Scientists claim: "All humans are descended from just TWO people and a catastrophic event almost wiped out ALL species"

MtDNA mutation rate is much higher than scientists claim

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6424407/Every-person-spawned-single-pair-adults-living-200-000-years-ago-scientists-claim.html?fbclid=IwAR1LLXG8V2QEB6zyvuHR39u-8ZYCxdX1z8__Lli1cdHe5ftuDOjI7ZXXTQQ

Excerpt: "Scientists surveyed the genetic 'bar codes' of five million animals - including humans - from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race.

These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it's not just people who came from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, too

Stoeckle and Thaler, the scientists who headed the study, concluded that ninety percent of all animal species alive today come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than 250 thousand years ago - throwing into doubt the patterns of human evolution.

'This conclusion is very surprising,' Thaler admitted, 'and I fought against it as hard as I could.'

The new report from experts at the Rockefeller University along with from the University of Basel published the extraordinary findings in Human Evolution.

The research was led by Senior Research Associate Mark Stoeckle and Research Associate David Thaler of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

They mined 'big data' insights from the world's fast-growing genetic databases and reviewed a large literature in evolutionary theory, including Darwin.

Dr Stoeckle said: 'At a time when humans place so much emphasis on individual and group differences, maybe we should spend more time on the ways in which we resemble one another and the rest of the animal kingdom.'
 

We're also surprisingly similar to not just every other human, but every other species.

'If a Martian landed on Earth and met a flock of pigeons and a crowd of humans, one would not seem more diverse than the other according to the basic measure of mitochondrial DNA,' said Jesse Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

'Culture, life experience and other things can make people very different but in terms of basic biology, we're like the birds,' Dr Stoeckle added.

The 'mitochondrial DNA' examined in the research is that which mothers pass down from generation to generation and it showed the 'absence of human exceptionalism.'

'One might have thought that, due to their high population numbers and wide geographic distribution, humans might have led to greater genetic diversity than other animal species,' added Stoeckle.

'At least for mitochondrial DNA, humans turn out to be low to average in genetic diversity.' "

My comment: Previous studies over human mtDNA mutation rates have been quite controversial. The observed mtDNA mutation rate is much higher than what scientists claim. This was discovered by researchers who were studying mtDNA mutation rates from samples of Romanov family members. They noticed that human mtDNA mutation rate can be 20 times faster than other studies claim. Here's a study:

http://www.dnai.org/teacherguide/pdf/reference_romanovs.pdf

Excerpt: " And because heteroplasmy is caused by mutations, this unexpectedly high incidence suggests that mtDNA mutates much more often than previously estimated--as much as 20-fold faster, according to two studies that are causing a stir.

Regardless of the cause, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that "mitochondrial Eve"--the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people--lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa. Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old."

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/279/5347/news-summaries

Mitochondrial DNA appears to mutate much faster than expected, prompting new DNA forensics procedures and raising troubling questions about the dating of evolutionary events.