Ancient Ancestors Had More DNA Than We Do Now: Have we Devolved?

Link to source article on Ancient Origins

Link to source article on Gizmodo.au

Talk about serendipity!

I was reading the thread about humans not able to make Vitamin C and it being a genetic disease on these forums, Then I went to the Ancient Origins site and read the article I posted above.

The article states that over the time since we parted ways with chimpanzees, we've lost about 40.7 million base pairs of DNA... And that at least 27.96 million of the base pairs lost were unique.

From the source:

A study published this week in the journal Science has found that modern humans lost DNA as we evolved after our split from apes. Our ancient ancestors, early humans, possessed substantially more amounts of genetic data than we do now. This surprising discovery raises many questions, the most obvious one being: why did we lose all that genetic information? Also, what difference has the loss made?

The short answer is: We don’t know yet.

According to news website Gizmodo, the team of researchers led by Professor Evan Eichler, geneticist at the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, sequenced the genomes of 236 individuals from 125 distinct populations. They found that Homo sapiens have shed approximately 40.7 million base pairs of DNA after breaking from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, around 13 million years ago.

The genome of modern humans now contains 3 billion base pairs of DNA (complex molecules which contain all of the information necessary to build and maintain an organism, the building blocks of life), and even then scientists are unsure how much of that number is so-called “junk DNA”—genomic data whose function, if it has any, is not understood—but they do assert that at least 27.96 million of the base pairs lost were unique.

Have modern humans beneficially shed superfluous DNA, or have we lost something important over the generations?

I wonder what was lost?

Was it simply shedding body hair, simplified changes to the hands and feet and maybe an issue or two like the inability to produce Vitamin C for ourselves?

Maybe the AA people are right and the missing stuff is part of the DNA "Nip and Tuck"?

What say ye ATS? What do you think the missing DNA contained?

Maybe it's stuff like:

Missing enough brain cells to be able to notice that political parties are the same regardless what they are?
Psychic, woo-woo stuff?

But seriously, what do you all think?

a reply to: gspat

I don't understand genetics enough to be able to say, BUT I will say that if you look at history - the conquistadors and the Spanish inquisition, those who came to North America and slaughtered/diseased the Native Americans, Alexander the Great, Mongolians, etc. etc. all of these barbarians and armies wiped huge numbers of people off of the planet.

Could that be why there seem to be a high number of "base pairs" missing in our current DNA?

a reply to: gspat

The way western medicine and corporations are screwing with human DNA, the species is ripe for a pandemic wipeout.

You will rue the day you trusted these profit machines to put these chemicals in your system. Injecting your babies etc. Programming your minds to believe to need them.

The epitaph for homo sapien will read. "We learned, but it was too late."

There us a good book titled 'Human Devolution' by Michael Cremo that explores the idea that "If we did not evolve from apes, then where did we come from?" I'm sure you've heard of his book 'Forbidden Archaeology'?
I personally believe us modern humans are completely different animals than the ancients, especially our minds; we must of been tampered with at some point in time; its too unlikely to have all these different races on the planet imho.

a reply to: gspat

Funny, this report fits nicely with what my 'ignorant' spiritual beliefs are.

Thanks for posting OP

eta: The 'ignorant' remark was in no way directed at you or your OP gspat, rather it was aimed at previous contributors in other threads.

humans havent devolved ...we were tampered with....hense less dna...

a reply to: gspat

I do not believe that we are de-evolving.

I believe instead, that the DNA we appear to have shed, could well have been DNA that we were no longer using. It is possible that as we shed unnecessary or unused data from our genomes, the structure of that data may become more efficient at doing what we still need it to do.

Think about it. These days, computers can be the size of a wrist watch, and be as powerful as those which run the Voyager space probe, or something similar, and those computers were much, MUCH larger. Nowadays, our genes have less material in them than that of our ancestors, and yet, here we are, with smartphones, the James Webb Telescope coming on line in the next few years, the Large Hadron Collider, cures for diseases once thought unbeatable, and more coming on stream as time progresses.

Yes, we have less raw material, but we appear to be getting more out of what we have to work with, than at any point in our history!

I mean that whole "wise ape" thing, must not make any sense. Those other apes were certainly more evolved, the complex culture, use of tools, transportation and communication capabilities. How could anyone think we're the most evolved? We put ourselves in cages, apes merely have us to do that for them. Totally different!

a reply to: TrueBrit

To be fair it's been posited by geneticists that we've devolved since the agricultural revolution, when evolutionary pressures outside of civilization became more relaxed. My counter is that civilization is in itself an advancement, so what cultures and survives within it is a further advancement, even if seemingly much different than out in the wild, but I see it both ways.

Lastly, to counter your tech advancement point, these were made by a minute fraction of a percentage of the population. You can have the majority devolving while pure statistics sees the cream of the crop evolving within the same species. Culling time? I kid, I don't, who knows.

originally posted by: InverseLookingGlass
a reply to: gspat

The way western medicine and corporations are screwing with human DNA, the species is ripe for a pandemic wipeout.

You will rue the day you trusted these profit machines to put these chemicals in your system. Injecting your babies etc. Programming your minds to believe to need them.

The epitaph for homo sapien will read. "We learned, but it was too late."

Well we seem to be living longer than we ever have done before, I think a stupid war will be the end of us as those who get to the top never seem to learn those past painful lessons..

www.who.int...

To answer the question posed in the title of the OP, I’d have to say, “It would seem to be so...” I base that on the candidates currently campaigning for a shot at the presidency.

Seriously, though, I doubt we’ve devolved. It could be that we may have evolved further than we have had we not lost certain of the genetic information. But overall, my guess is we’ve evolved at least a little. Maybe very little, but a little.

It’s like 2 steps forward, 1 back.

Since I’m pretty ignorant, though, my opinion has no merit. Never mind...

Nice thread, though...

Well, I guess humans gambled a lot to lose that many base pairs. Darn casinos.

Actually humans might have lost of them because they expanded their diet. We eat a more diversified diet than most other animals. We gained some new genetics in that time also.

Just cooking our food made it so that we did not need a lot of those base pairs. Enzymes could have been lost because we did not need them. Most time it is the reduction of the enzyme creation that is a result, we can still eat some raw stuff. We are not animalistic anymore, the changes might have made us more intelligent. It's like feeding antibiotics to a cow to increase the rate of growth, the cow grows faster because it is not utilizing it's immune system as much which takes lots of energy away from growth. In the case of humans, having all those base pairs hanging around doing nothing taxes our ability to think. Now, maybe they aren't testing everyone, maybe some people who are not very smart still have the whole kitten Kaboodle yet.

The whole universe is in entropy.

The universe might seem vast and never ending, but it is slowly dying and losing its twinkle, scientists have concluded.


An international team of astronomers has analysed starlight from 200,000 galaxies and discovered that their energy is only half what it was two billion years ago.

Astronomers worked out the brightness of cubes of space measuring one million light years on each side. The oldest cubes of space which were around half a billion years old glowed with the luminosity of about 19 million suns. However those that were just half a billion years old only were as bright as 11 million suns.

Source

It always has struck me strange that humans are so different to all mammals in some really peculiar ways. Ways that definitely don't seem to fit into the darwinian theory.

The human brain provides logic, speech, art and requires an enormous caloric requirement...yet its only 2% of our body mass (compared to a birds brain to mass ratio which is 8%).

Nakedness or hairlessness makes almost no-sense from an evolution stand point, not for a mammal.

Blushing (seriously, there is no evolutionary benefit)

We live much longer then most animals when reproduction is no longer possible.

Im sure there are one off cases where one animal here or there might have "one" characteristic like ours, but no other animals have "all" these characteristics...seems very strange if you ask me.

a reply to: gspat
We still have our appendix. That is left over from our days of grazing the plains.
I think a better explanation would be we have SHED some of our DNA not lost.

a reply to: gspat

It just goes to show, we do not evolve into new species, we degenerated into disease.

originally posted by: sirChill


Nakedness or hairlessness makes almost no-sense from an evolution stand point, not for a mammal.

ive always wondered about this
we lost our body hair only to have to cover ourselves up. we have to cover up to either keep warm or to shield our skin from the sun.
wonder whay

a reply to: gspat

We have also gained unique new DNA sequences, as well as loose old DNA. Chimp and human genomes are about the same size.

Apes have 24 chromosomes and humans have 23 but that is because, in humans, two ancient chromosomes have merged.

A database now exists containing the genetic differences between human and chimpanzee genes, with about thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion/deletion events, and various chromosomal rearrangements. Gene duplications account for most of the sequence differences between humans and chimps. Single-base-pair substitutions account for about half as much genetic change as does gene duplication.

There are many genes that confer disease resistance that are different.

Humans appear to have lost a functional caspase-12 gene, which in other primates codes for an enzyme that may protect against Alzheimer's disease.

The forkhead-box P2 (FOXP2) transcription factor, which is involved in speech development, is absent from Chimps. There are also several genes involved in hearing which are different for humans.

For the most part, we do know the actual differences (we have mapped both genomes) but there is still much to learn about genetics so we will be discovering the significance of the differences for many years to come.

originally posted by: sophie87
There us a good book titled 'Human Devolution' by Michael Cremo that explores the idea that "If we did not evolve from apes, then where did we come from?" I'm sure you've heard of his book 'Forbidden Archaeology'?
I personally believe us modern humans are completely different animals than the ancients, especially our minds; we must of been tampered with at some point in time; its too unlikely to have all these different races on the planet imho.

We didn't evolve from apes, we share a common ancestor.

a reply to: chr0naut
maybe

originally posted by: sirChill
It always has struck me strange that humans are so different to all mammals in some really peculiar ways. Ways that definitely don't seem to fit into the darwinian theory.

The human brain provides logic, speech, art and requires an enormous caloric requirement...yet its only 2% of our body mass (compared to a birds brain to mass ratio which is 8%).

Nakedness or hairlessness makes almost no-sense from an evolution stand point, not for a mammal.

Blushing (seriously, there is no evolutionary benefit)

We live much longer then most animals when reproduction is no longer possible.

Im sure there are one off cases where one animal here or there might have "one" characteristic like ours, but no other animals have "all" these characteristics...seems very strange if you ask me.

Blushing is a signal of sexual attraction. Massive evolutionary benefit for a hairless, self aware, communicative species.