Madam, I'm Adam

This just in:

It really is all relative. A new study revealed that all humans are descendants of the same man and woman who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Our communal mom and dad got together after a “catastrophic event” almost wiped out the human race, the Daily Mail reported of the study.

The researchers studied the DNA of five million animals, including humans, to come to their conclusions. They also found that every nine out of 10 animals come from the same original creatures. The research showed that humans have very low genetic diversity and variants within the species, similar to many other animals.

The report comes out of Rockefeller University and the University of Basel, Switzerland, published in the journal “Human Evolution.”

Here’s what the Daily Mail, whose stock-in-trade is pictures of attractive women in thong bikinis, has to say:

Scientists surveyed the genetic ‘bar codes’ of five million animals – including humans – from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race. These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it’s not just people who came from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, too

Stoeckle and Thaler, the scientists who headed the study, concluded that ninety percent of all animal species alive today come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than 250 thousand years ago – throwing into doubt the patterns of human evolution. ‘This conclusion is very surprising,’ Thaler admitted, ‘and I fought against it as hard as I could.’

So does this mean that Genesis is correct?

The study has been misunderstood by some religious parties who thought it meant that we all came into being in some seminal Big Bang-typed event 100,000 ago, but this isn’t what the findings actually suggest. What Stoeckle and Thaler’s findings point to is that our species has to revamp far more often than we thought, and we do so in unison with all animals.

Doesn’t seem to me that that’s what the study “suggests” at all, but then I’m a big John Milton fan. You should be, too.