The face of our ancestral mother

[Loki]

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence...face/face.html

Face of The Real Eve...

Reconstructing an Ancient Past

You are looking at the reconstructed face of one of the oldest-known modern humans, a woman who lived perhaps 100,000 years ago. She may be a member of the population that gave rise to all anatomically modern Homo sapiens, who migrated and survived out of Africa.

Facial reconstruction expert Richard Neave of Manchester, England, created this three-dimensional representation from the cast of the skull uncovered in the Qafzeh cave in Israel in 1969. The cast was provided by the Natural History Museum of London.

Rebuilding the features of a human face from skeletal remains is "done in anatomical way," says Neave. "It's a bit like dissection in reverse ... I used a soft wax and just re-created over the surface of the skull all the facial muscles. The eyes were inserted and all the basic underlying muscular structure was rebuilt over the face."

The result is the reconstructed face of a woman who lived relatively close — geographically and chronologically — to the African "real Eve." Her visage may give us a glimpse of what the genetic relative of all humans may have looked like.

"There are always areas of uncertainty," says Neave. "We don't know the shape of the ears, the tip of nose, the line of vermilion of the lips ... We do know the basic proportions of the face, whether the lips protruded forward or not, whether the eyes sloped upwards or downwards."

Neave reiterated that this woman, known scientifically as "Qafzeh 9," was truly modern, and was anatomically and evolutionarily no different from humans alive today.

[Pomor]

How do they know that the real Eve lived in this particular tribe or even in this particular place? 'She may be a member of a population' doesn't sound like a very scientific statement to me.

http://www.heretical.com/science/rafonda1.html

"The age of the human species has lately been estimated at between 150,000 and 250,000 years, based on studies of mitochondrial DNA. Those estimates were based on the assumption of clonal transmission of the mtDNA, and the cited studies invalidate that (Awadalla et al., 1999; Hagelberg et al., 1999; Eyre-Walker et al., 1999), but we do not know by how much the dates are off. Eyre-Walker has proposed that "Eve" may have lived twice as long ago as current estimates.4 If there were bottlenecks subsequent to a mtDNA replacement event, which wiped out older lines, it would seem that the sweep occurred more recently than it really did. Our few thousands of ancestral pairs could have occupied an area as small as Rhode Island and would have faced many natural catastrophes in their long period of isolation"

[Pomor]

In other words they found a 100.000 years old Negress and claim that she is the real Eve. Hilarious.

[Loki]

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence...k.html#changed

Q: I have been hearing about this for years, and finally The Real Eve gives me some kind of detail and confirmation. What I still don't understand is how humans physically changed during the migration from Africa to the Americas. How could we physically and genetically change from dark hair and dark skin to finer hair and paler skin?

A: In evolutionary terms, changes of skin and hair color are relatively minor events and can take place in a population over a period as short as 20,000 years. Other animal species can also show enormous differences in skin and hair pigmentation; for instance, the black panther is just a black or "melanistic" leopard. Our skin color is controlled by rather few genes. These produce melanin, a brown pigment. The normal or original state for modern humans is probably black because melanin protects against the harmful effects of the sun in the tropics. The melanin genes can mutate in various ways that stop our skin from making effective pigment. In northern Europe and northern Asia, this is beneficial, because too much melanin in a low-sun environment prevents production of vitamin D. Over thousands of years, people with paler skin survive better in the north and are "naturally selected" to survive. This is the most likely reason Europeans and northern Asians are pale-skinned.

[Awar]

Is this the definitive word about pigmentation ( I think I agree with it ).

Anyway, how do they know what pigmentation she had?
Perhaps she had this paleo-negroid phenotype, but I think they can't really know her skin-color.

[cosmocreator]

I don't believe the Eve theory. I'm a multi-regionalist. I think the reason this Eve theory exists is to attempt to validate the Bible -- Jewish and Christian. The Eve theory is wrong and so is the Bible.

[Loki]

I don't believe the Eve theory. I'm a multi-regionalist. I think the reason this Eve theory exists is to attempt to validate the Bible -- Jewish and Christian. The Eve theory is wrong and so is the Bible.

I would be inclined to agree with you, if I had a better grasp of genetics. We get fed a lot of info that genetics "prove" the Out of Africa theory & African Eve theory. But ordinary people like us cannot really say whether the geneticists got it right or not...

I guess we'll have to wait for further research. I definitely don't think my female ancestor 80,000 years ago looked like this gorilla of a negress.

[Sigrun Christianson]

That must be a joke. C'mon!

She is our genetic mother. Cleopatra was a Negress. Jefferson had an affair with his Negress slave. Suuuure. There's no agenda behind this, right?

[Stríbog]

She's got fricking red eyes. I guess Negroes 100,000 years ago were into drug use as much as Negroes today are.

[Sigrun Christianson]

She's got fricking red eyes. I guess Negroes 100,000 years ago were into drug use as much as Negroes today are.

@ Stríbog

Does anyone believe that Gawd, in his infinite wisdom, would have created that as our first kin? Surely even Gawd had some aesthetic notions!