Mysterious Melissa brought this interesting new study to my attention. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science. It was reported on Science Daily.
Excerpt:
More than 7 billion people live on this planet — members of a single species that originated in one place and migrated all over Earth over tens of thousands of years.
But even though we all trace our family lineage to a few common ancestors, scientists still don’t know exactly when and how those few ancestors started to give rise to the incredible diversity of today’s population.
A brand-new finding, made using advanced analysis of DNA from all over the world, sheds new light on this mystery. By studying the DNA sequence of Y chromosomes of men from many different populations, scientists have determined that their male most recent common ancestor (MRCA) lived sometime between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago.
It’s the first time the human ancestry has been traced back through the male line by sequencing the DNA of many entire Y chromosomes.
And, it agrees reasonably well with previous findings about our female most recent common ancestor, made by studying DNA carried down through the human race’s female line. Such studies used DNA from mitochrondria — structures inside cells — and placed that time of the most recent common ancestor between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.
[…]The reconciliation of the timing of “Adam” and “Eve,” however, may be this study’s most important immediate implication.
“This has been a conundrum in human genetics for a long time,” said Carlos D. Bustamante, PhD, a professor of genetics at Stanford and senior author of the study. “Previous research has indicated that the male MRCA lived much more recently than the female MRCA. But now our research shows that there’s no discrepancy. In fact, if anything, the Y chromosome may be a bit older.”
So the new dates for Adam and Eve would allow them to actually date. Ha ha!
Now those dates are still too far in the past to satisfy an old-Earth creationist like me, but it solves that problem about them existing durring completely different dates. I’ve been waiting for that one to be solves for a decade! It’s progress.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
“…those dates are still too far in the past to satisfy an old-Earth creationist…”
Why? (Just curious.)
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Well I think that because of the genealogies, it should be closer to less than 50K.
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WK,
Y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve probably never lived at the same time.
This idea perfectly reconciles with the Bible because the most common male ancestor would have been Noah. however, the most common female ancestor would have pre-dated Noah because Noah’s wife and the wives of his three sons were probably not related.
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Oh, you’re right. So they don’t have to exist at the same time! Makes sense.
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Different dates could work if there were two radical population bottlenecks. You’d have to be dealing with a tiny group of people, of course.
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The mtDNA mutation rates they used are calibrated from radiometric dating and measuring the differences between human and chimp or human and neanderthal mtDNA. But that’s an order of magnitude or more slower than the observed mtDNA mutation rates that put Eve only several thousand years ago. I wrote more at this reddit post:
But as far as I know, the observed mutation rates put Y-Adam at something like 100k plus years ago.
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These studies are a bit of a mess at the moment, and I suspect its because the ‘out of africa’ idea is sacrosanct to modern secular liberal thought (i.e. that all humans are essentially of the same nature).
Theres a growing strand of thought which is positing that non-african humans are significantly different to africans genetically; the increased estimates for the common Y chromosomes reflect the need to push things back to allow both strains of modern human to have a common ancestor.
I don’t think its too long before a new variant of the multi-regional hypothesis finds favour again with scientists, which will make many of these common dates fairly meaningless.
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