Therefore is the name of it called Babel;
because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth:
and from thence did the LORD scatter them
abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Genesis 11:9
P.S.-the evolutionary "out-of-Africa" theory simplified is the idea that our first human ancestors evolved in Africa, then branched out worldwide. This erroneous belief (which not all evolutionists believe) is based the notion that more mutations in the mtDNA = more generations & hence an older population. Problem is, the DNA research shows otherwise---read below."The young-earth creation (YEC) model and the evolutionary model differ significantly on the order and timing of the rise of modern human ethnic groups. A plain reading of Scripture indicates that the major ethnic groups present today likely originated simultaneously when languages were confused at the Tower of Babel event (Genesis 11:1–9). Furthermore, careful analysis of the biblical text places the date of the event around ~4000 years ago.
By contrast, the evolutionary model puts the origin of African ethnic groups first, and dates this event at ~200,000 years ago (Gomez, Hirbo, and Tishkoff 2014). Following the evolution of Africans, evolutionists claim that a small subpopulation of humans migrated out of Africa tens of thousands of years later to give rise to the modern non-African people groups (Gomez, Hirbo, and
A careful reanalysis of the primary data from my most recent study (Jeanson 2015b) indicates that the mutation rate in non-Africans might be sufficient to explain mtDNA differences across all ethnic groups. Previously, I predicted that a constant rate of mutation over 6000 years would result in 20 to 79 mitochondrial genome-wide nucleotide differences. This prediction captured the average non-African mtDNA difference (38–40 nucleotides) quite well.
However, after the paper was published, I was made aware that the upper end of this prediction (79 nucleotides) also barely captured the average African DNA difference (~77 nucleotides; average from Ingman et al. 2000). To reach this difference of 79 nucleotides, a constant rate of mutation and a generation time of 15 years had to be assumed. Since a 15 year generation time is at odds with typical practices today in the West, my initial thoughts were to continue to favor the prediction that I made previously—that Africans possess a faster mtDNA mutation rate—rather than favor the hypothesis of a historically very fast, African-specific generation time.
In this paper, I assess the relative merits of the fast generation time hypothesis versus the fast mutation rate hypothesis by examining marriage data from the United Nations (UN).
Calculation of the average marrying age by country revealed striking global patterns. In African nations surveyed around 1976, nearly a third (32.8%) of women were married by ages 15–19 (....difference was significant at p<0.05. This percentage was nearly three times higher than the percentage among women from non-African nations, a difference which was specific to the 15–19 year-old age bin since the difference quickly disappeared with older age bins. Later surveys still showed a similar fold-difference between African and non-African nations in the 15–19 year age bin, but the absolute values of the percentages decreased for both groups, perhaps due to the increasing adoption of Western culture and practices in African nations.
I used a divergence calculation (differences=mutation rate*time*2) rather than a coalescence calculation (differences=mutation rate*time) to predict the maximum possible DNA differences arising in the time elapsed since the Flood. Multiplying 4365 years5 by the upper end of the 95% confidence interval of the previously published (Jeanson 2015b) mtDNA mutation rate (e.g., 0.197 mutations per generation), and then converting the mutation rate to mutations per year, demonstrated that 115 nucleotide differences could have arisen since the Flood, assuming a generation time of 15 years.
These conclusions were applicable beyond the specific individuals examined in our dataset. The highest number of pairwise mtDNA differences on record comes from a comparison of 7098 mtDNA genomes—Kim and Schuster (2013) reported a maximum mtDNA difference of 123. Adding the maximum number of predicted post-Flood mutations (e.g., 115) to the range of predicted pre-Flood mutations (e.g., 6–22) easily captured (e.g., total of 121–137 mutations) the 123 pairwise nucleotide difference. Hence, the current rate of mtDNA mutation appeared sufficient to explain modern mtDNA differences among both African and non-African people groups........among the six South African individuals present in this dataset, all of them branched off from the primarily African node. This indicated that they were not individuals of European/non-African ancestry who just happened to recently migrate to South Africa. If they had recently migrated, they likely would have branched off one of the other two nodes. Instead, they all appeared to have a strictly African heritage, and their average pairwise mtDNA difference (i.e., each individual compared pairwise to each of the remaining 368 individuals) varied by a factor of two or more.
One potential objection to these conclusions was the fact that my calculations for maximum divergence required an unending chain of generations in which the mother in each generation must have been born when her mother was 15 years old......Thus, my conclusions that required an unending chain of 15-year-old mothers applied to only a subset of African lineages. Further investigation of the variation in pairwise differences among African groups should reveal how many generational chains will need to be
In short, the evolutionary model predicted a minimum number of differences nearly six times higher than the maximum number of mtDNA differences present today. By contrast, the YEC model exactly captured the full spectrum of mtDNA differences observable today."
AnswersResearchJournal/Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson
