Human Genetic Ancestry

Human DNA fits one origin for all people, and three of four standard arguments against a single first couple fail. It does not fit a recent one: measured rates of lasting change put mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam over 100,000 years back, and Africa's genetic depth exceeds any post-Babel dispersal.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"None of the studies above set out to explicitly test the hypothesis that humans could have passed through a single-couple bottleneck." — Richard Buggs, Professor of Evolutionary Genomics, Queen Mary University of London, 20171

"Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old.  No one thinks that's the case, but at what point should models switch from one mtDNA time zone to the other?" — Ann Gibbons, Science, 2 January 19982

"Thus, no origin outside of Africa had the explanatory power of an origin anywhere in Africa." — Sohini Ramachandran and colleagues, 20053

Summary

Human DNA records ancestry in four ways.  The whole genome holds the variety that every person inherited from both parents.  Mitochondrial DNA passes from mother to child alone.  The Y chromosome passes from father to son alone.  And the way diversity is spread across the map shows where people spread from.  Seven articles under this heading test each record against the young-earth reading, in which every person descends from Adam and Eve about 6,000 years ago and from Noah's family about 4,500 years ago.  This page gathers their verdicts.

The genetics agrees with Genesis on the shape of human ancestry and disagrees with it on the depth.  On shape, every living person traces back to one maternal line and one paternal line, human diversity is shallow and nested, and the non-African world fits a spread through the Near East.  None of these tells the two histories apart, but none counts against Genesis either.  Three of the four standard arguments against a single first couple do not test it, and BioLogos quietly cut its own claim from 18 million years to half a million.  On depth, every measured rate of lasting change puts mitochondrial Eve at 126,000 years or more, and the largest pedigree measurement of the Y rate puts the root of the Y tree at 163,000 years.  The median time back to four ancestral copies of a stretch of the genome, which is all one couple can carry, is 495,000 years.  Recombination has counted about 1,800 to 2,000 generations since Neanderthal genes entered Europeans, against 160 generations in 4,000 years, and that count uses no calendar at all.

The young-earth reading has its best evidence in the mitochondrial clock and in the arguments its critics overstated.  The gap between mother-child mutation rates and tree-based rates is real, was published in Nature Genetics, and once seemed to date Eve to about 6,500 years.  It has its worst evidence in the places where nothing needs to be assumed:  a deep family tree on Norfolk Island that watched mutations become permanent and found 2 where the young-earth rate predicts 54.6, a Y chromosome whose family and tree rates agree, and a generation count read straight off recombination.  The rescues offered so far either cannot be tested, or were tested and supply a small fraction of what is needed, or point the wrong way.

What the data support is one human family with a deep history.  A young-earth genetics would need a mechanism, not yet specified or measured, that moves several independent clocks together by the same large factor.

The seven articles:

  1. Adam, Eve, and Human Genetic Diversity Linkage disequilibrium, population-size curves and lineage sorting do not test a single couple, and almost every single-letter site carries two variants, well within what a couple can hold. Two measurements stand unanswered: HLA-DRB1 has up to nine lineages older than the human-chimpanzee split against a ceiling of four, and the median TMR4A is 495,000 years.
  2. Mitochondrial Eve and the Young-Earth Timeline Its three earlier versions were merged into this one article on 2026-10-27. The fast pedigree rate counts mutations appearing, the slow tree rate counts mutations staying, and the young-earth clock uses the first as the second. A deep pedigree that counted only permanent changes matches the tree rate.
  3. Y-Chromosome Adam and Noah The Y has no pedigree-versus-tree gap. The pedigree rate alone dates the root to 163,000 years. The young-earth Y clock rests on choosing one row of a quality-filter table, and Noah's three sons leave no signature at the root.
  4. Out of Africa or Out of Babel? Refitting the diversity gradient from raw genotypes puts the start in Africa, not Mesopotamia, but only because of where the African populations sit. Africa's private alleles and the recombination generation count are the hardest data for a post-Babel spread.
  5. Archaic Admixture Neanderthal DNA survives in every living population studied and Denisovan DNA in Melanesians, so the archaic humans had fertile children with ours. The depletion of that ancestry on the X chromosome, a sign of partial hybrid sterility, has no creationist answer.

Part 1: Can every human descend from one couple?

The question.  Genesis makes Adam and Eve the parents of all people, and Noah's family the parents of all people after the Flood.  Could the genetic variety of eight billion people have come through one couple a few thousand years ago?  The usual answer from population genetics is a firm no.

The verdict.  The firm no was overstated, and two measurements still stand against a recent couple.  Three of the four arguments in Dennis Venema's Adam and the Genome measure something real but do not test a one-generation crash to two people.  The person who says so most bluntly is Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist who accepts common descent:  "LD, ILS, and Ne are irrelevant lines of evidence, that do not rule out a single-couple bottlenck in any relevant time scale".4  The fourth argument, counting variants, fails at the level of single letters.  Of 57,190 variable sites in 896 nuclear genes, 113 carried three variants and none was reported with four,5 and a couple carries four copies of every stretch of their genome.  What survives is depth.  HLA-DRB1, an immune gene, has at most nine lineages older than the human-chimpanzee split, after von Salomé's group moved four of the 13 into a later radiation;6 a couple can carry four.  And the median time back to four surviving lineages across the genome, the TMR4A, is about 495,000 years:  "For humans alive today, the median TMR4A is approximately 500,000 years ago".4

The strongest point for the young-earth side.  The mainstream case retreated in print.  In 2014 BioLogos said "There is in fact no point in our evolutionary history over the last 18 million years or more where our lineage was reduced below 10,000 individuals";  the revised page says the data rule out a single couple "for at least half a million years".7  That is a cut by a factor of 36 in the time depth of the claim, with no correction notice.  Richard Buggs, an evolutionary geneticist, reviewed the studies Venema relied on and found that none of them was designed to test a two-person bottleneck.1  A fast-growing founding pair keeps about two-thirds of the heterozygosity of the population it came from, which is why the shallowness of human diversity, discussed under Race, Skin Color, and Common Ancestry, fits a young family as well as an old one.

The strongest point against it.  No young-earth calculation meets either surviving measurement.  The best fitted single-couple model, by the Stockholm statistician Ola Hössjer and the biologist Ann Gauger, neither of them a young-earth creationist, puts the couple at about 500,000 years:  "A single couple 25,000 generations ago (about 500kya) having primordial heterozygosity of 0.012".8  No fit at 6,000 years exists on either side.  The child article's own arithmetic shows why:  6,000 years of mutation separates two lineages by about 0.0005% of their sites, while lineages split at the human-chimpanzee divergence differ by 0.52%, a thousandfold shortfall.  Created diversity can close that gap by definition.  John Sanford, Robert Carter and colleagues proposed that each of Eve's egg cells was created separately, so "there is almost no limit to the number of variant alleles and linkage blocks that could have existed in Eve's ovaries".9  Their own verdict on the model is accurate:  "This model is not only consistent with what is observed, it would appear to be very hard to falsify."9

Where the article itself is soft.  TMR4A has not been through peer review, and HLA genes show some convergent evolution, which would inflate a lineage count.  Neither weakness has been pressed by a published calculation.  Whether eight people could found a viable population, and why a crash spares heterozygosity but not the number of variants, is argued in Population Bottlenecks.  → Adam, Eve, and Human Genetic Diversity

Part 2: Mitochondrial Eve

Mitochondrial Eve and the Young-Earth Timeline answers this question.  It was three separate versions until Eric had them merged on 2026-10-27;  the merged article keeps the study-by-study rate table by region.

The question.  Every person's mitochondrial DNA comes from their mother, so all living maternal lines meet in one woman, called mitochondrial Eve.  That much is not disputed, and it is expected whether or not Eve was the only woman alive.  The dispute is her date.  In 1997 Thomas Parsons and colleagues counted mutations directly between mothers and children and wrote:  "Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock would result in an age of the mtDNA MRCA of only ~6,500 y.a., clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans."10  Nathaniel Jeanson of Answers in Genesis later pooled three whole-genome family studies, 63 mutations in 398 transmissions, and got 0.158 mutations per genome per generation.11  Run backwards, rates like these put Eve within a few thousand years.

The verdict, shared by all three versions.  The measurements do not establish a 6,000-year Eve.  The reason is a quantity that both sides call a "mutation rate".  Each cell carries hundreds to thousands of mitochondrial genomes, so a new mutation starts as a minority among many copies, and most such minorities are lost within a few generations.  The fast family rate counts mutations appearing.  The slow tree rate counts mutations staying.  In the largest single study, Wei Wei and colleagues saw 477 new minority variants across 1,526 transmissions and only 3 that came near taking over a child's cells.12  The young-earth clock uses the appearing rate as if it were the staying rate.

The test that separates them needs no radiocarbon and no chimpanzee.  In 2022 Jennifer Connell's team sequenced whole mitochondrial genomes through 345 mother-child transmissions in the documented Norfolk Island genealogy.  They found nine mutations, seven of them minorities and two fixed.  Jeanson's rate predicts 54.6 fixed changes.13  The fixed-only rate is 1.30 × 10⁻⁸ per site per year, against the tree rate of 1.665 × 10⁻⁸ that Pedro Soares's team derived from more than 2,000 genomes.14  A pedigree measuring permanent change gives the tree rate.

The strongest point for the young-earth side.  The gap is real and it is mainstream.  Science reported it as a live problem in 1998, and a young-earth reader can quote its news page directly.2  The circularity charge is half right:  Soares's clock is calibrated on an assumed human-chimpanzee split, so a reader who denies that split may set it aside.  And the largest family study ever run, deCODE's 116,663 Icelandic transmissions with 8,199 mutations, gives about 0.07 mutations per transmission.  Taken raw, that dates Eve to about 24,000 years, a fourfold gap rather than a fortyfold one.  Robert Carter of Creation Ministries International states the position fairly:  "These rates are a bit too slow for the creationist (we'll deal with that later) and a bit too fast for the evolutionist."15

The strongest point against it.  deCODE's count is an appearing rate by construction.  The authors "used a minimum read frequency threshold of 0.05 for detecting mutations in individuals", so a variant in one copy in twenty counts.16  Clocks calibrated on dated ancient genomes use no ape and land at 126,000 to 161,000 years.  And the newest measurement shows which way sensitivity pushes.  Barbara Arbeithuber's team sequenced 80 single human eggs from 22 women with an error rate below one in ten million.17  Read as a clock, their rate dates Eve to about 1,900 years, younger than any young-earth model.  The more sensitive the instrument, the faster the appearing rate.  The staying rate does not move.  The same study found no rise in egg mutations between ages 20 and 42.  That undercuts the best rescue on offer, a higher mutation rate in older ancient mothers, though it rests on 22 women, and egg mutations do rise with age in mice and macaques.

How the three versions differ.  The main article presses hardest.  It treats Norfolk Island as decisive, ranks nine rescues, and adds its own regressions on 229 ancient genomes and its own parse of the reference tree.  The second version is more guarded.  It stresses that Norfolk Island rests on only two fixed changes, treats deCODE's corrected dates as sensitivity checks rather than estimates, and names the best open young-earth research path:  a model of specified created starting sequences, tested against family data, the tree and ancient genomes together.  The Astra rewrite makes the same points more briefly.  None of the three finds a 6,000-year Eve in the data.  Part 6 lists where they disagree.  How clocks are calibrated in general is the subject of Molecular Clocks.

Part 3: Y-chromosome Adam

The question.  Every man's Y chromosome comes from his father, so all living male lines meet in one man, called Y-chromosome Adam.  On a young-earth reading he is Noah, about 4,500 years ago, since every man after the Flood descends from Noah through Shem, Ham or Japheth.  Nathaniel Jeanson and Ashley Holland made the case in 2019:  "We show that pedigree-based mutation rates from high-coverage sequence runs are hidden in the evolutionary literature, and we demonstrate that these rates confirm a 4,500-year history for human paternal ancestry."18

The verdict.  The human Y tree is not 4,500 years old, and the Y is where that conclusion rests on the least assumed machinery.  Unlike mitochondrial DNA, the Y has no gap between family rates and tree rates.  Yali Xue's team, measuring the first Y rate directly in a Chinese family whose common ancestor was born about 1805, wrote:  "No discrepancy in the pedigree or evolutionary rate was evident."19  Agnar Helgason's team at deCODE then used 753 Icelandic men in 274 male lines, covering 1,365 father-son transmissions, and got 8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰ mutations per position per year.20  Six estimates by three independent methods, from families, archaeology and ancient DNA, span a factor of only 1.36.  On the Helgason rate alone, with no fossil, no radiometric date and no ape, David Poznik's dated tree of 1,244 men puts the root at 163,000 years.21

Where the young-earth Y clock comes from.  Jeanson and Holland argue that low-coverage sequencing misses real mutations, so the high-coverage studies give rates "10- to 17-times faster".18  The child article tested that inside Helgason's own data and found the rate flat across sequencing depth, a Spearman's rho of −0.054 over 739 branches.  Their high-coverage figure is real arithmetic, but it reads father-son differences from one row of Monika Karmin's supplementary table, after one quality filter of several.22  Read every row of that table as a rate and the same tree comes out anywhere from 1,857 to 89,658 years old.  A 4,500-year tree needs 33 to 48 times Helgason's measured rate.  The disagreement is not about Scripture against evolution.  It is about which row of one table counts as a mutation rate.

The strongest point for the young-earth side.  Filtering does dominate rate estimates, and Robert Carter has said so better than any critic:  "It is not trivial to derive mutation rates from sequencing data, because the error rates inherent in the data are on the same order of magnitude of the in vivo mutation rate."23  The one near three-way split in the tree is real:  the stem below the branch called CF is only four mutations long, and Jeanson found it.  Karmin's team did find a sharp collapse in male diversity "at around 8–4 kya", when female effective population size was "up to 17-fold higher than the male",22 the most Flood-shaped result in the mainstream literature.  Its date, though, is built from the very rate a young-earth model rejects;  compress the tree to 4,500 years and the collapse lands inside the last 150 years.  And Carter, Stephen Lee and John Sanford accept the measured pedigree rate rather than Jeanson's.  Their own table of founder ages runs from 3,110 to 52,900 years on average, and they print it.24

The strongest point against it.  The Saqqaq man of Greenland is the one test that needs no date a young-earth reader rejects.  His hair is radiocarbon-dated to "4,044 ± 31 14C yr bp",25 which is inside a young-earth timeline, and he carried haplogroup Q1a.25  On a 4,500-year tree his Y should sit within a few dozen mutations of the root.  It sits deep in the crown of one of the youngest major branches, and no young-earth source has addressed it.  The rescue that ancient fathers were older and passed on more mutations, called patriarchal drive, is real but small.  Noah at 500 years contributes about 3.86 Y mutations per son, and Carter's own convex model supplies 3 to 4 percent of what the tree needs.  Below the root the tree is a ladder of two-way splits.  The four-mutation CF stem lies four splits and about 1,615 mutations below the deepest sampled split, so making it Noah leaves the A and B lineages older than the Flood.

Y-Adam and mitochondrial Eve need not be a couple.  Each is the last common ancestor along one line of inheritance, a fact about which lines happened to survive, not a census of the first people.  When one previously unsampled African American man's Y was sequenced in 2013, the estimated root moved by roughly 200,000 years.  Fernando Mendez's team drew the lesson:  "This underscores how the stochastic nature of the genealogical process can affect inference from a single locus."26  → Y-Chromosome Adam and Noah

Part 4: Out of Africa or out of Babel?

The question.  Human genetic diversity falls steadily with distance from Africa.  The mainstream reads this as a chain of founder groups leaving Africa about 60,000 years ago, each carrying a sample of the diversity behind it.  Creationist writers read the same map as a spread from Mesopotamia after Babel, about 4,000 years ago on the Masoretic chronology, with Africa settled early and holding the most diversity because it held the most people.  Both are dispersals from one place, so the gradient can be refitted from any starting point and the fits compared.

The verdict.  The child article ran that test on the raw public genotypes behind Sohini Ramachandran's 2005 study:  783 microsatellite markers in 1,027 people from 53 populations.  An origin at Addis Ababa explains 85.9% of the variation in diversity, and one at Babylon 64.7%.  Ramachandran's own scan found the same:  "no origin outside of Africa had the explanatory power of an origin anywhere in Africa."3  But the child also found something both sides usually leave out.  Drop the eight African populations and refit, and the gradient stops choosing:  Ararat 0.854, Babylon 0.853, Addis Ababa 0.850.  The gradient fixes a direction, with Africa at the diverse end.  It does not fix a birthplace.

The strongest point for the young-earth side.  The non-African world fits a Near Eastern staging post as well as it fits Ethiopia, and Out of Africa says the same thing about the route.  Karmin's Y study found "a cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time interval at 47–52 kya",22 which is the shape of one dispersal from one place.  The mainstream cannot agree where in Africa the expansion began, and its candidates are thousands of kilometres apart.  The size of the Addis-over-Babylon gap rests partly on three African samples of three, five and seven people;  dropping them halves the gap, though it does not reverse it.

The strongest point against it.  Africa does not just hold more diversity.  It holds diversity of a kind a young dispersal cannot make.  At matched sample size, Africa has 0.168 private variants per marker, found nowhere else, against 0.017 to 0.031 in every other region.  On a Babel model each of those is a post-Babel mutation, so African mutation rates would have had to run five to ten times faster than everyone else's.  The rescue that Africa grew largest was tested on these data in 2005 and failed:  "we could not detect any effect of the historical census size of the populations".27  Jeanson's rescue, that Africans had shorter generations and so more of them, was measured in 2023 and runs the other way.  Richard Wang's team read generation intervals from the mutation spectra of 1,247 families and found 20.1 to 21.0 years for East Asians, Europeans and South Asians "compared to the African population, 26.9 ± 3.5 years".28

The measurement no calendar touches.  When Neanderthal genes entered the ancestors of Europeans, they came in long unbroken stretches that recombination has cut shorter every generation since.  Measuring how short they are now counts generations, not years.  Sriram Sankararaman and colleagues, using a recombination map built by watching crossovers in living Icelandic families, found 1,805 to 1,993 generations.29  Four thousand years at 25 years a generation is 160.  Rejecting radiometric dating and molecular clocks does not touch this number, and no creationist author found in this project's search has addressed it.  → Out of Africa or Out of Babel?

The rest of the Babel evidence, the text of Genesis 10 and 11, the Mesopotamian archaeology and the age of the language families, sits under Babel, Language, and Human Dispersal.  How much of one modern people's ancestry genetics can trace to an ancient one is tested in Are Today's Jews Descended from Ancient Israel?, which finds a large Levantine share in most Jewish communities and warns that genetics detects ancestry, not covenant descent.

Part 5: The key numbers side by side

Each child compares the data with the young-earth date for its own event:  about 6,000 years for Adam, Eve and mitochondrial Eve, about 4,500 years for Noah, and about 4,000 years for Babel, all on the Masoretic chronology.  The longer Septuagint chronology, weighed under Babel, Language, and Human Dispersal, adds well under a factor of two to any of these, so it changes none of the gaps below by more than that.

Article Measurement Value What a young-earth reading needs Source
Single couple Variable single-letter sites with three variants, of 57,190 113, and none with four At most four per site Hodgkinson 20105
Single couple HLA-DRB1 lineages older than the human-chimpanzee split At most 9 of 13 At most 4 von Salomé 2007,6 IPD-IMGT/HLA 3.65.030
Single couple Median time back to four ancestral lineages, TMR4A 495,000 years About 6,000 years Swamidass 20224
Single couple Most recent fitted single-couple model About 500,000 years About 6,000 years Hössjer and Gauger 20198
Single couple Divergence 6,000 years of mutation can build between two lineages About 0.0005% of sites 0.52% for lineages split at the human-chimpanzee divergence Child article's own computation
Mitochondrial Eve Mean distance from the tree's root to a living genome 57.1 substitutions 0.238 lasting changes per genome per 25-year generation Behar 201231
Mitochondrial Eve Young-earth pedigree rate 0.158 per genome per generation, Eve at about 9,000 years 0.238 Jeanson 201511
Mitochondrial Eve New minority variants against near-fixed ones, same 1,526 transmissions 477 against 3 All appearing changes treated as lasting Wei 201912
Mitochondrial Eve Fixed changes in 345 Norfolk Island transmissions 2 observed 54.6 at Jeanson's rate Connell 202213
Mitochondrial Eve Rate of fixed changes, Norfolk Island 1.30 × 10⁻⁸ per site per year, Eve at about 246,000 to 264,000 years About 5.7 × 10⁻⁷ Connell 202213
Mitochondrial Eve Tree rate, calibrated on the chimpanzee split 1.665 × 10⁻⁸ per site per year, Eve at 207,000 years About 5.7 × 10⁻⁷ Soares 200914
Mitochondrial Eve Rates calibrated on dated ancient genomes, no ape Eve at 126,000 to 161,000 years About 6,000 years Main child article, from Fu 2013, Rieux 2014 and Posth 2016
Mitochondrial Eve deCODE, every mutation seen in 5% of reads 0.0703 per transmission, Eve at about 24,000 years raw; 61,000 and 360,000 on two corrections that are sensitivity checks, not estimates 0.238 Árnadóttir 202416
Mitochondrial Eve Mutations counted inside single eggs 0.743 per genome per generation, Eve at about 1,900 years 0.238 Arbeithuber 202517
Y-chromosome Adam Pedigree Y rate, 1,365 Icelandic transmissions 8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰ per position per year 33 to 48 times faster Helgason 201520
Y-chromosome Adam Spread of six Y rate estimates by three methods A factor of 1.36 A family-versus-tree gap like mitochondrial DNA's Xue 2009,19 Helgason 2015,20 Petr 202032 and others in the child
Y-chromosome Adam Root of the Y tree 163,000 years on the pedigree rate, 190,400 on the ancient-DNA rate About 4,500 years Poznik 201621
Y-chromosome Adam The same tree read through each row of a quality-filter table 1,857 to 89,658 years One row chosen as the rate Karmin 201522
Y-chromosome Adam Young-earth high-coverage rate 10 to 17 times the published pedigree rates The whole gap Jeanson and Holland 201918
Y-chromosome Adam Y mutations Noah passes to each son at age 500 About 3.86 A root-to-tip budget of 1,303 to 1,654 Child article's own computation
Y-chromosome Adam Saqqaq man, Greenland 4,044 ± 31 radiocarbon years, haplogroup Q1a, deep in a young branch A Y within a few dozen mutations of the root Rasmussen 201025
Out of Africa or Babel Fit of the diversity gradient, all 53 populations R-squared 0.859 from Addis Ababa, 0.647 from Babylon Babylon at least as good Child's refit of Ramachandran 20053
Out of Africa or Babel The same fit without the African populations 0.850 Addis Ababa, 0.853 Babylon, 0.854 Ararat Babylon at least as good Child's refit
Out of Africa or Babel Private variants per marker at matched sample size Africa 0.168, other regions 0.017 to 0.031 African mutation five to ten times faster Child's own computation
Out of Africa or Babel Generation interval over the past 10,000 generations Africa 26.9 ± 3.5 years, others 20.1 to 21.0 Africa shorter Wang 202328
Out of Africa or Babel Generations since Neanderthal genes entered Europeans 1,805 to 2,043 About 160 Sankararaman 201229

How to read the mitochondrial rows.  A shortfall factor means nothing until it names the rate taken as the rate of lasting change.  Against deCODE's raw count, a 6,000-year Eve needs mutations about 4 times faster than measured.  Against the dated ancient genomes it needs about 21 to 27 times.  Against Norfolk Island's fixed changes it needs about 44 times.  Every rate that counts mutations staying puts Eve at 126,000 years or older.  Every rate that counts mutations appearing puts her at 24,000 years or younger.  That split, not any single row, is the finding.

What the four records share.  They are independent.  The autosomes, the mitochondria and the Y chromosome are inherited by different routes, and the Babel test uses geography and recombination rather than any mutation clock.  On the mainstream reading they agree on a history tens to hundreds of thousands of years deep.  On the young-earth reading each needs its own mechanism:  created diversity for the autosomes, an appearing rate read as a staying rate for the mitochondria, a filter choice for the Y, and for Babel both faster African mutation and about ten times more recombination per generation than is measured today.  A single mechanism that moved all four together by the same factor would be a real alternative.  None has been proposed.

Part 6: Where the articles disagree

The first six articles agree on every verdict.  They disagree on six points of argument, and one of those matters.

  1. Do three wives on the Ark predict a three-way root in the mitochondrial tree? The main mitochondrial article says yes and that the prediction fails, since the reference tree's root has exactly two branches. Out of Africa or Out of Babel? repeats the point. The second and Astra versions say three founders do not require a three-way root. The second and Astra versions are right. The three wives' mitochondrial lines all descend from Eve through some 1,650 years of pre-Flood generations. In almost any genealogy two of them share a maternal ancestor more recently than either shares one with the third, so their tree is a two-way split followed by another, not a three-way star. Robert Carter says as much: "Depending on how closely related they were, there could have been 1, 2, or 3 mitochondrial lines among Noah's daughters-in-law."15 What the two-branch root does refute is Jeanson's 2016 reading, in which "three major nodes were visible in human mtDNA trees".33 Those nodes came from an unrooted drawing with no outgroup. The test that survives is the one the main article also runs: the length of the branches. Its three shallowest candidate founder nodes need branches of 10, 13 and 14 mutations built before the Flood, while measured rates supply 0.5 to 3.9 in 1,656 years, and only Jeanson's highest rate with 15-year generations reaches them. And the branch called L3, which holds nearly all non-African lines, sits 35 mutations below the root,34 all of which a young-earth model must place between the Flood and the dispersal. So the shape objection collapses into the rate objection, which stands. The same holds, more weakly, for the Y. Three brothers share one father, so a three-way split is a firmer expectation there, but Carter's survey of the options allows that "The three Y chromosomes of Noah's sons could have been identical or different", with "one, two, or three different versions".35 The Y article's verdict rests on the depth of the tree, and its point about the shape should be read as secondary.
  2. What Wei's 477 against 3 measures. The main article calls it a measured 160- to 470-fold gap between mutations appearing and mutations staying.12 The second version says it compares counts at one moment and does not follow the 477 to their fate. The second version is right about what the ratio measures. The main article's verdict does not depend on it, because Norfolk Island counts permanent changes directly.
  3. The deCODE corrections. The main article calls 61,000 years the like-for-like reading of deCODE and 360,000 the far bound. The second version calls both sensitivity calculations, not estimates. The second version's labelling is the safer one and the table above follows it. Only the raw 24,000 years comes from deCODE's published numbers without a modelling choice, and it is an appearing rate.
  4. Norfolk Island's age for Eve. The main article gives about 264,000 years and the second version about 246,000. Both are correct: the first converts Connell's yearly rate to a 25-year generation, the second divides 2 fixed changes by 345 transmissions. They differ by 7%.
  5. The ceiling on a fast Neanderthal mitochondrial line. The main article says that at 95% confidence the Neanderthal line "cannot have run faster than 1.36 times ours". The second version answers that a ratio of branch lengths becomes a ratio of yearly rates only once each branch's duration is supplied. Because a Neanderthal specimen stopped mutating when it died, a branch ratio of 1.01 on a young-earth timeline means roughly twice the yearly rate. The second version is right, and the main article concedes a factor of about two in its own caveat. The main article's other result is untouched: with no archaic date at all, the human branch itself needs about 98 changes since the split, which on 6,000 years is 0.409 lasting changes per genome per generation. The question belongs to The Genus Homo and its Neanderthal articles.
  6. Unlabelled shortfalls and a mislabelled node. The main article's Summary says a 6,000-year Eve "needs a factor of 26" without naming the rate it is measured against. The figure matches the radiocarbon-calibrated ancient-DNA rate of Rieux and colleagues, and the Summary should say so. Out of Africa or Out of Babel? says L3 "sits 39 substitutions below the root" and cites Behar 2012, whose figure is for a different node: "the path from the RSRS to the root of M already contains 39 substitutions."31 M is a daughter of L3. With L3 at 35, the two articles agree once the node is named.

Objections and responses

"Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam are not Adam and Eve, so their ages prove nothing."  They are not, and the mainstream says so too.  Each is the last common ancestor along one line, and a single newly sampled man once moved the Y estimate by about 200,000 years.26  But on a young-earth reading every person descends from Eve and every man from Noah, so these ancestors can be younger than Eve and Noah and never older.  Their ages are upper-bound tests of the model.  The Y is the sharpest of them.  Noah had one Y chromosome and his sons copied it, so every difference among living men's Y chromosomes is a mutation since Noah.  No created diversity can sit on the Y tree below him.

"Mutation rates were faster in the past."  Possibly, and no measurement can rule out every past change.  But the change would have to be specific.  It would have to make lasting mitochondrial changes about 21 to 44 times faster, Y mutations 33 to 48 times faster, recombination about ten times more frequent, and African mutation five to ten times faster than everyone else's.  It would have to do all this together, and do most of its work before the Saqqaq man of Greenland lived, since his Y already sits deep in a young branch.  Nobody has proposed a mechanism that does any one of these by a measured amount.

"The clocks assume evolution."  Some do.  Soares's mitochondrial clock is calibrated on an assumed human-chimpanzee split, and a reader who denies that split may set it aside.  Norfolk Island's fixed changes, Helgason's Y rate from Icelandic fathers and sons, and Sankararaman's generation count from a pedigree recombination map use no ape, no fossil and no radiometric date.  They give the same answers.

"Created diversity explains the deep variants."  For the autosomes it can, by definition, and that is the trouble.  The version that explains everything is, in its authors' words, "very hard to falsify".9  For mitochondrial DNA a varied Eve is coherent, and the second mitochondrial version names it as the best open line of research, but nobody has yet fitted a specified set of starting sequences to the family data, the tree and the ancient genomes together.  For the Y it is not available at all, for the reason given above.

"The geneticists disagree among themselves."  They do, and the children report it:  where in Africa the expansion began, whether the deepest Y lineage is 200,000 or 338,000 years old, what Connell's "16 times" headline compares, and how far deCODE's count should be corrected.  None of these disputes brings any rate of lasting change within a factor of ten of what a young earth needs.

"These articles found errors in their own earlier drafts, so why trust them?"  Part 6 lists where they still disagree.  Every disagreement is about an argument, not a verdict, and each was settled here from the sources.  Several corrections, on the three-way root, the Wei ratio and the Neanderthal ceiling, removed arguments that had been pressed too hard against the young-earth side.

"So genetics has disproved Adam and Eve."  No, and this is the objection to this page's verdict from the other direction.  Three of the four standard arguments do not test a single couple, and Swamidass, who accepts common descent, writes that the genetic evidence rules out a two-person bottleneck only "going back about 500,000 years (not 18 million)".4  What the data contradict is a recent couple, not a first one.  How the Genesis chronology itself is read is a separate question from what the DNA shows.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Computations nobody has run. An independent recomputation of TMR4A, published as a whole distribution. An intron-only HLA-DRB1 tree with a divergence threshold, which would settle whether the pre-split count is nine, four or something else. A recount of the high-coverage Danish father-son Y pairs from raw data, which Jeanson and Holland asked for. A spatially explicit post-Babel colonisation model that ends with African diversity above Levantine diversity. And a young-earth model of specified created mitochondrial sequences, tested against the family data, the tree and the ancient genomes together. Each child names its own list. All five are cheap on public data, and each could go against either side.
  2. Sources the children could not read in full. Helgason 2015's main text, the published Science version of Petr 2020, Bergström 1998 and von Salomé 2007 beyond their abstracts, and Ramachandran's supplementary figure showing the migration routes. None is likely to move a verdict, but each holds a locator or a method the children had to take on trust.
  3. Molecular Clocks is not yet written. It is the natural home for the general question of why family rates and tree rates differ, which these four records answer differently: a large gap in mitochondrial DNA, none on the Y.
  4. The three mitochondrial versions stay unmerged. Readers should treat the main article as the reference and the other two as checks on its tone and its weakest arguments, as Part 6 does.
  5. The weakest points of this page's own case. TMR4A is unrefereed. The DRB1 count depends on intron dating. The origin scan's margin depends on three small African samples. The Y tree's one thin stem is real. If TMR4A or the DRB1 count fell, the case against a recent couple from the autosomes would rest on divergence alone, which created diversity can absorb. The mitochondrial, Y and recombination records would be untouched. Each of these is where a young-earth researcher could most usefully push.

Verdict

Human DNA supports one human family and does not support a recent date for its founders.  The arguments most often used against a single first couple do not test it, and their authors have retreated in print.  The geography of diversity outside Africa fits a spread through the Near East.  Those points belong to the young-earth side, and the children state them plainly.

Four independent records disagree with a young date, and they disagree by large factors.  The autosomes carry a median of 495,000 years back to four ancestral lineages and an immune gene with up to nine lineages older than the human-chimpanzee split.  Mitochondrial DNA, read through rates of lasting change, puts Eve at 126,000 years or more, and the one family tree deep enough to watch changes become permanent found 2 where the young-earth rate predicts 54.6.  The Y chromosome has no family-versus-tree gap to exploit, and its pedigree rate alone puts the root at 163,000 years.  Recombination counts about 1,800 to 2,000 generations since Neanderthal genes entered Europeans, against 160 since a post-Babel dispersal.

The young-earth case is strongest where it criticises and weakest where it predicts.  It was right that the single-couple disproof was overstated, right that the mitochondrial family rate is real, and right that filtering drives Y rate estimates.  Where it has made a prediction that a measurement can check, a fast rate of lasting mitochondrial change, Jeanson's three-way split at Noah, an African population large enough or fast-breeding enough to hold the most diversity, the measurement has gone the other way.

What an honest young-earth position looks like here.  Say that all people are one family and that genetics agrees.  Say that the standard disproof of a first couple was overstated, and show the deletion.  Then say plainly that no measured rate dates mitochondrial Eve, Y-chromosome Adam or the human dispersal to within a few thousand years, that the Y cannot carry created diversity past Noah, and that recombination counts generations without a calendar.  A young-earth genetics needs a single mechanism that moves all four records together by the factors in Part 5.  Until someone specifies it and measures it, the data on the table favour a deep human past.

  1. Population Bottlenecks, on minimum viable populations, inbreeding, and why a crash keeps heterozygosity but loses variants.
  2. Molecular Clocks, on how DNA differences are turned into dates and why family and tree rates differ.
  3. Race, Skin Color, and Common Ancestry, on how shallow human diversity is and why that fits one family.
  4. Are Today's Jews Descended from Ancient Israel?, on what ancestry genetics can and cannot say about one people's origins.
  5. Babel, Language, and Human Dispersal, on the text, archaeology and languages behind the Babel question.
  6. The Genus Homo, on the Neanderthals and Denisovans whose genes and mitochondrial branches several children use.
  7. Humans and Chimpanzees, on the human-chimpanzee comparison behind every ape-calibrated clock.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Buggs, Richard J. A.  “Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis?”  Nature Ecology & Evolution Community.  Oct 29, 2017.  A blog post, written for the Nature Ecology and Evolution Community, that tests chapter 3 of Venema's book against the studies Venema cites, and argues that none of those studies set out to test a single-couple bottleneck.  Buggs is Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London and Senior Research Leader at Kew, and is a Christian who is not a young-earth creationist.  The article uses it because Buggs, an evolutionary geneticist and not a creationist, rejects Venema's addition of the African and non-African estimates.

    1. 1a.

      The question comes from religious friends, and asks whether a bottleneck of two is possible, not whether it is probable.  “None of the studies above set out to explicitly test the hypothesis that humans could have passed through a single-couple bottleneck.” ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Gibbons, Ann.  “Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock.”  Science 279(5347):28–29.  Jan 2, 1998.  A news article in Science, written after a 1997 workshop on human mitochondrial DNA mutation rates.  It reports that two studies suggested mitochondrial DNA mutates as much as 20-fold faster than assumed, and that forensic scientists changed their identification rules because of it.  The article uses it for the full passage about 'mitochondrial Eve' and six thousand years, and for the point that the discrepancy was taken seriously by scientists rather than invented by creationists.  Mirror:  Dnai.org

    1. 2a.

      The passage in full.  The paragraph break is shown as ¶, as printed.  “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. ¶ No one thinks that's the case, but at what point should models switch from one mtDNA time zone to the other?” ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Ramachandran, Sohini et al.  “Support from the relationship of genetic and geographic distance in human populations for a serial founder effect originating in Africa.”  PNAS 102(44):15942–15947.  Nov 1, 2005.  A research article in PNAS, published 1 November 2005, that tested whether genetic difference between human populations grows with distance from one origin, and tried 936 African and 3,274 non-African locations as that origin.  Every African origin fitted better (R² from 0.757 to 0.870) than any non-African origin (R² up to 0.744), and routing distances through waypoints raised the fit of the regression on geographic distance from 0.5882 to 0.7834.  The authors warn that the pattern should not be read as equilibrium isolation by distance, and this article relies on the origin scan for its claim that the dispersal came from Africa. ↩

    1. 3a.

      Section Results, page 15945:  “The 936 locations in Africa used as origins resulted in R² values ranging from 0.757 to 0.870 (the SD of R² within Africa was 0.017), whereas R² using the 3,274 non-African locations as origins ranged from 1.67 × 10−7 to 0.744 (the SD of R² outside of Africa was 0.245).  Thus, no origin outside of Africa had the explanatory power of an origin anywhere in Africa.” ↩ ↩

  4. 4.

    Swamidass, S. Joshua.  “The Misunderstood Science of Genetic Bottlenecks.”  Peaceful Science Prints.  2022.  A review presented at a workshop at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation and published by Peaceful Science Prints (revised 2023 and 2025), the author's own venue, so it is not peer reviewed, and its author is a party to the dispute.  It argues that the genetic evidence rules out a single-couple bottleneck of two only back to about 500,000 years, not 18 million, and that linkage disequilibrium (LD) and incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) do not test that bottleneck.  The article uses it because its author is not a creationist and says bluntly that LD and ILS are irrelevant to the single-couple question, and because the BioLogos corrections were not transparent or complete. ↩

    1. 4a.

      Section Summary box, page 1:  The misspelling "bottlenck" is the source's own.  “LD, ILS, and Ne are irrelevant lines of evidence, that do not rule out a single-couple bottlenck in any relevant time scale.”  Same box.  “The genetic evidence only rules out a single-couple bottleneck (2, not 10,000) going back about 500,000 years (not 18 million).” ↩ ↩

    2. 4b.

      Page 5:  “For humans alive today, the median TMR4A is approximately 500,000 years ago (Figure 3).”  Figure 3 caption:  Figure 3:  “a single-couple bottleneck is ruled out before 495,000 years ago … The black line identifies the median TMR4A, at 495,000 years ago.” ↩

  5. 5.

    Hodgkinson, Alan, and Adam Eyre-Walker.  “Human triallelic sites: evidence for a new mutational mechanism?”  Genetics 184(1):233–241.  2010.  A population-genetics analysis of human DNA variation that counts sites where three different letters occur in the population.  It finds about twice as many such sites as chance predicts, and proposes that two mutations can arise together in one person.  The article uses its count of three-allele sites, and the absence of any four-allele site, against the four alleles that two people could carry. ↩

    1. 5a.

      Page 236:  From resequencing data on 896 nuclear genes in 90–95 individuals, after removing CpG and coding sites.  “a total of 36,702 transitions, 20,375 transversions, and 113 sites that had three alleles segregating in the human population.”  That is 113 triallelic sites in 57,190 polymorphic sites, or 0.198%, and no four-allele sites are reported.  The paper's own point is that 113 exceeds the chance expectation of 61.15.  Its ratio of observed to expected is given as:  “ratio of observed over expected = 1.85, with a standard error of 0.17, P < 0.001”.  The absolute number is what matters here.  Not from this paper: the 1000 Genomes Phase 3 paper reports the same shape at scale, and its pipeline treats "high confidence bi-allelic variants" as the main class and adds multiallelic variants "onto the haplotype scaffold one at a time." ↩

  6. 6.

    von Salomé, Jenny et al.  “Full-length sequence analysis of the HLA-DRB1 locus suggests a recent origin of alleles.”  Immunogenetics 59(4):261–271.  2007.  A study of the complete sequence of the HLA-DRB1 gene (an immune-system gene) in humans and four other apes: chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan.  Its abstract reports that the DRB1*03 lineage is found in all five species, and that an ancestral version split within the last 5 million years into four human-specific lineages.  The article uses it because its authors, the Uppsala group whose 1998 intron dating destroyed the raw allele-count argument, assign four of the thirteen first-field lineages to one recent radiation from a single ancestor, so they are a hostile witness to the lineage count as well as to the allele count. ↩

    1. 6a.

      From the abstract.  “The DRB103 lineage has been found in human, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan.  An ancestral 'proto HLA-DRB103 lineage' appeared to have diverged in the last 5 million years into the human-specific lineages 08, 11, 13, and 14.” ↩

  7. 7.

    Venema, Dennis R.  “Adam, Eve and Human Population Genetics.”  BioLogos.  2014.  A 2014 BioLogos article by Venema, which BioLogos deleted in June 2021 and replaced with a substantially revised article under a different URL and author line, back-dated to November 12, 2014.  This copy is published by Peaceful Science, the website of Joshua Swamidass, with its insertions and deletions marked, and Swamidass is a party to the dispute, so its editorial framing is interested.  The article uses it because BioLogos deleted the strongest version of this claim in 2021, and the revised note called its conclusions "unchanged".

    1. 7a.

      Deleted in the 2021 revision.  “There is in fact no point in our evolutionary history over the last 18 million years or more where our lineage was reduced below 10,000 individuals”.  The revision replaced it with this sentence.  “As far as anyone can tell, the genetic data in fact rules out a single couple for at least half a million years.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Hössjer, Ola, and Ann Gauger.  “A Single-Couple Human Origin is Possible.”  BIO-Complexity 2019(1):1–20.  2019.  A modelling paper by Ola Hössjer, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University, and Ann Gauger of the Discovery Institute's Biologic Institute; neither is a young-earth creationist, and the paper does not argue for a young earth.  It simulates a population descended from one couple, compares the results with African allele-frequency and linkage-disequilibrium data from the 1000 Genomes Project, and finds that a single couple about 500kya fits the data.  The article uses it as the most technical work on the creationist side, and notes that its suggested date of 100kya, or more recently, was never fitted. ↩

    1. 8a.

      Page 9:  “Scenario 1  A single couple 100,000 generations ago (about 2mya) having zero heterozygosity (identical homozygous chromosomes), grows rapidly to a population of 10,000 people, then grows slowly and linearly to 16,000 people near the present.  Scenario 2  A single couple 25,000 generations ago (about 500kya) having primordial heterozygosity of 0.012, grows rapidly to a population of 16,000 people, then holds steady.”  The printed value is 0.012.  The raised 5 after its comma is the marker for the paper's own footnote 5, on the same page:  “In Scenario 2, most of the primordial heterozygosity is lost in the first few generations due to the slow growth rate.” ↩

  9. 9.

    Sanford, John C. et al.  “Adam and Eve, designed diversity, and allele frequencies.”  Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, 200–216.  Creation Science Fellowship.  2018.  A conference paper by John Sanford and Robert Carter of the FMS Foundation with four co-authors, arguing that Adam and Eve could have been created with many genetic variants already in their genomes.  Its simulations use a census of about 1,000 individuals with 100 new mutations per individual per generation, and it concludes that two people carrying such designed alleles could produce the allele-frequency patterns seen today.  The article quotes the paper's own account of its two models, including its claim that one of its models "would appear to be very hard to falsify."

    1. 9a.

      Page 208:  The Designed Gametes Model.  “assuming that Eve was created, not born, her eggs could not have formed in the normal way – so each gametogonium would have been miraculously formed and could potentially have been genetically unique.  Therefore, there is almost no limit to the number of variant alleles and linkage blocks that could have existed in Eve's ovaries.”. ↩

    2. 9b.

      Page 213:  “This model is not only consistent with what is observed, it would appear to be very hard to falsify.” ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Parsons, Thomas J. et al.  “A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region.”  Nature Genetics 15(4):363–368.  Apr 1997.  A genetic study that sequenced 610 base pairs of two hypervariable segments (HV1 and HV2) of mitochondrial DNA directly in 357 mother-to-child transmissions, not by RFLP analysis as one online rebuttal says.  It found a substitution rate of 2.5 per site per million years, about 20 times the rate predicted by phylogenetic analyses.  The article uses it because its authors worked out the age that this fast rate gives, about 6,500 years, and called it clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans.

    1. 10a.

      “Thus, our observation of the substitution rate, 2.5/site/Myr, is roughly 20-fold higher than would be predicted from phylogenetic analyses.  Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock would result in an age of the mtDNA MRCA of only ~6,500 y.a., clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans.”  The sentence immediately following, which creationist citations almost never include, reads:  “Even acknowledging that the MRCA of mtDNA may be younger than the MRCA of modern humans, it remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years.” ↩

  11. 11.

    Jeanson, Nathaniel T.  “A Young-Earth Creation Human Mitochondrial DNA 'Clock': Whole Mitochondrial Genome Mutation Rate Confirms D-Loop Results.”  Answers Research Journal 8:375–378.  2015.  A young-earth creationist article that builds a whole-genome mutation rate by pooling three whole-genome parent-child studies into one count of transmissions and mutations.  Its Supplemental Table 1, with formulas intact, reproduces every figure in Table 1 exactly when recomputed from its own inputs, so there is no arithmetic error in it.  The article uses it as the whole-genome step of Jeanson's clock argument.  Mirror:  Assets.answersresearchjournal.org ↩

    1. 11a.

      Table 1:  Table 1 pools Guo et al. 2013 (26 pedigrees, 0 mutations), Rebolledo-Jaramillo et al. 2014 (39 pedigrees, 0), and Ding et al. 2015 (333 pedigrees, 63): 63 / 6,594,462 bp-generations = 9.55 × 10-6 per base pair per generation, or 1.58 × 10-1 per genome per generation, 95% CI 0.119-0.197.  On the Rebolledo-Jaramillo row he writes:  “it is unclear whether homoplasmic mutations were even scored in the 39 mother-child pedigrees that were examined.  Since none were reported, I assumed that none occurred.”  Scoring a study zero because it did not report the quantity is not the same as the study reporting zero. ↩

  12. 12.

    Wei, Wei et al.  “Germline selection shapes human mitochondrial DNA diversity.”  Science 364(6442):eaau6520.  2019.  A genetic study that sequenced 1,526 mother-offspring pairs and counted the new heteroplasmies in each child.  Supplementary Table S2 lists 13 de novo D-loop variants, but the rate printed on the same row requires 131; every other row is exactly consistent with n = 1,526, and this one implies n = 151.  It is a dropped digit.  The article uses it as its main direct comparison of mutations appearing with mutations staying.  Mirror:  Repository.cam.ac.uk ↩

    1. 12a.

      477 de novo heteroplasmies above a 1% threshold across 1,526 transmissions, against only 3 de novo variants above 80% heteroplasmic fraction, two of which the authors attribute to ascertainment bias.  This is a 160-fold to 470-fold gap between mutations appearing and mutations approaching permanence, measured within a single dataset. ↩ ↩

  13. 13.

    Connell, Jennifer R. et al.  “Pedigree derived mutation rate across the entire mitochondrial genome of the Norfolk Island population.”  Scientific Reports 12:6827.  2022.  A pedigree study that sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of 225 individuals from 45 maternal lineages in the documented Norfolk Island genealogy, covering 345 mother-child transmissions, and found nine changes, seven of them heteroplasmic (a variant present in only some of a person's mitochondrial copies) and two fixed changes.  Counting all nine gives 0.058 mutations per site per million years; excluding the seven heteroplasmic changes gives 0.013, that is 1.30 × 10-8 per site per year, against the phylogenetic 1.665 × 10-8.  Jeanson's rate of 0.158 per generation predicts 54.6 fixed changes in 345 transmissions, and the probability of observing 2 or fewer is about 3 × 10-21; this is the cleanest direct measurement of the whole-genome fixing rate in a deep human pedigree and the most important source in the article. ↩ ↩ ↩

  14. 14.

    Soares, Pedro et al.  “Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock.”  American Journal of Human Genetics 84(6):740–759.  2009.  “one mutation every 3624 years”.  “a severe shortage of such uncontroversial episodes”.  A study that recalibrated the human mitochondrial clock for the whole molecule, using more than 2,000 complete mitochondrial genomes.  Its rate of 1.665 × 10-8 substitutions per nucleotide per year is calibrated on an assumed 6.5–7 million-year human-chimpanzee split, so it is a model output rather than a measurement, and the young-earth circularity critique is correct about this paper specifically.  The paper also concedes that there are few uncontroversial episodes available for archaeological calibration.  The article uses it for the phylogenetic rate that the young-earth argument has to overturn, and for the size of the selection correction, which the paper's own curve puts at 1.50 times at 0–1 thousand years falling to 1.13 times at 50–100 thousand years. ↩ ↩

  15. 15.

    Carter, Robert W.  “When did Eve live? An evaluation of the data.”  Creation Ministries International.  Sep 18, 2025.  A popular article on the Creation Ministries International website by Dr Robert Carter, published 18 September 2025 and headed "Biblically, about 6,000 years ago. Scientifically, the answer depends on the mutation rate."  It is Carter's current young-earth statement on the date of Mitochondrial Eve, and it concedes that the published pedigree rates are too slow for his timeline.  His separate peer-reviewed 2007 paper, "Mitochondrial diversity within modern human populations," in Nucleic Acids Research 35(9):3039–3045, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1888801/, is real and sound and does not date Eve; it locates the consensus of 827 sequences at the root of macrohaplogroup R and concedes "perhaps as few as 30 differences between the macrohaplogroup R consensus and the root node of all extant human mitochondrial sequences."  The article cites it as the current young-earth statement on the question and quotes its concessions.

    1. 15a.

      “Ten years later, a study done on the population of Norfolk Island calculated a rate closer to 0.03 mutations per generation.  This equates to one mutation every 33 generations, or about one every 1,000 years.  Another study done on the population of Iceland detected 8,199 mutations among 116,663 mother-child transmissions, which equates to a rate of 0.07 mutations per generation, about twice as fast as the Norfolk Island population.  These rates are a bit too slow for the creationist (we'll deal with that later) and a bit too fast for the evolutionist.”.  His six "appeals" section works through selection, drift, male dead ends, heteroplasmy, somatic mutations and hypervariable sites.  The drift argument is the strongest thing in the piece.  Carter derives that the neutral substitution rate equals the neutral mutation rate, r = Nμ/N = μ, which is correct standard population genetics.  The reply is that Kimura's identity takes as its input the rate at which mutations become heritable variants in an individual, and for mitochondrial DNA a new variant must first take over inside the mother's own germline before it is one.  The heteroplasmy layer sits underneath the population-genetic layer, and the identity does not reach into it.  His next appeal concedes the test:  “when a genealogy is deep enough, heteroplasmy clears up”.  Norfolk Island is a genealogy deep enough. ↩

    2. 15b.

      “Option 3 raises an interesting question.  How many lines would we expect to see?  Depending on how closely related they were, there could have been 1, 2, or 3 mitochondrial lines among Noah's daughters-in-law.  Thus, it is entirely possible that every mutation in the tree occurred post-Flood.  The fact that there is no obvious three-way split in the tree tells us something important.”  He does not then say what it tells us.  He also concedes:  “Most people don't realize it, but we cannot know upon which branch Eve sits on the mtDNA family tree.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Árnadóttir, Erla R. et al.  “The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees.”  Cell 187(15):3904–3918.e8.  2024.  A study from deCODE Genetics/Amgen in Reykjavik of 64,806 Icelanders from 2,548 matrilines, with 116,663 mother-child transmissions and 8,199 mutations, which the article calls the largest such study ever run.  The article gives the rate as 0.0703 mutations per genome per transmission.  The article uses it as its direct measurement of the pedigree rate, divided into the measured depth of the human mitochondrial tree, which gives roughly 24,000 years.  Mirror:  Decode.com ↩

    1. 16a.

      Section Results:  The detection rule, from the Results:  “we used a minimum read frequency threshold of 0.05 for detecting mutations in individuals, requiring at least one carrier to have a read frequency of ≥0.1.”  The comparison with Connell, from the same paragraph.  Reference 16 in their list is Connell et al. 2022, whose coding-region estimate is:  “2.87 × 10-6 mut/bp/gen … or 9.79 × 10-8 mut/bp/year … is higher than a previously published pedigree-based estimate of 2.59 × 10-8 mut/bp/year, where a higher frequency threshold (0.2) was used for detecting mutation events.”  The authors also measured their own false-positive rate against additional tissues: 3 of 284 for mutations with more than one carrier in a matriline, but 9 of 110 (8.2%) for mutations with only a single carrier.  Single-carrier mutations are 69% of everything they detected. ↩

  17. 17.

    Arbeithuber, Barbara et al.  “Allele frequency selection and no age-related increase in human oocyte mitochondrial mutations.”  Science Advances 11(32):eadw4954.  Aug 6, 2025.  The oocytes came from 28 eggs of eight women aged 20-29, 25 from six aged 30-34, and 27 from eight aged 35-42.  The age result, from the abstract:  “with age, mutations increased in blood and saliva but not in oocytes … mtDNA in human oocytes is protected against accumulation of mutations with aging and having functional consequences.”  The mixed model gives Z-test P = 2.7 × 10-3 for blood, 5.7 × 10-2 for saliva and 0.688 for oocytes; the permutation test on old versus young oocytes gives P = 0.550 and a 0.99-fold decrease.  The paper's count is 52 de novo mutations at minor allele frequency >= 1% over.  “70 mother-to-oocyte transmissions … the germline mutation rate to be 3.95 × 10-4 … and 1.95 × 10-5 … mutations per site per generation for the D-loop and coding region, respectively.”  The per-genome figure quoted in this article is computed from those two published rates over the regions they cover: 3.95 × 10-4 × 1,122 = 0.443 for the D-loop, and 1.95 × 10-5 × 15,359 = 0.300 for what the paper calls the coding region (protein-coding 11,341 bp, rRNA 2,513 bp and tRNA 1,505 bp).  The 88 bp of non-coding sequence outside the D-loop is reported separately and omitted here.  Together they give 0.743 mutations per genome per generation over the 16,481 bp rated, or 4.5 × 10-5 per site per generation and 1.8 × 10-6 per site per year at 25 years.  The implied Eve age divides Behar's 57.1 root-to-tip by that figure.  A 2025 study that applied duplex sequencing, whose error rate is below 10-7, to 80 single human eggs (oocytes) from 22 women aged 20 to 42, with blood and saliva from the same donors.  The article uses it as the only direct measurement of the quantity a young-earth rescue would need, and it points the wrong way for that rescue.  Mirror:  PMC ↩ ↩

  18. 18.

    Jeanson, Nathaniel T., and Ashley D. Holland.  “Evidence for a Human Y Chromosome Molecular Clock: Pedigree-Based Mutation Rates Suggest a 4,500-Year History for Human Paternal Inheritance.”  Answers Research Journal 12:393–404.  2019.  A genetics paper by two young-earth creationists, Nathaniel Jeanson of Answers in Genesis and Ashley Holland of Cedarville University.  It argues that the published pedigree studies of Y-chromosome mutation rates used low-coverage sequencing, which misses real mutations, and that high-coverage data give a rate that fits a 4,500-year history.  The article treats this as the young-earth case on the Y chromosome and tests its central causal claim against Helgason's published data. ↩

    1. 18a.

      Section Abstract:  “Pedigree-based mutation rates act as an independent test of the young-earth creation and evolutionary timescales.  Currently, evolutionists use published Y chromosome pedigree-based mutation rates to argue for an ancient origin of humanity.  However, their published studies rely on low-coverage sequence runs.  We show that pedigree-based mutation rates from high-coverage sequence runs are hidden in the evolutionary literature, and we demonstrate that these rates confirm a 4,500-year history for human paternal ancestry.” ↩

    2. 18b.

      “the two high coverage datasets revealed a per-generation mutation rate that was, on average, 10- to 17-times faster (table 1) than the previously published (i.e., Xue et al. 2009; Helgason et al. 2015) low coverage studies.”  Their Table 1 lists sequence coverage of 15.5x for Xue, 12.4x for Helgason, 35.5x for Karmin and 40x for Maretty, with per-generation rates of 3.0 × 10⁻⁸, 3.00 × 10⁻⁸, 3.02 × 10⁻⁷ and 5.0 × 10⁻⁷.  The Helgason interval they print, 2.85 × 10⁻⁸ to 3.16 × 10⁻⁸, appears nowhere in Helgason's abstract; recomputing it from Helgason's Supplementary Table 9 by an exact Poisson interval gives 2.77 × 10⁻⁸ to 3.25 × 10⁻⁸, so theirs is a slightly narrower normal approximation of the right quantity.  The column head misspells Xue as "Xu." ↩

  19. 19.

    Xue, Yali et al.  “Human Y Chromosome Base-Substitution Mutation Rate Measured by Direct Sequencing in a Deep-Rooting Pedigree.”  Current Biology 19(17):1453–1457.  Sep 15, 2009.  A direct sequencing study that compared the DNA of two men from one Chinese family, whose common ancestor was born about 1805, and counted the mutations between them.  It gives a Y mutation rate of 1.0 × 10⁻⁹ changes per base per year, and it found that eight of the twelve candidate mutations had arisen in the cell lines rather than in the men.  The article uses it as its direct measurement of the Y rate, and notes that the rate rests on only four mutations. ↩

    1. 19a.

      Page 1456, section Discussion:  “No discrepancy in the pedigree or evolutionary rate was evident.”  The same paragraph shows the authors were speaking directly to the mitochondrial controversy: "this has been done for the mtDNA HVSI, where a controversy has emerged over whether the 'pedigree rate' measured in family studies is consistent with the 'evolutionary rate' inferred from comparisons of different species or whether it is substantially faster." ↩

  20. 20.

    Helgason, Agnar et al.  “The Y-chromosome point mutation rate in humans.”  Nature Genetics 47(5):453–457.  Mar 25, 2015.  A genetic study of 753 Icelandic men grouped into 274 family lines, which counted new point mutations (single-letter changes in DNA) on the Y chromosome across 1,365 father-to-son transmissions, called meioses, covering 47,123 years.  It found 8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰ mutations per position per year for 15.2 of the 21.3 Mb of male-specific Y sequence, and a slightly lower rate on the palindromic (mirror-image) parts.  The article uses it as the largest direct measurement of the Y mutation rate. ↩ ↩

    1. 20a.

      Section Abstract:  “Here we used whole-genome sequence data from 753 Icelandic males, grouped into 274 patrilines, to estimate the point mutation rate for 21.3 Mb of male-specific Y chromosome (MSY) sequence, on the basis of 1,365 meioses (47,123 years).  The combined mutation rate for 15.2 Mb of X-degenerate (XDG), X-transposed (XTR) and ampliconic excluding palindromes (rAMP) sequence was 8.71 × 10(-10) mutations per position per year (PPPY).  We observed a lower rate (P = 0.04) of 7.37 × 10(-10) PPPY for 6.1 Mb of sequence from palindromes (PAL), which was not statistically different from the rate of 7.2 × 10(-10) PPPY for paternally transmitted autosomes.” ↩

  21. 21.

    Poznik, G. David et al.  “Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences.”  Nature Genetics 48(6):593–599.  Apr 25, 2016.  A study that sequenced 1,244 Y chromosomes from men around the world and built a dated family tree of the male lines, with a supplementary note and data archive giving the split times.  It reports bursts of male population growth on each of five continents, at times of known migrations and technological changes.  The article uses its backbone of split times, which places the root of the Y tree about 163,000 years ago when dated by the pedigree rate, and its statement that one split is a short internal branch. ↩

    1. 21a.

      Section Supplementary Note, tables Supplementary Table 10 (Split-time estimates), page 47:  “T, estimated split time, assuming the aDNA-based mutation rate estimate of Fu et al. (μ = 0.76 × 10–9 per bp per year);  T′, estimated split time using the pedigree-based mutation rate estimate of Helgason et al. (μ = 0.888 × 10–9 per bp per year).”  The backbone, with T and T′ in thousands of years: root A0–T splits A0 from A1 at 190.4 / 163.0; A1 splits A1a from BT at 159.0 / 136.1; BT splits B from CT at 105.8 / 90.5; CT splits DE from CF at 76.0 / 65.0; CF splits C from F at 75.5 / 64.6.  The paper gives no confidence interval for the root of about 190,000 years anywhere in the text or supplement, and none has been invented here.  Poznik uses 0.888 × 10⁻⁹ as "the Helgason rate" rather than the 8.71 × 10⁻¹⁰ of Helgason's abstract, because Helgason's rate is region-specific and Poznik reweighted it to their own 10.3 Mb callable set. ↩

  22. 22.

    Karmin, Monika et al.  “A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture.”  Genome Research 25(4):459–466.  Apr 2015.  A study of Y-chromosome sequences from 475 male samples that dates the common ancestor of all Y lineages in Africa to about 254,000 years, using ancient DNA samples to calibrate the mutation rate.  It also reports a second strong bottleneck in male lineages within the last 10,000 years, which the authors attribute to cultural change.  The article uses it for the Holocene male bottleneck and for the filter counts in its supplementary Table S2. ↩

    1. 22a.

      Section Supplementary Table S2:  The table is titled "The effect of different quality filters on the number of Y chromosome SNPs in 475 male samples," in the Supplemental Tables PDF.  Its own column definition:  “FS - average number of father – son differences in 24 Dutch father-son pairs, 6 Estonian father-son pairs and 1 brother-brother pair, including cases where father has an ancestral allele and the son or one of the brothers has a derived allele.”  The rows used in the filter-ladder table above are read directly from it: no filters, 82,306 SNPs at FS 180.26; filter c (regional exclusion mask), 10,793,302 callable bp, 42,340 SNPs, FS 3.26; and filter a+b+d, the combination the paper uses, 8,819,704 bp, 35,672 SNPs, FS 0.61.  Jeanson and Holland's headline "high coverage" rate is arithmetically exact: 3.26 / 10,793,302 = 3.02 × 10⁻⁷ per bp per generation, the filter-c row.  Nothing in their reading of this table is fabricated.  The table prints L = NA for the "<5% no-calls" row, so the ladder reuses the unfiltered 59,373,566 bp for it, which makes that row's implied age an upper bound. ↩

    2. 22b.

      “the Y chromosome plot suggested a reduction at around 8–4 kya (Supplemental Fig. S4B; Supplemental Table S4) when the female Ne is up to 17-fold higher than the male Ne.” ↩

    3. 22c.

      Section Abstract:  “Applying ancient DNA calibration, we date the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) in Africa at 254 (95% CI 192–307) kya and detect a cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time interval at 47–52 kya.” ↩

  23. 23.

    Carter, Robert W.  “The promises and pitfalls of correlating Y chromosome genetics to human history.”  Journal of Creation 36(2):34–39.  Aug 5, 2022.  A review in a creationist journal of Nathaniel Jeanson's 2022 book Traced: Human DNA's Big Surprise, by a reviewer who says he and Jeanson have discussed these issues in depth.  The review praises the research and calls the book's conclusions perhaps more tentative than its claims, and it describes the book's rule for counting mutations per generation.  The article uses it for Jeanson's per-generation mutation rule and for Carter's warnings about filtering and about Jeanson's choice of root.

    1. 23a.

      “It is not trivial to derive mutation rates from sequencing data, because the error rates inherent in the data are on the same order of magnitude of the in vivo mutation rate.  Thus, all papers published on the subject to date have applied significant filtering steps to the data before the final estimates are reported.  This is frustrating, to say the least, since an accurate estimation of the mutation rate is one of the things that will separate the young-earth and the evolutionary models of human history.” ↩

  24. 24.

    Carter, Robert W. et al.  “An Overview of the Independent Histories of the Human Y Chromosome and the Human Mitochondrial Chromosome.”  Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, 133–151.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  2018.  A conference paper from a creationist conference, by two authors at the FMS Foundation and one statistician at the University of Idaho.  It compares Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from 1000 Genomes and Simons Genome Diversity Project samples, and concludes that Y Chromosome Noah and Mitochondrial Eve lived less than 10,000 years ago.  The article uses it for the patriarchal drive idea and for the Helgason mutation rate that its authors accept.

    1. 24a.

      Table 4:  Y haplogroup founder ages, minimum from Jeanson & Carter 2017 and maximum from Xue 2009: A1 6,282 to 106,800 years;  B 4,112 to 69,900;  C 3,526 to 59,950;  D/E 3,331 to 56,625;  G 2,313 to 39,326;  Q/R 2,319 to 39,428;  average 3,110 to 52,900 years.  Their own caption:  “Clearly, one cannot simply apply a linear rate estimate to the distance data, especially since the different branches have had demonstrably different rates of mutation accumulation.”  Section Abstract:  The paper's abstract concludes that the founding individuals.  “lived less than 10,000 years ago, which is most consistent with a biblical timeframe.”  That conclusion rests on the minimum column of this table.  A critic should engage the whole table;  a defender should print both columns. ↩

  25. 25.

    Rasmussen, Morten et al.  “Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo.”  Nature 463(7282):757–762.  Feb 11, 2010.  A genome study that sequenced DNA from a tuft of hair of one man, the Saqqaq individual, a member of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo people.  The hair was dated by radiocarbon, a method that measures how much of the carbon-14 isotope a sample has left.  The article uses it because the date falls inside the window that young-earth writers accept, and because his Y chromosome belongs to haplogroup Q1a, a named branch of the Y family tree. ↩

    1. 25a.

      Section Results:  “Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating of the hair sample produced a date of 4,044 ± 31 14C yr bp and 4,170–3,600 cal. yr bp when correcting for local marine reservoir effect.” ↩

    2. 25b.

      “our analysis of more than two hundred Y chromosome SNPs … allowed us to assign the Saqqaq individual to Y chromosome haplogroup Q1a …, commonly found among Siberian and Native American populations.”  Two parenthetical cross-references, "(Supplementary Information)" and "(Fig. 3d)", are elided at the ellipses. ↩

  26. 26.

    Mendez, Fernando L. et al.  “An African American Paternal Lineage Adds an Extremely Ancient Root to the Human Y Chromosome Phylogenetic Tree.”  American Journal of Human Genetics 92(3):454–459.  Mar 7, 2013.  A short report in which a team led by Fernando Mendez sequenced the Y chromosome of an African American man whose lineage, called A00, became a new and very old root of the Y tree.  The authors date that root to about 338 thousand years, older than the oldest anatomically modern human fossils and older than their own estimate for mitochondrial DNA.  The article uses it for that date, and for the point that one previously unsampled lineage can move a single-locus date by roughly 200,000 years.

    1. 26a.

      “This underscores how the stochastic nature of the genealogical process can affect inference from a single locus.” ↩ ↩

  27. 27.

    Prugnolle, Franck et al.  “Geography predicts neutral genetic diversity of human populations.”  Current Biology 15(5):R159–R160.  Mar 8, 2005.  A two-page paper in Current Biology that compared the genetic diversity of human populations with their distance from East Africa along likely colonisation routes.  That distance predicted diversity with R² = 85%, and the authors could detect no effect of how large each population was in the past.  The article cites it as the published test of the argument that Africa grew biggest and so kept the most diversity, and as an earlier report of the distance pattern that Li and colleagues repeated in 2008.

    1. 27a.

      Page R159:  “There is no obvious outlier and we could not detect any effect of the historical census size of the populations or any obvious macro-geographic pattern, such as a stepwise decrease in genetic diversity corresponding for instance to a severe bottleneck following the colonisation of a continent.”  This is the published test of the argument that Africa grew biggest and so kept the most diversity.  No creationist source located for this article cites it. ↩

  28. 28.

    Wang, Richard J. et al.  “Human generation times across the past 250,000 years.”  Science Advances 9(1):eabm7047.  Jan 6, 2023.  A population-genetics study that estimates how long a generation lasted in different human populations.  It reads the intervals from the mutation spectra of 1247 sequenced trios (a child and both parents) together with dated variants, not from demographic records.  It finds the African interval is longer, 26.9 ± 3.5 years, than the 20.1 to 21.0 years found in East Asian, European and South Asian populations.  The article uses it as a direct measurement that tests Jeanson's shorter-African-generation idea and finds the reverse. ↩

    1. 28a.

      Section Results, page 3:  “The dominating pattern across the past 10,000 generations is a significantly shorter sex-averaged generation interval for East Asian, European, and South Asian populations—20.1 ± 3.9, 20.6 ± 3.8, and 21.0 ± 3.7 years—compared to the African population, 26.9 ± 3.5 years (P < 1 × 10−10, t test).” ↩

  29. 29.

    Sankararaman, Sriram et al.  “The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans.”  PLoS Genetics 8(10):e1002947.  Oct 4, 2012.  A genetics study, published 4 October 2012, that dates the last gene flow from Neanderthals into Europeans by measuring linkage disequilibrium, the tendency of nearby DNA variants to be inherited together, in present-day European genomes.  The generation figures are the primary output of the method, while the year figures are those numbers multiplied by an assumed generation interval and are much looser.  The article uses the generation count because it counts meioses rather than years, so it does not depend on any calendar. ↩

    1. 29a.

      Table 2:  Europeans.  The deCODE pedigree recombination map gives tGF = 1,805–1,993 generations as a 95% credible interval, and the European linkage-disequilibrium map gives 1,881–2,043 generations; the same table converts these to 47,334–63,146 and 49,021–64,926 years. ↩

  30. 30.

    IPD-IMGT/HLA Database (ANHIG).  Allelelist.txt, release 3.65.0.  Jul 14, 2026.  A plain-text list of every named HLA allele in the IPD-IMGT/HLA database, one per line with its accession code, such as HLA00001 for A01:01:01:01.  The article counts from it 4,023 named DRB1 alleles in 13 lineages (01, 03, 04, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16), 3,121 DQB1 alleles in 5, 9,279 A in 21, 11,258 B in 36 and 9,416 C in 14, and uses the DRB1 figure of 13 as its starting count.  DPB1 is left out because its first field is a running number, giving 1,972 distinct first fields for 3,170 alleles, not lineage labels. ↩

  31. 31.

    Behar, Doron M. et al.  “A 'Copernican' Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root.”  American Journal of Human Genetics 90(4):675–684.  2012.  The root lies between L0 and L1'2'3'4'5'6, the paper says they are.  “separated from each other by 14 coding and four control-region mutations.”  A reassessment of the human mitochondrial DNA family tree that proposes a new reference sequence rooted on Neanderthal mitogenomes, the Reconstructed Sapiens Reference Sequence.  The abstract says the phylogeny was refined by adding information from 8,216 modern mitogenomes, while the mean distance below is reported over a larger set of 18,843, so the two numbers refer to different things.  The mean distance from the reconstructed root to a modern tip is 57.1 substitutions (standard deviation 5.9, range 41-77), and the paper also reports statistically significant molecular-clock violations in M and L2, which is a reason for caution about every published interval on either side.  The article uses it for the 57.1-substitution mean depth of the tree, its 41-77 range, and the bifurcation at the root. ↩

    1. 31a.

      Page 680:  “the ranges of substitution counts within haplogroups M and N, which are hallmarks of the relatively recent out-of-Africa exodus of humans, are also very large … the path from the RSRS to the root of M already contains 39 substitutions.” ↩

  32. 32.

    Petr, Martin et al.  “The evolutionary history of Neandertal and Denisovan Y chromosomes.”  bioRxiv.  Mar 9, 2020.  A genetics study that sequenced the first Denisovan Y chromosomes and three late Neandertal Y chromosomes, in a 104-page preprint with its supplementary information that had not been peer reviewed.  The peer-reviewed version appeared as Science 369(6511):1653–1656 on 25 September 2020, doi:10.1126/science.abb6460.  It dates the Denisovan Y split to about 700 thousand years ago and the Neandertal and modern human Y split to about 370 thousand years ago, and it argues that gene flow replaced the Neandertal Y and mitochondrial DNA.  The article uses it for the paper's estimate that the modern human Y root is about 249 kya, made with the paper's own mutation rate. ↩

  33. 33.

    Jeanson, Nathaniel T.  “On the Origin of Human Mitochondrial DNA Differences, New Generation Time Data Both Suggest a Unified Young-Earth Creation Model and Challenge the Evolutionary Out-of-Africa Model.”  Answers Research Journal 9:123–130.  2016.  Jeanson's own account of how the headline figure was drawn:  “since only eight nucleotides separated the maximum reported mtDNA difference today from the maximum predicted post-Flood mutations (115), I simply reported the maximum YEC predictions as 123.”  Figure 2:  The prediction bar in Figure 2 is set equal to the observed value by hand.  A creationist journal article by Nathaniel Jeanson of Answers in Genesis, arguing that Africans had a historically faster generation time, which would explain why African groups carry more mtDNA differences.  It tests this with United Nations marriage-age tables and 369 mtDNA sequences, and it reports the maximum predicted difference as 123.  The article uses it for Jeanson's claim that the three major nodes of mtDNA trees match the three wives of Noah's sons after the Flood, and for his statement that male generation times do not matter to mtDNA.

    1. 33a.

      “Going back to the time of the Flood, modern ethnic groups would have all traced their maternal ancestry back to the three wives of Noah's sons (Jeanson 2015a).  Consistent with this historical record, three major nodes were visible in human mtDNA trees (Fig. 1).”  The figure is an unrooted radial neighbour-joining tree of 369 sequences with no outgroup and no bootstrap support, and the nodes were identified by visual inspection. ↩

  34. 34.

    van Oven, Mannis, and Manfred Kayser.  “Updated comprehensive phylogenetic tree of global human mitochondrial DNA variation.”  Human Mutation 30(2):E386–E394.  2009.  The standard reference tree of human mitochondrial DNA family lines, here its Build 17 release of 18 February 2016, built from 24,275 complete sequences.  The root node has exactly two children, L0 and L1'2'3'4'5'6, with 10 mutations on the L0 stem and 8 on the other.  Nearly every deep node is a bifurcation, and the one genuine polytomy is L3, which has seven children including M and N; L3 sits 35 mutations below the root, inside the African clade.  The article uses it to show that the two deepest branches are the only two at the root. ↩

  35. 35.

    Carter, Robert W.  “Can we place the sons of Noah on the Y chromosome tree?”  Creation Ministries International.  Oct 29, 2024.  A short article by Robert Carter, a creation geneticist, on whether the three sons of Noah can be placed on the human male family tree.  He concludes that nine different hypotheses fit the Bible's constraints, so the shape of the Y tree cannot show which lineages came from Noah's sons.  The article uses it to show that Carter himself lists nine compatible hypotheses, which permit any branching pattern.

    1. 35a.

      “Each of these nine hypotheses comport to the Scriptural constraints.  The three Y chromosomes of Noah's sons could have been identical or different.  They could have been slightly different or highly divergent.  There could have been one, two, or three different versions, and these versions could form a nested relationship, or not.  Did I miss anything?”  This is the most intellectually honest document on the young-earth side of this question.  Its other admissions, in order:  “If there was little mutation prior to the Flood, the three sons of Noah could have had identical Y chromosomes … There would not be 'three' founding branches, there would only be 'one'”.  “there is no real way to really know the sequence of 'Y chromosome Noah'”.  “We cannot know, therefore, that the rate of mutation accumulation was the same in every post-Flood family.  Thus, we cannot know if the different branch lengths near the middle of the tree represent 'time' or 'random chance'”.  And the warning to his own side:  “we need to be very careful about making firm conclusions when too many alternate hypotheses exist.” ↩