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by bilbo0s 253 days ago
There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it

But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it.

That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:

we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!)

There, feel better about it now?

2 comments

theres actually almost zero clarity around the common ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million years ago.
> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa.

This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely.

Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.