned Member
Male
Are any of you guys familiar with AIG Dr Jeanson and his work involving Y chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA based genetic research?

I find it pretty interesting. I've been listening to a bunch of Jeanson's lectures on the subject on YouTube. He also has a couple of books out that I am considering purchasing.

I know AIG isn't particularly polygamy friendly. I'm not here to discuss that. I would like to discuss this genetic research and it's implications.

For those that aren't familiar with genetics, mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to the offspring. The Y chromosome is passed father to son. Analysing differences in either can be used for estimating the number of generations to a common ancestor (based on copying errors accumulating over successive generations).

It seems that we all are much more closely related than we were taught in school.

Interestingly the Y chromosome research seems to indicate a common ancestor (for all men) around 4500 years ago. The mitochondrial work seems to track back to three common ancestors (for all people) about 4500 years ago. That lines up pretty well with the great flood pf Noah's day. Noah would be the one source of the Y chromosome. The three mitochondrial lines would apparently come from the wives of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Yes, I do believe that the stuff in Genesis actually happened.

You guys might want to look into Jeanson and his work.
 
Are any of you guys familiar with AIG Dr Jeanson and his work involving Y chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA based genetic research?

I've referenced it on this forum in the past.

Interestingly the Y chromosome research seems to indicate a common ancestor (for all men) around 4500 years ago. The mitochondrial work seems to track back to three common ancestors (for all people) about 4500 years ago.

That's for European and Northern African (Arab/Carthaginian) men. Australian natives (Aborigines) are such a distinct group of people that some geneticists have made the case that they are a separate species of humanity. Same genus, but a different species. After Australia allowed interracial marriages this became more apparent when mixed couples who were both fertile could not conceive or their offspring could not conceive...both hallmarks of divergent evolution.

It's wildly politically incorrect to even mention this in Australia and I'm sure some twit down there will want to put me in jail for mentioning it yet all the same it remains a fact.

Aborigines in Australia are estimated to have been isolated from the rest of humanity for as much as 65,000 years. In that amount of time European homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and there are no Neanderthal markers in the Aborigine population.

Anders Bergström wrote extensively about the genetic divergence of the Aborigines and he danced around the topic as much as he could while still publishing the facts he found that their Y chromosomes demonstrate the population was isolated from other human populations for at least 30,000 years.
 
I've referenced it on this forum in the past.



That's for European and Northern African (Arab/Carthaginian) men. Australian natives (Aborigines) are such a distinct group of people that some geneticists have made the case that they are a separate species of humanity. Same genus, but a different species. After Australia allowed interracial marriages this became more apparent when mixed couples who were both fertile could not conceive or their offspring could not conceive...both hallmarks of divergent evolution.

It's wildly politically incorrect to even mention this in Australia and I'm sure some twit down there will want to put me in jail for mentioning it yet all the same it remains a fact.

Aborigines in Australia are estimated to have been isolated from the rest of humanity for as much as 65,000 years. In that amount of time European homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and there are no Neanderthal markers in the Aborigine population.

Anders Bergström wrote extensively about the genetic divergence of the Aborigines and he danced around the topic as much as he could while still publishing the facts he found that their Y chromosomes demonstrate the population was isolated from other human populations for at least 30,000 years.
Interesting 🤔
I hadn't heard that about the Australian aborigines sometimes having sufficient genetic divergence from other people as to cause problems in reproduction.

It doesn't really surprise me. Crap happens in this broken world. Things (including man himself) are breaking down and becoming disordered.

Also, the separation of the aborigines apparently only happened a few thousand years ago, not the tens of thousands of years mentioned.
 
Also, the separation of the aborigines apparently only happened a few thousand years ago, not the tens of thousands of years mentioned.

Reread my post and feel free to verify what I posted:

Anders Bergström wrote extensively about the genetic divergence of the Aborigines and he danced around the topic as much as he could while still publishing the facts he found that their Y chromosomes demonstrate the population was isolated from other human populations for at least 30,000 years.
 
After Australia allowed interracial marriages this became more apparent when mixed couples who were both fertile could not conceive or their offspring could not conceive...both hallmarks of divergent evolution.
Do you have a reference for this?
 
  • Like
Reactions: EWP
Reread my post and feel free to verify what I posted:
Reread the book of Genesis to verify what I said about thousands rather than tens of thousands of years. 😏

In terms of considering the dates proposed by Bergström and others relative to those proposed by Jeanson, I will have to do additional reading. It seems like an interesting subject.
 
I've referenced it on this forum in the past.



That's for European and Northern African (Arab/Carthaginian) men. Australian natives (Aborigines) are such a distinct group of people that some geneticists have made the case that they are a separate species of humanity. Same genus, but a different species. After Australia allowed interracial marriages this became more apparent when mixed couples who were both fertile could not conceive or their offspring could not conceive...both hallmarks of divergent evolution.

It's wildly politically incorrect to even mention this in Australia and I'm sure some twit down there will want to put me in jail for mentioning it yet all the same it remains a fact.

Aborigines in Australia are estimated to have been isolated from the rest of humanity for as much as 65,000 years. In that amount of time European homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and there are no Neanderthal markers in the Aborigine population.

Anders Bergström wrote extensively about the genetic divergence of the Aborigines and he danced around the topic as much as he could while still publishing the facts he found that their Y chromosomes demonstrate the population was isolated from other human populations for at least 30,000 years.
Once again, I am pleasantly surprised by the broad scope of knowledge possessed by many people on this site.
 
Based on the Y chromosome work, Jeanson also proposes that the Native American Indians (former central Asians) came to the Western Hemisphere via Siberia in the early AD era, and largely displaced the folks that were here before perhaps accounting for the decline and fall of the Mayan society via the inadvertent introduction of novel diseases.

Modern Western Europeans (and their descendants around the world) also seem to have a lot of male ancestors from Central Asia perhaps resulting from the Mongol conquest and the bubonic plague.

The history of the world seems to be quite different than what we learned in school.
 
Do you have a reference for this?

I'm unable to find any reference to this and will see what I can find. In the meantime feel free to consider this an anecdote with reference to the fertility issues.

The topic of divergent evolution in Australian aborigines has been documented for over forty years. Given that divergent evolution would be indicated by fertility issues in mixed couplings you can surmise the rest.




 
Reread the book of Genesis to verify what I said about thousands rather than tens of thousands of years.

That's your choice to believe this and you'll forgive me if I choose to believe that the world is much older.

Genesis is to me the Word of God as written down by mostly illiterate nomadic tribesmen. The big things they got right but the details they had to describe within the limits of their contemporary understanding. To them the concept of thousands of years seemed like forever. The mathematical concept of one million was unimaginable for most people even into the Roman era when the term legion was accepted as meaning many because a legion was generally composed of ten thousand soldiers.

In any case the Australian aborigines are demonstrably a genetically isolated group who would be wholly absent any distinctly non-Aboriginal genetic markers that arose in the past~30,000 years.
 
@FollowingHim

It's notable that the statistics for Australia exclude mention of mixed couples and instead would tend to give the impression that there are such few mixed couples that they are statistically irrelevant. Yet their methodology is conspicuously silent on this matter.

 
I'm unable to find any reference to this and will see what I can find. In the meantime feel free to consider this an anecdote with reference to the fertility issues.

The topic of divergent evolution in Australian aborigines has been documented for over forty years. Given that divergent evolution would be indicated by fertility issues in mixed couplings you can surmise the rest.




Divergent devolution would seem to be a more accurate description of what happened. The world's genetic information seems to be degrading, not miraculously ramping up.
 
That's your choice to believe this and you'll forgive me if I choose to believe that the world is much older.

Genesis is to me the Word of God as written down by mostly illiterate nomadic tribesmen. The big things they got right but the details they had to describe within the limits of their contemporary understanding. To them the concept of thousands of years seemed like forever. The mathematical concept of one million was unimaginable for most people even into the Roman era when the term legion was accepted as meaning many because a legion was generally composed of ten thousand soldiers.

In any case the Australian aborigines are demonstrably a genetically isolated group who would be wholly absent any distinctly non-Aboriginal genetic markers that arose in the past~30,000 years.
Your are free to adopt a nonsensical modernist interpretation of Genesis. I not only forgive you for it, but I still like you quite a lot in spite of it.

On the other hand, the Man that walked on water, opened the eyes of the blind, rose from the grave, and ascended to heaven took a much more direct approach to interpreting Scripture. He seems to think the stuff in Genesis happened.
 
Divergent devolution would seem to be a more accurate description of what happened. The world's genetic information seems to be degrading, not miraculously ramping up.
Yes indeed. At the conclusion of the Creation Week God says everything He had created was very good (cf. Gen. 1:31). However, once sin entered everything was subject to the curse and has been deteriorating over time. The ages people live now are a far cry from those who lived prior to the Flood and the population bottleneck it brought.
 
@FollowingHim

It's notable that the statistics for Australia exclude mention of mixed couples and instead would tend to give the impression that there are such few mixed couples that they are statistically irrelevant. Yet their methodology is conspicuously silent on this matter.

Those statistics are just on births by the ethnicity of the mother. They don't even attempt to define who the father is, which is why there is no category for mixed couples - they're not considering the couple at all.
 
I disagree with the timeline for genetic mutations of this magnitude to take 65,000 years. It happens rather rapidly in endogamic societies, so I am quite skeptical of anyone who uses that argument as proof of an old earth, that they are doing anything more than speculating.
 
That's your choice to believe this and you'll forgive me if I choose to believe that the world is much older.

Genesis is to me the Word of God as written down by mostly illiterate nomadic tribesmen. The big things they got right but the details they had to describe within the limits of their contemporary understanding. To them the concept of thousands of years seemed like forever. The mathematical concept of one million was unimaginable for most people even into the Roman era when the term legion was accepted as meaning many because a legion was generally composed of ten thousand soldiers.

In any case the Australian aborigines are demonstrably a genetically isolated group who would be wholly absent any distinctly non-Aboriginal genetic markers that arose in the past~30,000 years.
Whoa! Scriptures were inspired by God. Illiterate men do not write.
 
Interestingly the Y chromosome research seems to indicate a common ancestor (for all men) around 4500 years ago. The mitochondrial work seems to track back to three common ancestors (for all people) about 4500 years ago. That lines up pretty well with the great flood pf Noah's day. Noah would be the one source of the Y chromosome.

@All

This is the post I responded to. The fact is that Australian Aborigines would not have a common ancestor with Europeans from just 4500 years ago. And they don't.

The Bible and Scripture do not explicitly state the age of the Earth anywhere and the people who read all sorts of things into the Bible that aren't there are welcome to their beliefs.

Myself, I don't feel obligated to constrain myself to the exact same set of beliefs that were held as accepted knowledge by Moses or any of his contemporaries or any of the other people mentioned in Scripture.

For instance:

  • I do not believe the world is flat.
  • I do not believe the sun revolves around the Earth every 24 hours.
  • I do not believe the stars are windows in the firmament (solid sky) above the Earth.
  • I do not believe in sea monsters.
  • I do not believe that men cannot fly.
  • I do not believe that God created the moon to be a perfect and unblemished sphere.
  • I do not believe that the moon is itself a source of light.
  • I do not believe that there are only four elements being earth, wind, fire, and water and that everything else is composed of these four elements.
  • I do not believe that illness is a punishment from God for our sins.
  • I do not believe that illnesses can be treated by bleeding someone to remove their ill humors.
  • I do not believe that medicine is an expression of witchcraft that defies the Will of God.
  • I do not believe that the known world is confined only the to understanding of peoples living in the Mediterranean prior to 1492 and I do not believe it is a heresy to acknowledge that the Pope was never informed of the existence of the Americas prior to 1492.
  • I do not believe it is an affront to God to set foot on the moon.
  • I do not believe that the brain is just an organ that makes snot.
  • I do not believe that blood does not circulate in the body.

But I do believe that the Ten Commandments are the literal Word of God written in stone by God Himself. I also believe in what Jesus said according to the testimonies of the people who knew Him and heard Him speak.

There's no end to the things that all of us accept as common knowledge that the people of the Bible would have considered heretical.

And none of these things matter to the core truths of Scripture that prove themselves true every single day.
 
Last edited:
The fact is that Australian Aborigines would not have a common ancestor with Europeans from just 4500 years ago. And they don't.
You are jumping to a black and white conclusion. Science is never actually that good.

The issue is that science is the study of things in the present - things we can experiment with and verify. You cannot study the past with science, you can only study the present - and then extrapolate your thinking into the past through assumptions and logic. The study of the past is not science, it is a different branch of philosophy. It is labelled "science" by those who specialise in it to give it a greater aura of certainty than it deserves.

In this case, science tells us the genetic differences between Aboriginal and European people. It does NOT tell us how long it takes such differences to accumulate - because that is the past, and we don't know it. That information is determined by extrapolation - scientists believe that group X and Y split 10,000 years ago, and their genetic differences are known, so this is used to calculate an estimated rate or accumulation of genetic differences. That rate is then applied to the data on Aboriginal and European people.

The raw data may be "there are 3x as many differences between Aborigines and Europeans as there are between group X and Y". The logical reasoning would then be that "we believe that group X and Y split 10,000 years ago, and therefore Aborigines and Europeans split 3x as long ago as that, so it must have been 30,000 years".

At some point though it all comes back to beliefs about the past, and the data is interpreted partly informed by presuppositions about the past. The difference between Creationist and Evolutionist scientists is simply that the Creationist takes their presuppositions from scripture (then using that to interpret the data), while the Evolutionist takes their presuppositions from evolutionary philosophy and uses that to interpret the data.

In reality the same data can usually be interpreted in both ways. It is wrong to say that one viewpoint is "the fact". There are no "facts" determined by historical science - as it is not verifiable. It is all hypothesis. There are just more and less plausible hypotheses.
 
That's your choice to believe this and you'll forgive me if I choose to believe that the world is much older.

Genesis is to me the Word of God as written down by mostly illiterate nomadic tribesmen. The big things they got right but the details they had to describe within the limits of their contemporary understanding. To them the concept of thousands of years seemed like forever. The mathematical concept of one million was unimaginable for most people even into the Roman era when the term legion was accepted as meaning many because a legion was generally composed of ten thousand soldiers.

In any case the Australian aborigines are demonstrably a genetically isolated group who would be wholly absent any distinctly non-Aboriginal genetic markers that arose in the past~30,000 years.
I'm a creationist through and through. But I do listen to a few "out of the boxers", Stephen Pidgeon being one. Considering all of the sacred writings (apocrypha for example), I do think it's highly possible that there were "others" here before Adam. A separate creation than the adamic line. Some call it a "gap theory".
 
Back
Top