I thought this paper might be of interest, particularly in light of discussions of Jeanson’s rapid speciation model in regards to mtDNA as a molecular clock.
In Mitochondrial DNA Clocks Imply Linear Speciation Rates Jeanson writes that…
If ancient DNA could be demonstrated to be reliable, and if it could be demonstrated that these fossil DNA sequences found immediately post-Flood were too genetically diverse to be explained by a constant rate of mutation, then the major undergirding assumption of the present study would be in error.
A relevant paper has recently been published in Nature Communications.
From the paper…
“Here we present a phylogeographic study of the extinct American mastodon ( Mammut americanum ), based on 35 complete mitochondrial genomes.”
“Mastodon specimens from eastern Beringia and Alberta were determined by radiocarbon analysis to be greater than 50,000 years old, or analytically nonfinite”
“The 33 new mitochondrial genomes were aligned with the only two mastodon mitochondrial genomes previously published”
This figure of Phylogeographic relationships of American mastodons include divergences the authors place between about 150 thousand years back to 3 million years.
In Jeanson’s world, Noah’s ark grounded, the door flung open to a rush of fresh air, and the ancester of all elephant and mastedon kind descended the plank to a world of islands popping up as water receded, in 2348 BC. Since that time, well within the framework of writen history, that ancestral pair gave rise to all the elephants, mammoths, and mastodons which ever lived, only to become mostly extinct. Jeanson’s molecular clock calculations differ from this study by at least two orders of magnitude. The creation museum has a casting in their lobby… you can’t miss the enormous fossil of a mastodon, a member of the elephant kind along with mammoths..
