Congratulations to Pääbo.
However, did he get right?
Fr Abram Abdelmalek
Oct
2022
On October 3rd, 2022, Svante Pääbo received his well-earned Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Prize Committee justified that he receives the award “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. Then it stated many other reasons in the press release in this regard.
While we are very happy for Svante on this huge achievement in his career and extend our congratulations to him. We also acknowledge his hard and smart work for more than forty years in genetics and paleogenomics which he has stablished as a new scientific discipline.
We raise few important questions.
The press release states that the genes of modern Homo sapiens who live in the west of Eurasia contains 1-2% of the Neanderthal DNA, where those who live in the east contain 1-6% of the Denisovans DNA, that is based on the concept of “Out of Africa”. Fig 1.
BGG
The questions are:
Does the 1-6% similarity between the three hominins species necessarily mean that the “sapiens” has evolved from the others, or share the same stem of evolution with them?
Could there be any alternative interpretation?
Does this 1% similarity need to be acquired through intermarriage between the different species?
While we do not argue that the three species could be humans of different descent and ancestry, but for the sake of science, we cannot lock our interpretation into just one scenario.
For example, humans and bananas share 1% of their DNA (50% of
genes) according to Dr. Lawrence Brody. Bananas (Musa) lie near the bottom of the evolutionary tree of the Plant kingdom and there is not any direct contact to the human evolution. This 1% of DNA cannot get into our genomes through interbreeding neither we branch out of the same stem of banana.
The comparison here is general in nature and does not target any specific DNA that is related to sexual reproduction. It only serves the argument of an alternative interpretation.
Though, all three Homo species could have coexisted and interbred, the little genetic variation (1-6%) between them does not lead to this conclusion. It may be interpreted as just a variation in the human genome pool that still shows its existence in the Tibetan people because of the geographic isolation and environmental adaptability. Same interpretation could be applied on the rest of the cases.
Lastly, this could also be interpreted as the designer used different components to create different species. However, he used 1% of the components in all species as schematically illustrated in Fig 3. Where the circled green resistor is common in both electronic boards.
Conclusion
I believe that the three Homo species could be lumped in one species with slight variations in genetic pool which may have gotten concentrated in certain groups of people due to isolation and adaptability. This ONE species has not evolved from a pre-existing ape-like creature but was specially created by the Mighty God as it is written in the Creation narrative in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. The only first ancestor of Humans is Adam.