0051 I continue to roll with Venema’s text.  I’m ignoring the niche.  Rather, I am simply assuming that a niche is operating.

In chapter 3, Venema convincingly lowers the curtain on Augustine’s concept that Adam and Eve are the biological ancestors of all humans.  He does so on the basis of DNA alone.

0052 DNA “remembers”, but not completely.  Insertions, deletions and substitutions sometimes occur as DNA is copied.  DNA is copied whenever a cell divides.  Chromosomal pairs are sorted into single chromosomes when a sperm or egg is formed.  Sperm and egg are united in the formation of a fertilized egg.

What does this imply?

The range of variation within the DNA of a species reflects the size of the breeding population.  If a breeding populationpasses through a severe bottleneck, then the result would be less variability in DNA in subsequent generations.

0053 Venema shows that, for human DNA, the breeding populations never fell below several thousand.  If they had, human DNA (at present) would show the typical pattern of a genetic bottleneck.

If that is not enough, during the Paleolithic, anatomically modern humans engaged in hanky-panky with two closely related species, the Neanderthal and the Denisovan.

0054 How else to explain the appearance of their DNA in some human subpopulations?

0055 Venema forecloses on the historical Adam imagined by Saint Augustine, where Original Sin passes from one generation to the next, through that hanky-panky business mentioned above.

0056 If there is a historical Adam and Eve, they are not the parents of all anatomically humans, living during the Paleolithic, over 50,000 years ago.