Power-Politics Versus Fact
What would have happened had the German scientists informed Adolf Hitler that his ancestors had belonged to the Jewish community? It is evident in history that Politics, or the arrogance of Power, often refuses to acknowledge the Reality. Authoritarian rulers have always failed to realise the fact that Truth cannot be erased by killing a rationalist or a scientist. The majority of those rulers have tried to discriminate people on the basis of skin colours, religious practices, or castes. Interestingly, Genetical Science recently revealed that all human beings have a common root.
According to Genetics and Statistics, billions of people, living on the Earth today, have actually descended from a few different couples. However, these forefathers and foremothers were chronologically much younger than the early progenitors of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, who had spread out from the African continent about 70,000 years ago. They might have been roaming on the Earth’s surface as early as 1000-1500 years ago.
In his 2020 publication How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality, English Geneticist Adam Charles Rutherford explained the issue through a somewhat acceptable mathematical calculation. According to Rutherford, the current total population of the world is about 7.9 billion, and the global population is growing at a rate of roughly 1% per year. It can be assumed that one’s parents or two different persons were born to two separate pairs of parents or four persons. If it is assumed that those four persons had come from four different pairs of parents, then the number of parents directly related to one genetically was eight three generations ago. Similarly, the number was 16 four generations ago. The number doubles in this way at each step for every past generation. It is considered that there is a gap of more or less 25 years between two successive generations. If it continues like this, then the total number of male and female ancestors of only one lineage was about 110000000000 (1 Lakh 10 Thousand Crore), 1000 years (or 40 generations) ago. This number is 10 times more than all the Homo Sapiens Sapiens born (approximately 110000000000 or 11 Thousand Crore) till date.
Therefore, it had been conjectured that if the male and female ancestors of each and every human being in today’s world were different persons, then the global population may well have been about a billion times more 1000 years ago than the current population. However, it is scientifically estimated that the global population was 30 millions 1000 years ago. Rutherford made an attempt to solve this puzzle in 2020. The fact is our ancestors did not originate from completely independent lineages. Instead, there has been quite a bit of genetic familiarity among families who belonged to completely different socio-economic positions.
In his publication, Rutherford mentioned that the common ancestor of all the Europeans living today was alive only 600 years ago… around 1400 AD. This man can be traced in the genealogies of all European families of the present day. In an article published in scientific journal Nature in 2004, MIT scientist Douglas Rohde and his two colleagues showed through computer simulations that the oldest person in the genealogy of all present-day human beings could not have had an earthly life earlier than 1400 BC, chronologically. It means this ancient ancestor of ours was roaming somewhere on the Earth during the reign of Neferneferuaten Nefertiti (BC 1370 – 1330), the Queen of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt and the great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. If one goes back a few thousand years, the person arrives at a date before which all our male and female ancestors were identical. In the terminology of Genetic Demography, this particular period is called the ‘Genetic Isopoint‘.
According to Rutherford, the genealogies of two radically different families on either side of the globe would match up completely when they reach the Genetic Isopoint. “If you were alive at the Genetic Isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” he stressed. According to Rohde’s calculations, the Genetic Isopoint occurred much more recently – somewhere between 5300 and 2200 BC, although human beings had left Africa and started dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago.
As per scientific assumptions, the great apparent differences and diversity between human populations ended not so long ago. With the help of the enormous power of modern computers, scientists can calculate everything, including complexion, height, colours of eyeballs, skull structure due to heterogeneous mixing of genes from different ancestors, influence of environment on genes, geographical migration of different branches of human population, etc.
The outcomes of research on Genetic Isopoint naturally undermine notions, such as skin colours, purity of blood, or so-called pedigree. Standing at the opposite pole of pseudoscience, like Eugenics (which was based on politically-motivated racism), Rutherford and other geneticists have tried to prove that human beings are relatives. Their scientific thought process makes some politicians retrace their paths.
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