ADAM AND EVE

It is pretty obvious to anyone reading my blog that, like Karl Marx, I consider religions as the Opium of the Masses.

Religion and intellect have knocked heads since the true founding of the Catholic Church at the Council of Nicea held around 350 AD.   From the earliest time through the Dark Ages The Church did everything in its power to discredit and destroy all forms of enlightenment from science to philosophy to mathematics.  

The massive body of knowledge that germinated in early Greece was considered heresy, and those intrepid enough to pursue enlightenment were put to death by The Church. 

Throughout the Dark Ages all accepted truths had to be based on the Bible as the only true knowledge.   And even today, great numbers of our population choose ignorance over knowledge, and insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Bible, a loose woven myth disguised as history, begins its story with Adam and Eve. 

Last night, as I lay awake in bed, as I often do, I considered the claim that through DNA we can trace the human race back to one woman somewhere is Africa – and African Eve.

 I don’t dispute that, but the more I considered this claim the more it seemed likely to me that there has to be more than one Eve.  

Now, I know that no one wants to read pages correlating math and history; and even though I spent the morning researching and correlating I won’t bore you with the minutiae. 

But, to give an overview I must start out with an explanation of exponential counting: you have two parents; four grandparents; eight great grandparents; sixteen great-great grandparents – the numbers double from each preceding generation.  

   

If you go back 20 generations (rounding off some numbers for ease of counting) you are directly kin to one million great-great… grandparents.   If you go back thirty generations you would be equally kin to one billion ancestors.

Now the trick is to track the population of the earth and determine the date when you are kin to everyone on earth. 

Using 20 years as the approximate length of a generation I determined that after 29 generations (the first generation is a zero) or 560 years - around the year 1460 -  our ancestors numbered 500 million: the same as the entire population of the earth in at that time.

If we pick any female in 1460 we have to consider her as an EVE for our generation.

Now, selecting that female from 1460 and counting her ancestors back into time we find that around the year 840 she is kin to 250 million ancestors: about the same number as the population of the earth in that year.   Therefore any female from the year of 840 can be considered and the second Eve.   

The population stabilizes to 200 million around the year zero; and the third Eve appears about 220 BC.      After this, approximately every 500 years we have a new Eve. 

Human population slowly decreases, until around 8,000 BC when we have an earth population of 5 million, dropping to 3 million about 10,000 BC.

If we continue backwards, somewhere between three and four million years ago the original Eve of our species walked across the savannas of Africa.  This is our African Eve.  

It is quite possible, if not probable, that someone will shoot holes all through this hypothesis; but that is the way science works.   

My wife gave me five books for Solstice and I probably could have better spent this time reading.

the Ol’Buzzard

A world clock worth checking out - there are many more.

O'B