I love this article if for no other reason than those of us who are bible thumpers- er. . . I mean bible readers. . . believe that Noah was the only male progenitor of the current living people, while there were 4 other unrelated(except by marriage) women who joined him on the ark. Naturally the "genetic Adam"(Noah) and the "genetic Eve"(the actual Eve of Genesis?) should be separated by many generations.

DNA kisses, tells on our ancestors
BY FAYE FLAM
How did ancient hunters, farmers and nomads conduct their sex lives? Did they pair up or just hook up? Some of what they didn't write in their memoirs they passed down in their DNA.

And now science has the tools to read it. By analyzing DNA from
people living today, scientists have found evidence of sexual exploits between explorers and native women, conquerors and conquered peoples, powerful men with multiple partners. DNA can even tell us something about mating patterns going back over the 200,000-some-odd years modern humans existed.

To do this so-called molecular archaeology, scientists count on noncoding DNA, which can accumulate harmless mutations, or copying errors, in its four-letter code. Comparing your pattern of spelling errors with those of someone else can reveal how closely you're related.

Particularly telling are the bits of DNA found exclusively in men or women. For men that's the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son through the eons. In tracing the genetic heritage of Polynesians, scientists found a link to Asians but a few distinctly European-looking Y chromosomes cropped up, apparently left by randy or lonely explorers.

Further study showed many seemingly unrelated men carry almost identical Y chromosomes, possibly disseminated by a powerful and/or prolific male ancestor. Several years ago, scientists from Oxford University found that 16 million men of Mongolian descent share a nearly identical Y chromosome, which they speculate might have been handed down from 12th-century warrior Genghis Khan - a man legendary for following his martial conquests with sexual ones.

These are extreme cases, but over time, apparently, some men had all the luck - and all the children.

That conclusion came from comparing the Y chromosome with its female counterpart - called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA, which is passed down in eggs and therefore follows through female lines. In the 1980s, mtDNA made a big splash when scientists used it to trace humanity's origin back to Africa and found our most recent common female ancestor, "Eve."

Mitochondrial DNA accumulates spelling errors at a slow but steady rate, and by collecting samples from hundreds of people, scientists figured out how many years it must have taken for today's array of spellings to have diverged from that of a common ancestor - Eve. She apparently lived 170,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Scientists realized they could find Adam using the Y chromosome. But when they calculated how long ago he lived, they got a surprise - Adam showed up 100,000 years after Eve.

That might seem to cause a problem for the birth of humanity, but unlike the biblical first couple, the genetic versions of Adam and Eve were simply our most recent common ancestors. Other people lived around the same time as Eve, so she probably had her choice of husbands. But whomever she chose, his Y chromosome didn't survive to the present day.
His Y and those of his contemporaries were all eclipsed by Adam's Y.

The universal Adam's Y chromosome may have taken generations to dominate humanity, but he and his male descendants couldn't have done it with strict monogamy, said Michael Hammer, a population geneticist from the University of Arizona.

"It could be the Clint Eastwood effect," Hammer said, referring to the actor's having sired children with a series of women. Or men might have beaten each other up to get access to multiple females - the way gorillas and elephant seals do. Or maybe women just tended to flock to the same few men, as peahens do to the most spectacularly plumed peacocks.

Some of this comes down to a simple biological difference between men and women. "Every time a man has sex, he makes enough sperm to fertilize every woman in Europe," said Steve Jones, a geneticist and author of "Y: The Descent of Men."

"It's unlikely a man would ever do that," he said. But to explain the 100,000-year mismatch between Adam and Eve, all those shared Y chromosomes and other oddities left in our DNA, "it's pretty clear there were some Lotharios out there.

Well to start off this random topic spot, I will introduce the subject of homeschooling and distance learning.
My husband and I homeschool all five of our children.
Homeschooling was not an educational choice that we had ever really planned for our children. Given the situation that we found ourselves presented with, we simply saw it as our only viable option.
Our school district is not alone in the US policy of educational sub-standards. It seems that whenever a good idea for improving this current situation is proposed, "the powers that be" step in and make it worse. Our elementary school is only 2 years old, and is so overcrowded that they are forced to increase the class sizes beyond the teachers ability to effectively teach, let alone control. Our nation's teachers are grossly under-paid, and ridiculously over-stretched. They have been reduced to nothing more than baby-sitters who would enjoy an opportunity to educate our children, although we as parents have rendered them virtually incapable of controlling our obnoxiously spoiled, weapon toting children. The attitude and behavior of most of the students that I have come into contact with is akin to something that you would find straight off the pages of"Lord of the Flies". Could we collectively stop blaming the teachers and the administrators and start looking towards our own responsibility in the situation?
On the bright side, our local high school gives a proficiency test to graduating seniors to be sure that they are ready to graduate. The down side is that this proficiency exam at a 7th grade level. If a high school senior must pass a 7th grade proficiency exam in order to graduate, what was the point of the additional 5 years of schooling? Could we not have simply tested them in the 7th grade? I am unclear.
Our decision was to leave the utterly ruined public education system behind.
Our first homeschooling student was going into 8th grade before we brought her home to learn. We then pulled our two 6th graders a year later, and finally our 5th grader and 2nd grader.
We enjoy a much more peaceful home and family now. We enjoy parenting a great deal more than we ever thought possible. Our children will have a richer educational experience than most public schools can afford them, and we like the freedom that we are now allowed to have. They will more than likely go to college at a standard campus, but the opportunity to educate them up to that point is amazing. I can't begin to list all of the benefits of learning in an environment that caters specifically to each student's strengths and weaknesses. I only wish that we had started sooner.