10,000 humans all spontaneously
and simultaneously popped into existence?
WOW
...and folks say the bible is hard to believe.
And once again we have the classic ploy of the creationist - make up an absurd strawman argument and attack it vigorously, while deliberately ignoring the real argument.
There is evidence that hominids, both anatomically modern Homo sapiens, as well as older species such as australopithecine and Homo erectus, experienced population bottlenecks at various point in time. Most recently, the data from our genome suggests that the population of modern humans on the planet living in Africa dropped to small numbers, as low as 10,000 to 30,000 individuals, within the last 70,000 to 100,000 years. At this point we don't have enough evidence to nail the numbers and dates down more firmly.
And no, these humans did not just pop into existence, they descended from a very long of ancestors ultimately stretching back to Earth's oceans almost 4 billion years ago. For the majority of our planet's history, life was restricted to single-cell self replicating organisms, not much more than tiny packets of self-replicating molecules, most of which occur naturally on Earth, and in asteroids and comets (amino acids).
Early in the history of our planet, about 3.5 BYA, life evolved the ability to capture energy from sunlight and create food. About 2 BYA, life evolved to form the first complex cells, or eukaryotic cell. Complex organisms today including humans are built using such cells. About 1.5 BYA life evolved the ability to reproduce sexually, by exchanging reproductive cells or gametes. Sexual reproduction allowed the organisms' genes to be shuffled from generation to generation, allowing much greater diversity upon which natural selection could act. Around the same time, we have the advent of the first multi-cellular organisms, like sponges, where colonies of cells would bind together using collagen to produce structures that could more more effectively use the resources available to them.
About 600 million years ago, we have fossil evidence for the first large organisms with complex, multi-cellular body structures like Charnia. Charnia and other pre-Cambrian organisms built their bodies using just 6 to 12 instructions (as opposed to the many tens of thousands in modern humans), using simple, repeated fractal patterns. More sophisticated than sponges (also multicultural), and more complex.
And then things began to heat up. Between about 580 and 500 MYA, life evolved more sophisticated features, like vision, and complex body structures that were constructed using the larger instruction sets encoded in their genomes. We have a vast array of fossil evidence from this period, organism like trilobites (arthropods), that show us the diversity evolution can produce in relatively short periods of geological time. Organisms also evolved the ability to prey on other organisms, building ecosystems with predators and prey, which added fuel to the fire by starting a biological arms race that continues to this day. The latter 20 to 25 million years of this period is often referred to as the Cambrian explosion, where the diversity of life on the planet exploded, and most of the modern biological phyla lineages were produced. Animals began moving to land, which had previously only been colonized by plants and insects. Fish evolved feet and lungs, and gave rise to the amphibians and reptiles. And much later, birds and mammals.
Reptiles ruled the planet for hundreds of millions of years, until all the larger reptiles (dinosaurs) were killed off about 60 MYA when Earth was impacted by an enormous asteroid. Extinction events are not uncommon in life's history, but this particular event has great significance to our own species. By killing of the dominant life forms on the planet, it allowed mammals to proliferate and take over the planet. About 7MYA we start to see the first hominid (human like) fossils, apes that responded to changing climatic conditions by spending more time on the ground instead of the trees. They learned to walk upright, and by about 2.5 to 3 MYA they had begum to makes their own stone tools for hunting and dressing meat. Their brains started to grow bigger, going from about 400 to 500 cc, to about 1,600cc in modern humans, likely driven by an increasingly complex social organization in their colonies or tribes, and by climate change. Scientists have found the fossils of over a dozen hominid species in this time period, evolving over time, culminating in very sophisticated human like organisms like Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. And of course, Homo sapiens, who first appeared on the plains of eastern Africa about 200 MYA. None of the other hominids have survived to the present day, but there were still pockets of neanderthals living in Europe 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, along with the descendants of Homo erectus who had fanned out over vast territories.
That is our story. We were not created as Adam and Eve by a supernatural creator in a magical Garden of Eden, we evolved from older hominid species. Our story is written in our genomes, in how our genes build our bodies, and the countless fossils we have uncovered. Our closest relatives on the planet today are the chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor about 6MYA, because we have compared our genomes to their genomes, and done the math.
We know all this because a countless number of scientists have spent their lives studying the natural world, and adding to our knowledge of the same. We don't know everything about everything, and many of the details of this story are open to debate, but the foundation that our story is built on is irrefutable.
There is a natural explanation for our existence which requires no magic or supernatural creators. Now you know our story, and can no longer pretend to be ignorant or attack strawmen without engaging on the facts.
