The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

marginal populations (e.g., Neanderthals and Denisovans, and to a much lesser extent other isolated modern populations) experienced elevated mutation rates. This is another area for further research. Not only does evidence for historical rate variation in different lineages exist, but it is also clear that the dates given for divergence events are not independently derived. For example, the split between Y chromosome haplogroups Q and M3, an important event that is supposed to have occurred just prior to the peopling of the Americas, is estimated to have happened 15 KYA. Behar et al. (2012) and Poznik et al. (2016) claimed this “provides a sanity check” for clock calibrations. Clearly, they are prepared to reject measured mutation rates in favor of evolutionary assumptions if the measured rates turn out to be too high. 7. Not all mutations are independent Recurrent mutations are a real concern. We detected hundreds of repetitive mutations on the mitochondrial chromosome and thousands on the Y chromosome. Approximately half of the existing variations on chromosome 22 are C→T (and its reverse compliment G→A). And more than half of those occur at CpG sites, a classic site for epigenetic modification. It is possible that anomalous ancient DNA and the extremely divergent modern lineages represent environmental effects, that is, epigenetic modifications that accidentally get hardwired by the loss of the cytosine through deamination. It is also possible that independent lineages could pick up identical mutations over time due to environmental effects. Because so many mutations have occurred at CpG sites, there has been a huge change in epigenetic control over the years. This might have something to do with the loss of longevity in the early post-Flood population. This is yet another area calling for additional research. 8. Further considerations There are several additional caveats that we must consider. Genetics is an imperfect science and we are delving deep into human history, sometimes with insufficient data. Because of this, we do not know the precise location of the chrY and chrM roots. Due to greater phylogeographic uncertainty near the root of the tree (Scozzari et al. 2014) we cannot precisely know just how closely related those individuals were, nor how much time separated them. Early populations are expected to experience strong drift due to small population sizes, and they are not likely to stay in one geographic location for long periods of time. Yet, it is clear from our study that many of the major haplogroup ancestors were closely related to one another. This is also obvious from the phylogenetic trees of many earlier studies, but the significance of this appears to have been missed by those authors. In this paper, we have carefully documented the many polytomies and near-polytomies in both trees, and we have demonstrated the implications of this: individual families or small tribes grew explosively, simultaneously giving rise to multiple lineages of major importance. This is reminiscent of Genesis 10 and 11, where a single family grew into many tribes, nations and languages. We must remember that there has been much replacement of older haplotypes during human history. The men of haplogroup E had to migrate from Asia into Africa, quickly growing to becoming the dominant haplogroup on that continent (Poznik et al 2016). This appears to be a greater population expansion than the more recent Bantu expansion (Campbell and Tishkoff 2010), which also carried E along with it. And, even though haplogroup R is common in Eurasia, and even though its roots appear to be in Central Asia, this group also expanded into Africa, penetrating as far south as Cameroon (Chiaroni et al. 2009). The dominant haplogroups today clearly did not expand into uninhabited territory (Slatkin and Racimo 2016). The Table of Nations (Genesis 10) was a one-off documentation of the early post-Flood world, with about 4,0000 years of history since. Much more work needs to be done before we can claim to precisely identify any of the biblical patriarchs. In the end, the data preserved among people living today, and among our ancestors buried in graves worldwide, may not give us a perfect recreation of history. What we can see already, however, is consistent with a generally straightforward reading of Genesis. We would like to note that the original Eve sequence (Carter 2007; Carter et al. 2008) was based on a consensus, which got us close enough at that time to draw several significant conclusions about human history. Bandelt et al. (2014) cited that earlier work, directly misconstruing our methods while taking a swipe at “creationism”. They apparently did not read either of those papers. Wood (2012) was more charitable, but he seems to have missed the fact that we were not saying Eve1.0 was the historical mtDNA source. To be clear, it is not possible to construct an ancestral sequence with zero ambiguity. The methods we employ here get us just a little closer to the primary root sequence (“the Eve sequence”) than where we were in those earlier papers. However, in this paper we have determined the exact sequences of all of the chrM haplogroup and megahaplogroup founders, and we have reconstructed the chrM phylogenetic tree, which reveals major molecular clock anomalies, and many polytomies and near-polytomies. While this paper strengthens and expands upon our earlier chrM papers, it is also breaking new ground in terms of the investigating the history of chrY from a biblical perspective. Our investigations have revealed many surprising results, including major molecular clock anomalies, many polytomies and near-polytomies, and the exact chrY sequences of all the founders of all the major haplogroups and megahaplogroups. The fact that the Y and mitochondrial chromosomes show similar patterns might indicate that we might be looking at post-Flood demographic effects and not the three sons of Noah vs. their three wives. Thus, it might not be possible to locate the Ark passengers on the phylogenetic tree. Finally, data quality is always a concern. Some of the branch tips are longer than they should be due to false positives, but this is maybe 1% of the modern data. However, this is a huge concern with ancient DNA (c.f. the revealing nature of fig. S11 in Haber et al. 2017), and so we urge people do be cautious about ancient DNA sequencing studies. There has been some contention among creationists on this topic, with the majority probably being on the more skeptical side. Thomas and Tomkins (2014) discussed the relevant problems and pitfalls of ancient DNA work, and there are many. However, with the publication of multiple ancient genomes to date (c.f. Yang and Fu 2018), including several Neanderthal individuals who were more similar Carter et al. ◀ Y Chromosome Noah and mitochondrial Eve ▶ 2018 ICC 147