there is a scientific Adam and Eve....forget the biblical story....and geneticists have been studying such for a bit now....the project is still going on....National Geographic and IBM are the sponsors of the project....
there is some great info in this article about what is going on:
The National Geographic and IBM's Genographic Project: Charting the migratory history of the human species
there is some great info in this article about what is going on:
The National Geographic and IBM's Genographic Project: Charting the migratory history of the human species
...The advantage of the Y Chromosome is that it is handed down only by the male parent unmingled with a woman's DNA. So it can stay the same from generation to generation. It can only change with a mutation which is an accidental but natural change in the genetic code. This can happen to strengthen the immune system from newly emerged diseases.
Wells says that the project uses this molecule, DNA, which is contained in every cell in our body. (Our red blood cells kick out the nuclei when they become mature, so they don't actually contain any DNA, but pretty much every other cell in our body does.) This is the blueprint to make a version of you. You have to pass on half your DNA to your child in a shuffled way, a process called recombination. DNA is very long. It's made up of four nucleotide bases - A, C, G, and T - and it's the order of those that provide the information. Because it's so very long - it's three billion of those in length - you occasionally make a mistake when you're copying it and passing it along.Those are called mutations, and everybody carries some mutations that distinguish them from their parents, roughly 30 of them per genome per generation. When those are passed on through the generations, they become markers of descent. They occur very rarely, so the odds are that most sites are not going to have any. When they do happen they occur uniquely at a single site. You hardly ever mutate the same site twice. So when two people share these markers in common, it's a sign that they share ancestry at some point.
Dr. Wells says: "What we do is start in the present with DNA from people who are alive today and trace back through these lineages that are defined by the markers that have been passed on through many, many generations, back to the point where they share a common ancestor. When we do that with people who are members of the same family, we very quickly reach a point where they share a common ancestor. But, it turns out, we can also do that with people all over the world. By asking a really stupid question (it's pretty much hypothesis-free): 'Are we related, and if so, how are we related?' we trace back to a single ancestor on the Y chromosome, which, it turns out, is the most recent ancestor we all share. This man, this Y chromosome, existed 60,000 years ago. And it turns out he existed in Africa. That means our species was still limited to Africa in its distribution 60,000 years ago.It's only in the last 60,000 years, or 2,000 generations, roughly, that we have left Africa to go out and take over the world."
He says that the present-day inhabitants of Ethiopia, Sudan and southern Africa carry the clearest signals of our earliest ancestry, signals that have been lost in the rest of us. So they give us a glimpse of our 60,000 year-old Adam. Adam would have been fully modern, both in terms of his appearance and his brain function.
Wells says that DNA sequencing undergoes mutation every generation. It is because of this complete gradual mutation between 31,000 and 79,000 years ago that first Eurasian Adam, the ancestor of all non-Africans, came into existence. The latest spread of Y-chromosome lineage is known to have taken place nearly 10,000 years ago.
Spencer, on the basis of the study of mitochondrial DNA(passed on through the maternal family line) and the Y chromosome (passed from father to son), says that the modern-day man is not a descendant of Neanderthals and that the human race can trace its origin to one Adam and Eve.