Please Unsubcribe... [meteorite-list] avoirdupois ? etc., etc., etc.

From: Jerry A. Wallace <jwal2000_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:22:36 2004
Message-ID: <3EE6CEAB.6080103_at_swbell.net>

Folks,

Since we seem to have morphed off into anthropology, genealogy, sulking,
skulking, and Rosie
resigning from the list again, and heaven only knows what else to
follow, here's an item of
'breaking news' that is both relevant and timely to our new 'off-topic'
subject. It's interesting, too.

The following is the blurb from the newsstory:

"New research suggests the human race was nearly wiped out 70,000 years
ago, when a crisis reduced
the population to about 2,000 people. The theory has reinvigorated the
debate on whether humans really
did come 'Out of Africa', or whether the species evolved in little
pockets around the globe."

/Adapted from a report for ABC radio's 'PM' program./

http://www.abc.net.au/news/indepth/featureitems/s876996.htm

In order to get back 'on topic', I'm now wondering whether or not the
homo sapiens' close brush with
extinction might have had anything to do with meteorites, asteroids,
meteoroids, comets, meteors, death
stars, and/or alien attacks. That should cover relevancy!

'Crawled out of the Odessa crater' Jerry (and may soon crawl back in)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharkkb8_at_aol.com wrote:

>
>> The most recent data I have seen shows in theory that ALL living
>> modern humans can trace their existence back to no more than 5
>> individual females and no more that 30 individual males.
>
>
>
> Speculation from the really exotic all the way down to perfectly
> plausible scientific projections are a lot of fun to bat back and
> forth, but for all practical purposes, it seems to me that the
> primitive, boring procedure of tracing actual familial lines and
> figuring out who is demonstrably related to whom is hardly obsolete.
> Sure, we can all come from the same DNA source and we can all be
> related to each other if we try hard enough, through clever wordplay
> or speculative, slightly massaged (perhaps) science, just as
> meteorites COULD very well take forms other than those we currently
> recognize. Maybe there are meteorites that look just like ping-pong
> paddles and are made of brie cheese. But if we're just talking about
> practical, day-to-day genealogy rather than expansive theoretical
> canvasses, surely it's still more useful to base it in empirical
> evidence....rather like using meteoritical science to identify
> meteorites, rather than posing lots of cool-sounding but unanswerable
> possibilities. ;-)
>
> Gregory
Received on Wed 11 Jun 2003 02:39:39 AM PDT