- Note: This story, originally published
a few weeks ago, would seem to back
- the reserach and theories of Zecharia
Sitchin which state that humans were
- genetically altered...by someone else.
-
- Researchers say they've found the origin
of a genetic feature that sets modern man apart from prehistoric ancestors
-- the modern male sex chromosome.
-
- The chromosome, a Y-shaped bundle of
DNA that turns an embryo into a male, dates to Africa 150,000 years ago,
Peter Underhill told the American Society for Human Genetics on Thursday.
-
- Underhill said the modern Y chromosome
diverged from an ancestral version still found in 10 percent of Ethiopians,
25 percent of Sudanese and 33 percent of the Khoisan tribe in southern
Africa. "Nobody else in the world or in Africa has the ancestral (variant),"
Underhill said.
-
- Douglas Wallace of Emory University in
Atlanta said the new findings support a growing body of genetic research
tracing the origins of humanity "back to a common founding population
in Africa about 150,000 years ago."
-
- The newer variant appears to have resulted
from a chance DNA mutation. This mutation involved the substitution of
one biochemical for another on one rung of the twisted ladder that forms
the Y chromosome.
-
- It probably occurred in a single sperm
that fertilized an egg, yielding a male whose male offspring bore enough
sons to endow almost all of the 3 billion men on Earth with the new variant,
leaving the old branch to wither and all but die. This was possible because
there were just 5,000 or so humans on Earth at the time, Underhill said.
-
- Underhill found the mutation by examining
Y chromosomes, chemical by chemical. The team examined 900 human chromosomes
from such diverse groups as Chinese and Zulus.
-
- What makes the genetic event even more
remarkable is the stability of the Y chromosome. At least 95 percent of
the Y chromosome never changes, even when a father's genes recombine with
a mother's genes after fertilization.
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