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From: "Alister John Marsh" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] How old is Y-Chromosome Adam?..Finding NeMo Adam?
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:28:09 +1300
References: <AANLkTikwdqMnD_7GhV2qq7SAnveR_oSc_tUMLEy_PrM+@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikwdqMnD_7GhV2qq7SAnveR_oSc_tUMLEy_PrM+@mail.gmail.com>


Robert,

Since it has been reasonably established that at least some modern humans
have received up to 4% to 5% of their DNA from archaic human branches like
Neanderthal, and another archaic human branch, the position of who
Y-Chromosome Adam was is being blurred.

It can't positively be ruled out that one of the unusual 12 Y-DNA marker
haplotypes tested to date descends from Neanderthal on the male line. It
also can't be ruled out that one or many of the vast majority of human
living males who has not yet been Y-DNA tested is a Y line descendant of
Neanderthals. Many take the view that because it has not yet been
conclusively proved that either one of the unusual 12 marker haplotypes, or
one of the untested vast majority of living males is a male line descendant
of Neanderthals or another archaic branch of the human family, it is safe to
assume that no living males exist who are not either from Y Haplogroup A or
B.

Statistically if say 4% of Western European DNA comes from Neanderthals,
there superficially seems a statistical chance that somewhere at least one
Neanderthal Y line survives. But given that there have been frequent bottle
neck events pruning the Y tree in the past 100,000 years, I personally think
survival of a Neanderthal Y line is very low chance. But I like to keep
just a little thought in the back of my mind that perhaps a Neanderthal male
line is hiding somewhere.

Perhaps we are getting to the stage where we could start talking about lots
of Y Adams. We could have "AB Adam". We could have "Neanderthal/Modern
Human Adam" ("NeMo Adam" for short?.... or does that sound just a bit fishy?
Perhaps this thread could be changed to "finding NeMo Adam"?).

At a personal level, given that as a primarily Western European I likely
received 96% or my total DNA from the modern human line, and 4% from the
Neanderthal line, I tend to think of the "Neanderthal/Modern Human Adam" as
"the" human Adam.

The "Chimpanzee/Modern Human Adam" does have living descendants from more
than one living male line, but a modern human could not interbreed with a
Chimp. Modern Humans and Neanderthals could interbreed, so I tend to think
of them as the same species, making the Neanderthal/Modern Human male
ancestor a more relevant founding "Human" figure than say an "A/B Adam", or
and "R Adam".

John.

-------------------------------------------------
From: "Robert Hughes" <>
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 4:58 AM
To: <>
Subject: [DNA] How old is Y-Chromosome Adam?

> How old is Y-chromosome Adam?
> Dienekes has a thoughtful post in his December-30-2010 blog about
> finding the age of Y-Chromosome Adam with a little help from Tim
> Janzen.
> Dienekes writes in part:
> The presumed shallow time depth of the human Y-chromosome phylogeny is
> one of the main arguments of the recent Out-of-Africa theory. One of
> the major things I found while working on my Y-STR series is that
> point estimates from Y-STR variation are associated with huge
> confidence intervals, because of uncertainty about factors such as
> generation length, population history, mutation rates, even if the
> mutation model behaves "perfectly" in symmetrical stepwise fashion.
> More at the link below.
> Link:
> http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-old-is-y-chromosome-adam.html
> Regards, Robert
> When I told my doctor about my memory loss, he made me pay in advance.
>
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