Welcome and Introduction to the Series

John Dehlin [00:00:23] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your co hosts for today. I am John Dehlin. I am joined by one of my two or three main partners in truth and righteousness, Gerardo Sumano. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:40] Hey, John.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] Thanks for joining us.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:42] Yeah, excited to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] As always, this is an exciting one.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:46] Yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:00:48] We are. It's March 4th and we are here bringing back onto our program someone who is. Who is a legend as far as I'm concerned, but also someone who has been doing really important work for Mormon Stories Podcast.

Simon Southerton [00:01:02] We.

John Dehlin [00:01:03] We reintroduced to you all, Dr. Simon Southerton, geneticist from Australia. Hey, Simon.

Simon Southerton [00:01:10] G', day, John. How are you?

John Dehlin [00:01:11] Thanks for joining us.

Simon Southerton [00:01:13] Pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:01:14] Yeah. And we are here in our next in a series that we have just started our Mormon stories with, with Dr. Southerton or with Simon, called what is it? Mormon Doctrine. Science versus Mormon Doctrine. What's it called?

Simon Southerton [00:01:29] Yeah, Mormon Doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] Okay. Yeah. And all this is, is once a month we bring Simon on. He has a lot of experience in science as it relates to Mormon Church truth claims. And once a month we have Simon addressing an issue where. Where science bumps up against Mormon doctrine or truth claims. And while we are talking about that, I just need to show you how we make this possible. So if you go to mormonstories.org Simon, it'll take you to this website. And on this website, we announced this program and there's a little donate button there. The reason why I'm mentioning this at the beginning is we feel like it's important to, you know, to pay Simon for his work.

John Dehlin [00:02:16] Simon has been doing basically really important work for, for us Mormons, post Mormons, for literally decades. He's been doing this longer than me, and that's saying something. And so we are paying Simon for his efforts. It's probably almost symbolic, but I think for him it's maybe a little bit motivating. But most importantly for us, we feel like it's just.

John Dehlin [00:02:41] It's just sustainable. And so because some of you have stepped up, we've started paying Simon. And what we would ask you to do is if you value this series on science versus Mormon doctrine, become a monthly donor. Go to mormonstories.org Simon Click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor. And what you'll get for free because of your donation, you'll get emailed a link to Simon's newest book called the Sacred Curse. And this is just a book about how Native American DNA exposes Mormonism's Lamanite myth. It's Basically an updated book from, from Simon's original book called Losing a Lost Tribe, which was very instrumental to my own faith journey way back in the early 2000s and so become a monthly donor for Simon support financially this series on science versus Mormon doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:03:41] And you'll get a free book along the way as well. And that's, that's basically all I wanted to say is an introduction other than to say Simon was well, Gerardo, thanks for making this happen. And Simon, we're so excited to have you on. So how would you like to continue the conversation? Simon?

Simon Southerton [00:04:00] Well, thanks very much, John. It's really got quite excited actually about the Science versus Mormon Doctrine series because we've had some wonderful feedback. There's quite a lot of interest in the series and I'd really encourage people to continue to give feedback and suggestions because it's, it's going to make the, the podcast even better.

Simon Southerton [00:04:28] So, and we've taken notice. People will realize as we go through the today's discussion that we're, we're taking on board many of the comments that are being made and the suggestions about people we can involve in the, the podcast series. So yeah, like I'm, I, I do like enjoying, I do enjoy talking about science. So yeah, it's, it's off to a, I think a pretty positive start.

Simon Southerton [00:04:56] But before we go any further, I just wanted to give a bit more background about how I, and, and I think John as well, imagine the, the series panning out. We don't want it to be a sort of a gotcha series where we embarrass people who have very, still may have still quite strong beliefs related to the Mormon Church.

Simon Southerton [00:05:21] We just want to point out doctrine and then discuss science that's relevant to it and then look at the way that maybe apologists in the church have dealt with that. But we're endeavoring to do that in a respectful way. We don't want to, to embarrass people or catch the church out.

Simon Southerton [00:05:39] So we will talk about things that are not necessarily doctrine, but they're interesting sides, but we're not going to pin them on the church. Every church has sort of little embarrassing things in their past. I'd also like to say that I'm a huge fan of consensus science. If, if scientists from diverse fields have all reached the same opinion, then I think we can be fairly confident that it's, it's factually solid and that's the truth.

Simon Southerton [00:06:12] So, so if things are fringe, I will probably say they're fringe. But I, I do endeavor to, to stick to the well established facts and if, if I do stray and somebody, if I do say something wrong or whatever, I'm more than happy to have feedback.

Simon Southerton [00:06:29] The series will not be a huge sort of download of lots of little snippets of science that are fact related to the topic. We're just going to focus on little stories that I, that I have found pretty important in my life, but also pieces of science that are particularly relevant to LDS doctrinal claims and the doctrines that the church hold.

Simon Southerton [00:06:59] And the other thing is that we, I think in almost every episode we're going to be joined by a real life scientist. So we do actually have a scientist joining us today, Professor Michael Westaway from the University of Queensland who's done some amazing work on Aboriginal Australians which is a very important story, a critical aspect of the human colonization of the world. So, so he'll join us as. When we're talking about science and I guess some. I also wanted to respond, I will at times respond to some of the feedback that comes from people and we did have some comments about why Intelligent Design wasn't mentioned in our previous podcast when we're talking about creationism.

Simon Southerton [00:07:47] And the reason for that is that Intelligent Design is not consensus science. It's a, the scientific community pretty much doesn't accept that Intelligent Design is viewed as a form of creationism. Intelligent Design is basically the idea that there are some things that are just too complex in the evolution of life on the Earth, that there must have been a God behind it.

Simon Southerton [00:08:14] And that's, and that's not a view held by the scientific community. And I think Intelligent Design is taught in some American schools in the science classes. But I know in Australia it can't be taught in science classes. In most developed Western countries it's not taught in science classes. I think in Australia it's actually taught in historical controversy.

Simon Southerton [00:08:38] So interesting. So, yeah. So just before we jump into talking about the doctrine, some of the highlights later in the project. That's. Sorry. Today's podcast will be seeing a YouTube clip by John Perry. John Perry's got a fantastic website if you want to really understand the basics of evolution and DNA, which is I think a very common theme in our, in our podcast series. He's got a beautiful website called Stated clearly, which, which is amazing. I'd highly recommend you visit that side, John.

John Dehlin [00:09:19] We'll have Jen, we'll have Jen add that to the show notes. It's called State It Clearly. That's a podcast. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [00:09:26] It's a, it's a YouTube channel.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] Oh, okay.

Simon Southerton [00:09:28] Yeah. So John is from Tennessee, but university, and he's kindly given us permission to show a little snippet out of one of his YouTube clips, which is just brilliant. Sort of about fossil viruses in our genomes, the things called endogenous retrotransposons. It's simpler to just call them fossil viruses, hop around our genome and. Because that's what they are, they literally are the reminders, the remains of viruses that got into our genomes years ago. But his. His little YouTube clip is absolutely brilliant. So big thanks to John, because I've actually stolen a few. Well, didn't steal. He gave me permission to take some of his pictures. So screen grabs from his. Some of his presentations and you'll. I'll see if I can. I'll try to remember to point them out. So. Yeah, that's.

Gerardo Sumano [00:10:21] Ready to start?

Simon Southerton [00:10:22] Yeah, ready to go.

John Dehlin [00:10:25] All right, so should we go to the first slide? Is that the next thing?

Gerardo Sumano [00:10:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:30] All right, so here we go.

Adam and Eve in LDS Doctrine

Simon Southerton [00:10:33] So, yeah, the last slide was we talked about creationism, and obviously Adam and Eve is a fairly central component of that. And. And so a little bit of the doctrine we talked about last week is. Is very relevant today. But we didn't take it too much further in the last podcast. We talked about dog evolution, which is lovely. We can. I'd love to talk about dog evolution for ages, but.

Simon Southerton [00:10:58] But the. The key messages that came out of that podcast that are related to today's podcast is that Adam is the first of all men. Eve is the mother of all living. Adam and eve lived about 7,000 years ago, and the Garden of Eden is located in the Americas in. In Missouri.

Simon Southerton [00:11:21] And there was no mortal death before Adam's fall. So these are. We'll elaborate a little bit on some of these later in the podcast. So. And these are all very well backed up by LDS scripture. So the. The rest of the Christian. Christian community just has the Bible and their interpretations of that. Was the. The LDS Church has these additional scriptures to Doctrine and Covenants, Book of, you know, the books of Moses and Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. And they contain, I think there's an additional two to three accounts of the Creation and Adam and Eve. So Adam and Eve are mentioned many, many times in LDS scripture in the Bible after the Genesis account, Adam and Eva, I think I only mentioned twice. So, yeah. So Adam and Eve are very critical figures in LDS doctrine.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:19] Now they're mentioned a couple times in the Book of Mormon, right?

Simon Southerton [00:12:22] Yes. Yeah, they mentioned in all three of. Of them. And in quite detail.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:29] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:12:30] And. And you'll. And that'll sort of become apparent as we talk a bit more. If we go to the next slide, I might get perhaps, Gerardo, if you could read out that.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:42] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:12:43] The. The Book of Mormon.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:44] Yeah. This is from the Book of Mormon. It says, Second Nephi, chapter two, verse 20, 22. And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed, he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the Garden of Eden. And all the things which were created must have remained in the same state. State in which they were after they were created. And they must have remained forever and had no end.

Simon Southerton [00:13:12] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:13:13] It's basically saying, right, that like Adam, when he transgressed, when he ate of the partake of the fruit, then that's when death was introduced.

Simon Southerton [00:13:27] That's right, yeah. Perhaps John could read the Pearl of Great price references there.

John Dehlin [00:13:34] Just the yellow part or the whole thing?

Simon Southerton [00:13:36] Just. Just another. The whole thing, probably. They're fairly okay.

John Dehlin [00:13:39] Moses 5:11. And Eve, his wife heard all these things and was glad, saying, were it not for our transgression, we never should have had seed and never should have known good and evil. So basically, Eve's saying, if we didn't sin, we would have never had kids. And then Moses 6:48, and he said unto them, because that Adam fell, we are. And by his fall came death.

Gerardo Sumano [00:14:10] Yeah, I had forgotten that that was there in Moses, that Adam and Eve couldn't have children before the fall. That. That's pretty explicit right there.

Simon Southerton [00:14:22] Yeah, yeah. And by extension, many early leaders of the church believe that all of the. There was no death of any. Any beings before the fall. Absolutely. Animals and. And so forth.

John Dehlin [00:14:42] I mean, I just have to say I. When I was serving my mission, I got a sense for this in seminary growing up, Obviously, Bruce R. McConkey and Joseph Fielding Smith heavily influenced kind of my upbringing, but. And the curriculum and the CES manuals. But when I. When I got on my mission, I discovered these books called Doctrines of Salvation, written by Joseph Fielding Smith. And this is all very clear and explicit, both in doctrines of salvation and then in Mormon doctrine. Anyone who tries to argue this wasn't core Mormon doctrine for forever just doesn't know the history.

Simon Southerton [00:15:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We move on to the next slide. We now get a fair. A very clear time scale here for when Adam fell. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:15:36] This is from the LDS Seminary Manual, 2017.

Simon Southerton [00:15:41] So this. This is a current one, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:46] Super recent.

Simon Southerton [00:15:47] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:15:47] And this is what it says. Do you want me to read it. Simon.

Simon Southerton [00:15:50] Sure, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:15:54] It may be helpful to understand that in doctrine and covenant 776 the 7,000 years is in reference to the earth's temporal existence, meaning since the fall of Adam. It is not commenting on the age of the earth.

Simon Southerton [00:16:09] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:16:11] Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:16:12] So we're going to talk a little bit about doctrine covenant 77 maybe later on. But it's, it's an interesting section because it's a Q A between Joseph Smith and God. So in, in the verses it actually has Q and A. So Joseph Smith had some questions about a revelation of John and he asked God what this meant. And God was fairly explicit that the, the, you know, the, the basically mankind had been on the earth for 7,000 years. So. 7,000 years since Adam walked the earth.

John Dehlin [00:16:53] Yeah. Doctrine and Covenants really leaves no, no room for no center debate as to what the church is because doctrine, covenants of Scripture, it's Jesus himself talking. It's modern day revelation. There's no Catholic Church to corrupt the text 7000years.

Simon Southerton [00:17:11] But as we'll know, as we'll talk about later on, that doesn't stop the apologists. So I have some amazing references where apologists are sort of trying to weasel their way out of this one.

John Dehlin [00:17:22] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:17:22] Which is challenging because this is a Q and A. I mean Joseph Smith's asking a question here because he doesn't fully understand. Right. Why would God be even more, you know, vague again? Okay, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:17:35] And I would say that like what the church says officially on its manuals, especially something a manual that is very, very recent and it's what it's the youth are being taught. Right. Has more way than whatever an apologist at BYU would have an opinion about. Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:17:55] Because it's been through, it's been through correlation and it's modern and it's approved, officially approved by the Church.

Simon Southerton [00:18:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If we go to the next slide now it gets even more interesting. Now we're getting into the territory where it's, this is clearly unique LDS doctrine. And we'll summarize what are the unique aspects of Adam and the pre Adamites towards the end of our discussion of the doctrine. But yeah, if you go to the. I might read this one out.

Simon Southerton [00:18:25] Go for it. It's a pearl of great price. Abraham 3, 22, 24. Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was. And among all these there were many of the noble and great ones. And God saw these souls, that they were good. And he stood in the midst of them. And he said, these I will make my rulers. For he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good. And he said unto me, abraham, thou art one of them. Thou was chosen before thou was born.

Simon Southerton [00:18:56] And there stood one among them that was like unto God. And he said unto those who were with him, we will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell. And there are. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:14] So inside and summarize that for us.

Simon Southerton [00:19:17] So here we got a revelation saying that it wasn't just God and Jesus Christ, it was the noble and great ones that were involved. So it's a well established belief in the church that there were early patriarchs and prophets such as Adam. Adam is preeminent among these patriarchs and prophets, but Noah, Abraham, probably even Nephi and probably Joseph Smith as well were involved in the creative process. So the creation of the world before we came to it. So this is a fairly unique one. I don't think there's too many other. I. To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any other churches that. That hold this belief.

John Dehlin [00:20:03] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:20:04] And this scripture, we go onto the next slide. Now, this is a doctrine I don't want to pin on the church because I believe this is where that previous scripture that we just read out, that I just read out, has inspired.

Simon Southerton [00:20:25] Sorry, Brigham Young, this is back in 1852, to make some. Some pretty bold statements about Adam and his role in the creation. So now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and gentile, saint and sinner. When our father Adam came into the Garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize the world. He is Michael the Archangel, the ancient of days about whom holy men have written and spoken. He is our Father and our God and the only God with whom we have to do. So this is. Yeah. The church now obviously distances themselves from this belief.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] Well, for those who don't know, this is the Adam God theory.

Simon Southerton [00:21:17] Yeah, we are. Basically. That's the. The. This was a. A general conference sermon, I believe, that ended up going into the. The. I think it's the millennial star was at the church magazine at the time. So it.

Gerardo Sumano [00:21:35] Yeah, millennials are.

Simon Southerton [00:21:37] Yeah, yeah. So. And you can see how the previous revelation about there being noble and great ones are involved in the creation of the world. You can see how that sort of inspired Brigham Young to, To. To elaborate a little bit further on that sort of claiming that God, you know, Adam is the God, that we are only God that we need to be concerned about here on the earth.

Simon Southerton [00:22:04] But this has been the Adam God theory has been thoroughly denounced by the Church. And if you, you want to see a proper denouncing of this theory, then I'd highly recommend you read Mormon Doctrine by Bruce Omakonki because he absolutely rips into anybody that regurgitates this theory. Cultists and other enemies of the true restored truth for their peculiar purposes have they've talked about the Adam Gold theory. But yeah, yeah, so I'm not going to hold this, the church to this. It's, you know, it's, these are.

Gerardo Sumano [00:22:42] But it's interesting to see how important Adam and Eve or Adam is in Mormon doctrine. I think on the temple we learned that. Well, part of what Briam Young was teaching is part of the temple ceremony that Adam did help create the earth, that he was Michael and then Michael was put in the earth and you know, created by Jehovah and Heavenly Father. And so it just shows how, how important this doctrine of or teaching and belief of Adam is to through the Church.

John Dehlin [00:23:17] And anyone who's been through the Mormon Temple ceremony knows that Adam is central right, to Mormon theology. Creation theology.

Simon Southerton [00:23:26] Yeah, yeah. And we've flicked to the, the, there's other revelations to, to add even more evidence to this belief in the centrality of, of Adam that he was a real person. We've got him appearing in visions to other prophets. So in Jose in, to Joseph Smith in 1836, he saw Father Adam and Joseph F. Smith in 1918 saw Father Adam, the ancient of days and father of all. So, so these are visions that like, you know, prophets have had. So I mean it's not surprising really the, the, those doctrines that we talked about in Abraham about these gods being involved in the creation of the, the world, it's not, not surprising that it would have inspired subsequent prophets to, to, you know, have dreams and revelations of this nature.

John Dehlin [00:24:29] And there's Joseph F. Smith, quote or.

Simon Southerton [00:24:32] Yeah, do you want to do that?

John Dehlin [00:24:33] Among the great and mighty ones who were assembled in this vast congregation of the righteous were Father Adam, the ancient of days and father of all, and our glorious mother Eve with many of her faithful daughters who had lived through the ages and worshiped the true and living God. And Simon, sometimes I'm a little bit ham fisted. But you know, what I under, what I interpret is the reason you're showing this slide is because a more modern, you know, now that science has beaten the church up thoroughly on these claims about the creation of the earth and the earth and the age of the earth.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] Progressive, you know, neo apologists and progressive Mormons want to say that, well, Adam and Eve, the garden story, that's all metaphorical, that's all symbolic. We really don't believe that all humans came from one set of parents because the science just beats that opinion to shreds. But, but if you've got Joseph Smith or Joseph F. Smith seeing visions claiming Adam and Eve were seen in the visions, then that taints the visions and it makes it. So either we believe in a literal Adam and Eve or. Or we're starting to wonder whether these visions are just fabrications and not real. It's got. It's kind of got to be one or the other.

Simon Southerton [00:25:51] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:52] Right.

Gerardo Sumano [00:25:52] And they're canonized. This ones that he has.

Simon Southerton [00:25:55] That's right. These are both in the Doctrine Covenants and these are recent editions. Yep, yep.

John Dehlin [00:26:00] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:26:01] Canonized, Yeah. I actually have an earlier version of the Doctrine Covenants and these two sections are not in it.

John Dehlin [00:26:09] Oh, wow.

Simon Southerton [00:26:10] I was looking. I was looking for the references. What's going on here? So, you know, they're canonized, they're put in deliberately because they, you know, they're scripture. Yeah, yeah. So it is very difficult and the church is not going to pay any attention to apologists. So the apologists can make all these nuanced claims, but at the end of the day, it's. They have absolutely zero in zero authority to make any interpretation of scripture. The only people entitled to interpret scripture is the prophets. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:26:49] On the next slide, you have actually an interpretation directly by the Church of what?

Simon Southerton [00:26:53] Yeah, yeah. This is our last slide. As we almost. The last slide. We'll summarize the doctrine a bit. Yeah, so this is. Gerardo, perhaps if you read. Read that out the, the highlighted section there.

Gerardo Sumano [00:27:06] Yeah. So this is from the church website. It says we are. We. We are all descendants of Adam and Eve, our first parents, who were created in God's image. There were no spirit children of heavenly Father on the earth before Adam and Eve were created.

John Dehlin [00:27:25] And that's in response to the question, what does the church believe about evolution?

Simon Southerton [00:27:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:33] So again, the church believes that Adam and Eve were the first humans, period. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [00:27:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:41] But it's saying Simon.

Simon Southerton [00:27:43] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:45] All right. They're throwing down. They're throwing down the gauntlet.

Simon Southerton [00:27:50] Well, mean, if you, if you add the doctrine together, you've got Adam and eve. They live 7,000 years ago. They are. We are all the descendants of Adam. And Eve, they're our first parents. Okay. So there's no. How do we connect beyond them is really gets very challenging.

Gerardo Sumano [00:28:14] Oh, and there's no death before them.

Simon Southerton [00:28:16] We talk about the signs. Yeah, yeah. And we're going to talk about science that I think is particularly challenging to this particular belief or very difficult. Difficult to. Very difficult to reconcile with that claim. But I thought as we. To finish off our discussion of the doctrine, I thought we'd just talk about, highlight the. What I believe are the uniquely LDS aspects of the doctrine related to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and the fall. So sorry, how. There we go. You good? Okay.

Five Uniquely LDS Aspects of Adam and Eve

John Dehlin [00:28:56] Now, now I'm good.

Simon Southerton [00:28:57] Yeah. So I'll read those out. So Adam and Adam and other gods helped create the earth. That's clearly, I think an LDS one. There was no mortal death before Adam's fall. And of course the, the Garden of Eden is in the United States.

Simon Southerton [00:29:13] And yeah, I, it was quite interesting. I found as I was reading bits of Genesis and the books of Abraham, Moses and Doctrine and Covenants in preparation for the podcast. It just felt like Mormonism was just so much more vivid and colorful. You know, it's like it, it was sort of elaborating on the, on the Bible. So in comparison to the Bible, it just sort of seemed like it was almost in Technicolor because you can see how a 19th century mind would have learned all of the doctrine related to Adam and Eve that they could from the Bible. And then they've expanded it if you like, in their own mind. And so we've ended up with things that are really quite, quite unique. Yeah. So any other comments you folks want to make?

John Dehlin [00:30:16] Before we have a. Simon, we have a comment, a well timed comment from one of our viewers. Brian J. Says I'm not hearing much science yet and he's got a smiley face. And that, that's a, that's a good segue into our next slide. What do you think?

Simon Southerton [00:30:31] That's an excellent. Yeah. So, so basically what we're planning, the plan is that we talk 20 or so minutes about the doctrine and then we just jump into science. Like, like the last episode, there wasn't enough science was very interesting. Science dog, evolution. But now we're going to jump into science just so people understand we're, we're

John Dehlin [00:30:52] trying to lay the foundation what's Mormon doctrine? So that then we can talk about

Simon Southerton [00:30:57] the science that's relevant to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so today I'm, I'm just going to pick out a couple of pieces of science. One or two of them had significant impact on me. When I first learned about it, I thought, wow, gee, that's fascinating. And then I buried it away. And sometimes that would have been, you know, five or 10 years before I had my little faith crisis back in 1998, so.

John Dehlin [00:31:25] And for those who haven't heard your story, Simon, you were a Mormon bishop.

Simon Southerton [00:31:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:29] While you were a geneticist. Right? Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:31:31] Yes. Yeah. So. So, yeah, I'm going to talk about a couple of little bits of science that connect us with our very ancient ancestors and with our most recent living ancestor, chimpanzees. So we'll. We'll talk about those. And then I want to talk about the. The human family, because there's just so, so much fascinating human genetics and genomics that's been done in the last 10 years that has completely revolutionized our understanding of. Of human history. It's just added so much new information.

Simon Southerton [00:32:15] There were scientists, for example, 20 years ago arguing we can't have any. We kind of intermarried or interbred with Neanderthals. That's complete rubbish because. Because some scientists were seeing it in some of the fossils. They speculated that there was some interbreeding. But as we probably, many of us know, we do actually have a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, and we'll talk a little bit about that.

Scientific Dating Methods and Evidence

Simon Southerton [00:32:41] But before I do, I wanted to just run through some of the technology that I think is sort of to give a little bit of support and background to some of the things that we talk about down the track.

Simon Southerton [00:32:57] I want to talk about carbon dating, first of all, and then I'll just sort of run through the basics of DNA and genomics. The reason I want to talk about carbon dating is it is just such an amazing technology and it's been used.

Simon Southerton [00:33:13] They refer to it basically as the workhorse of modern archaeology and anthropology. So I'll just run through how it works. So, cosmic radiation from the sun, most of our. A lot of our atmosphere, 80% of our atmosphere is nitrogen.

Simon Southerton [00:33:34] And cosmic radiation from the sun hits our atmosphere, and every now and then it hits a nitrogen atom and it converts it into a carbon 14, a radioactive form of carbon. And throughout history, there's sort of been a fairly stable. It does have ups and downs, but there's fairly stable amounts of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. And living beings, if they're eating plants and animals or trees that are taking carbon from the atmosphere, their car, the amount of carbon 14 in their body or in the in the tree is the same as the atmosphere. Once they die though, they're not taking any new carbon 14 in and it then decays away.

Simon Southerton [00:34:21] So the radioactive carbon 14 atoms will break down and they'll convert to carbon. And it's about every 5,700 years the amount of radioactive carbon halves. So it has what they call a half life of 7,000, 5,700 years. And by measuring the amount of carbon 14 relative to carbon in a, say for example, a fossil or a skeleton or in a tree or carbon containing material, you can get a very good estimate of when that, that organism was alive.

Gerardo Sumano [00:35:06] So basically, so basically what they're doing is so they have, from what I was reading, they have it pinned down to a very, a pretty good number of, you know, you said 5,700 years, right. And then after that period, the carbon 14 halves. So like there, so there's going to be half the amount is carbon 14 after that amount of years. So and then after another 5,700 years is going to have again, right?

Simon Southerton [00:35:39] That's right. It'll be a quarter.

Gerardo Sumano [00:35:40] Right.

Simon Southerton [00:35:40] And then another 5,000, it'll be 18 and 1 16th and right.

Gerardo Sumano [00:35:45] One third every 5,700 years is just

Simon Southerton [00:35:48] going to keep having.

Gerardo Sumano [00:35:49] So then when they take a skeleton or, or a fossil today, they can see how, how, how much carbon he has, how much carbon 14 he has, and then they can, they can know how old, how old is it?

Simon Southerton [00:36:04] Yeah, yeah, they can make a fairly good estimate. I think it's generally, it's getting more accurate with, with time, but it's, it's in the vicinity of probably 5 to 10% error on it, but it's pretty, it's very reliable. So when carbon dating was first developed, the technology for detecting radioactive carbon, carbon 14 was nowhere near as good as is today. So you could only, it was only reliable for about 20 or 30,000 years.

Simon Southerton [00:36:33] But the technology today is so sophisticated. I mean this is the, why we're running into the trouble with drug takers and the Olympics, because the technology for detecting absolutely minute amounts of particular molecules has, has increased so rapidly. We're getting to the point where you can, you can almost just walk past somebody that's got a drug in them and you, you'll pick up enough to, to be detected. So it's, I'm exaggerating obviously, but that's so the techno. So the ability to detect carbon 14 in a sample has risen dramatically. And so it's now, they just published last year, I think it was a new calibration of carbon 14, a sort of a reference that improves the accuracy.

Simon Southerton [00:37:26] And it's now you can date carbon date back to about 60,000 years. And one of the things that's been really important for cross validating and determining the accuracy of carbon 14, improving the accuracy of carbon 14 is tree rings.

Simon Southerton [00:37:46] So living trees go back about three, I think about four to 5,000 years. But then in some in bogs, they've been able to dig up trees that take the, this, the tree ring record back to almost 13 to 14,000 years.

Simon Southerton [00:38:02] And tree rings are beautiful because if, you know, they tell you the exact year and you can cut out the carbon from that year and date very accurately, you can then cross validate the two technologies, which are quite completely different.

Simon Southerton [00:38:21] And so that gives it a tremendous amount of confidence that carbon dating is very accurate. For those who don't may not be familiar with tree rings. So basically a tree in winter will lay down thicker, smaller cells and they're quite dark. And in the summer when they're growing or when they've got a lot of water, they'll put in a much thinner walled rings.

Simon Southerton [00:38:45] So you can, so each one of those pairings of dark and light will be an, a complete year. So like any technology, if it's in the hands of a fool, they will make mistakes. For example, if you pull out a bit of charcoal from a fire and you carbon date it, but a, a tree ring, sorry, a tree root had grown through it, say 150 years ago, or, you know, much more recently than the carbon from the tree root, will completely ruin your, your dating.

Simon Southerton [00:39:23] If you're dating, say, carbon from a fire and they've used coal in the fire, coal is what they actually refer to as carbon dead. So it won't have radioactive carbon because it's millions and millions of years old. So there are obviously stumbling blocks and problems for people who aren't particularly careful. But if you're very careful, you can avoid these sorts of problems. Another one is artificial aging. For example, mollusks and marine animals, they often obtain their, the carbon that they obtain into their, into their shells, for example, mollusks or fish, sometimes the carbon that they absorb is actually quite old in itself. So it's not, it's not the same.

Simon Southerton [00:40:16] It hasn't got the same amount of radioactive carbon as the atmosphere. So that can lead to things looking much older than they are. So scientists now have sort of offsets and corrections for any errors in that can come about from that.

Gerardo Sumano [00:40:32] Yeah, and you have a slide here with other dating Methods.

Simon Southerton [00:40:36] Right, yeah. Before I go on, I just want to say one, I, in preparation for this, I looked in because there are many apologists who take all sorts of liberties and to, to shred carbon dating. It's very important to, to make carbon dating look unreliable.

Simon Southerton [00:40:56] And one example is a bunch of creationists who, because in, in rare situations, coal can have tiny traces of carbon 14. And that's because carbon 14 can also arise from natural radiation that's in present in the coal. For example, some coal will have uranium levels of uranium that, a little higher. And that uranium, even though the coal is buried and it's not taking in carbon 14 from the atmosphere, the uranium can, radiation from the uranium can cause formation of very tiny traces of carbon 14.

Simon Southerton [00:41:39] Most coal is carbon dead and it's actually used as a negative control. But you know, apologists knew that. They're, they, they sent this coal in to a lab and they got, they found that there were tiny traces of carbon 14. So they used that. And there's books being written on all sorts of things claiming that this completely shreds carbon dating, but it's clearly not, it's just a, just an occasional challenge that a competent scientist would be well aware of. And it's, it doesn't really undermine the effective effectiveness of the technology. So we hop to the next slide. There are. So any other questions about carbon dating?

Gerardo Sumano [00:42:29] No.

John Dehlin [00:42:29] I love it though. This is, I, I learned this, you know, in college, but you just forget it if you don't, you know, think about it.

Simon Southerton [00:42:37] It's amazing stuff. And the, the just so advanced these days. Like they just published a new calibration. I forgot to mention that in that calibration they had, they carbon dated stalagmites in China. So a stalagmite is, that's basically that calcium carbonate columns that form in caves.

Simon Southerton [00:43:01] And each, in some caves each year they get a new layer of carbon calcium carbonate deposited along the stalagmite and then it gradually grows. And because of the changing weather patterns, you can see a change in the color through that each year. So you get rings that are just like tree rings in the stalagmite.

Simon Southerton [00:43:24] And they dated this, this stalagmite in China covered a period of about 15,000 to 55, 000 years ago. So absolutely invaluable resource for improving the calibration of carbon dating. So it's, it's not a, it's not. So you can sort of get a sense that it's not a.it's not a, an old technology that's sitting on the hill on the shelf and they just wheel it out.

Gerardo Sumano [00:43:51] Right. Because I feel like that's how apologists try to describe it. Right. Like something that's.

Simon Southerton [00:43:57] Yeah, yeah. Something that there are, there are journals that are just filled with scientists that are working to improve the calibration. Yeah, they, they dug a cowry pine From New Zealand that's 40, 000 years old dug out of a bog.

Gerardo Sumano [00:44:11] Now, Simon, I don't know how you feel about this, but we have Michael on the, on, on the back. We can't. Now that we're talking, we've laid the background about carbon dating. We can bring him on to talk about the Maga man and, and how, how they dated it. What, how, how do you feel about that?

Simon Southerton [00:44:33] Oh, I think we might, we might bring him in when we. Yeah, when we're talking about Mongo man.

Gerardo Sumano [00:44:37] Okay. Okay, that's fine.

Simon Southerton [00:44:39] Yeah, because there's a little bit more stuff to get through there.

Gerardo Sumano [00:44:41] Okay, sounds good.

Simon Southerton [00:44:43] Excellent. So, yeah, I just wanted to make just a brief comment that there are many other dating methods. So there's all sorts of luminescence dating, which is a fascinating one that Michael might mention a little bit about later on.

Simon Southerton [00:45:01] But another fascinating one is that the volcanoes turn out to be very, very important for dating ancient remains because the, the layer of tephra or pumice that comes out with each volcanic eruption, that can be ground out, ground up, and they can get a very clear chemical signature from that layer.

Simon Southerton [00:45:27] Plus they can use dating techniques such as potassium to argon or argon 40 to argon 39 to very accurately date when the eruption was. And that technology, we'll mention it later on a bit as we talk more about the dating of the earliest human fossils.

DNA Basics and Human Genetics

Simon Southerton [00:45:50] So if we shift on to, I'll just say a little bit about DNA, quickly run through just to, to refresh people's memory. Many of us would have heard this at some stage in our lives. Clearly, DNA is the, the molecule that drives life. And the way that it does this is it contains coded information that guides the direction of proteins.

Simon Southerton [00:46:16] And so the mechanisms in our body are for producing proteins from DNA that is through a molecule called rna. And RNA contains the coded, carries the coded information from DNA. And then it's, it's, it locks into a molecule called a ribosome.

Simon Southerton [00:46:44] And it's a little bit like a zipper. It sort of zips through that ribosome. And the ribosome will be adding a new amino acid to the molecule. And that amino acid chain then forms the protein. And the way that DNA codes for information going into that protein is that every three bases of DNA in a gene codes for a particular amino acid, and that's called a codon.

Simon Southerton [00:47:12] And when this RNA strand zips through the ribosome, each codon will determine what amino acid attaches. And that's a pretty important critical part of, of how DNA guides the, the direction of life by carrying that information through RNA into proteins.

Simon Southerton [00:47:41] And I must thank John Perry for some of these illustrations, which I borrowed from his Stated clearly website. So if we turn to the human genome on the next slide. So we mentioned earlier on what DNA is, but the entire human genome carries about 3 billion bases of DNA. And a useful way to think of it is just a massive book.

Simon Southerton [00:48:08] And with it, so that book is our genome, and within that genome, that book, there are 20 through 23 chapters or chromosome pairs. Within each chapter, there are a whole lot of sentences that have meaning. They're the genes. They guide the production of amino acids, sorry, proteins, via the assembling of amino acids. Together, we hop to the next slide.

Simon Southerton [00:48:46] I just. This is just an aside out of interest. Some of you may know. I worked in forestry for years, and we go back. Yeah, yeah. And the two tree species that I worked on were conifers and eucalyptus.

Simon Southerton [00:49:05] And you can see in this illustration that the human genome, which is about 3 billion base pairs, is absolutely dwarfed by the conifer genome. So all the pine trees you see around you, they're the size of their genome is about 10 times the size of the human genome.

Simon Southerton [00:49:22] Meanwhile, eucalyptus is about a quarter of the size of the human genome. And there are, there are plants that have genomes that are much smaller, even like 100 or even 50 million base pairs. So the point I wanted to make on this slide is that the conifers don't have any more genes necessarily.

Simon Southerton [00:49:44] They have what's referred to often as junk DNA, but they just have lots and lots of repetitive DNA. And we're going to talk a little bit about repetitive DNA or transposons a little bit later on, but it's, it's. There are pieces of DNA, lots of DNA in our genomes that just reproduces itself and doesn't actually serve any function in the body.

Simon Southerton [00:50:12] So if we hop to the next slide, we not only have the human genome, we now have the complete genome of Neanderthal, which is a very close relative of humans, and we have the genome of Denisovans. So there are also about 3 billion base pairs in size.

John Dehlin [00:50:36] Let Me ask you this is going to seem like just a really obvious question. What is a, what is a Neanderthal and what is a Denisovan? For those who just don't know, I'll

Simon Southerton [00:50:47] talk a little bit about them later on.

John Dehlin [00:50:48] Okay, Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Simon Southerton [00:50:49] Yeah, not too long. Actually, I think it's fairly, fairly soon. Yeah, so. But yeah, they're, they're fairly close relatives. So I think Neanderthal and Denisovans split from each other about 800,000 years ago. But what's fascinating is the Denisovan DNA. We don't even know what a Denisovan really looks like because the, the entire genome was, which was published in 2012, was from a finger bone. And that's all we have from Denisovans. The scientists could tell it was, it was slightly different to a human finger bone, and they got a whole, a new archaic human relative from that genome. The Neanderthal genome was published in 2010.

Simon Southerton [00:51:38] So the point I want to make on this slide is that the fascinating information that can come out of those three genomes is the differences. So even within the human genome, there are millions, three or four million variants or SNPs or markers. These are points in the genome where there is a difference that's commonly found in the population.

Simon Southerton [00:52:02] And so there are millions of markers that are unique to humans, unique to Neanderthals, and unique to Denisovans. And that information is enormously valuable and can tell us an awful lot about our ancestry. And today, if you're getting your DNA tested by a DNA ancestry company, they are using that information.

Simon Southerton [00:52:28] They're using all of those millions of variants to tell you where your ancestors came from. Yeah, but scientists are using that information as well, and they're asking much, much deeper questions about a deeper ancestry. And that's, I think, what we're.

Simon Southerton [00:52:49] And we'll talk a bit more about that later on. So that's what I wanted to say in terms of background science. And then we'll just sort of jump into what I think are some quite interesting aspects of biology that tell us who our distant relatives are and more recent relatives. So we hop to the next slide.

Simon Southerton [00:53:18] I can't remember when I first came across this, but mitochondria, which are these small organelles in each one of our cells, and we can often have many, many copies of a mitochondrial genome in a cell. You're. They, they generate, mitochondria generate the power in our cells.

Simon Southerton [00:53:42] And so muscle cells, for example, have lots and lots of mitochondria. And I was Fascinated to learn. Yes, these things look, these mitochondria look like bacteria. And in fact, it turns out there's an awful lot of evidence that our mitochondria were in fact bacteria that were absorbed into the very earliest, what they refer to as eukaryote cells on the earth. And this is about 2.7 billion years ago when the first eukaryote came into existence.

Simon Southerton [00:54:20] And so this was a, probably a fairly random occurrence. There are lots and lots of failures in evolution, but this one really worked and kicked off the evolution of plants, animals and fungi on the Earth. Plants and animals and fungi all have mitochondria.

Simon Southerton [00:54:41] But there are even further clues in mitochondrial DNA to, to suggest very clearly that they're derived from bacteria. In contrast to our genome, which is packaged into chromosomes and is not circular bacteria, sorry, mitochondrial DNA is circular. And it, and so, and that's completely different to the genome.

Simon Southerton [00:55:13] Each of the genes also lack what's called an intron. Now an intron in human, in eukaryote genes, introns are very common. What it is is a piece of DNA inside a gene that does not code for the protein intro. And while the gene is being convert, guiding the direction of protein, when an intron comes along, it's just.

Simon Southerton [00:55:41] So when the RNA is synthesized from the DNA, the introns are clear, are cut out. Okay, so it's just a spacer of DNA. I'm not up to speed on what the function of these is, but they're very common in eukaryotes, but they're absent, completely absent in the genes in our mitochondria.

Simon Southerton [00:56:04] I mentioned earlier about codons. That's the three bases of DNA that code for a particular amino acid. There are subtle differences in the codons that are used in mitochondria in our mitochondria as opposed to our genome. And the subtle differences are similar to, to bacteria and also the machinery of, of copying the DNA and converting the DNA into, using it to guide direction of amino acids and sorry, assembly of amino acids into a protein that is also very reminiscent of bacteria.

Simon Southerton [00:56:46] So I guess the question there would be when there's all of this amazing machinery in our nucleus, why does there, you know it, it's, it's such powerful evidence that our, a very early ancestor of ours was a bacteria that was absorbed into our cell when the machinery is already there in the nucleus, why wasn't that same machinery, which is spectacular, it even has error proofreading, much better proofreading capability in the genome.

Simon Southerton [00:57:19] But it's, it's it's. We've just the genome machinery and the way it functions is just entirely like a bacterial ancestor. So that, to me, when I first read about this, I just was absolutely blown away. It just showed very clearly the ties that we had to all living things on the planet. On the planet very, very long time ago.

Simon Southerton [00:57:47] And as I mentioned earlier, I may have, I may have real. I might have had that sort of wow moment as a very faithful member of the church and just conveniently put that one on the shelf. I didn't think too much more about it. So I don't know if you have any questions.

John Dehlin [00:58:03] Are you saying we share ancestry with conifers, basically, and.

Simon Southerton [00:58:09] Absolutely. All, all plants, all animals and all fungi?

John Dehlin [00:58:15] That's not theoretical. That's literally we can find, we can find shared DNA. Through analyzing the sequencing of the DNA of a conifer and our DNA, we can find the, the similarities.

Simon Southerton [00:58:34] Yes. Yeah. Obviously plants will have genes that are unique to plants, but there are whole hosts of genes to common metabolic pathways where there is just abundant similarity between plants and animals. All plants and all animals. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:58:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:57] So fascinating.

Simon Southerton [00:59:00] I just, it's. I just was. I think that's a very powerful illustration of our connectivity right through to the, the earliest on plants and animals, not just the, you know, we're just related to, you know, primates, nothing else. Yeah. Where it, it connects us deeply into the tree of life on the planet.

John Dehlin [00:59:21] Some don't like that, but for me, it, it, it's kind of beautiful that, that we all share. We're all kind of brothers and sisters, even with the plants.

Simon Southerton [00:59:29] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:30] For me.

Simon Southerton [00:59:31] Yeah, yeah. We might need to just move along a little on a little behind schedule. But if we hop on to the next slide now, I'll just give you a bit of background before we hop into this slide. This is a YouTube clip created by John Perry from SATA. Clearly.

Fossil Viruses, Neanderthals, and Shared Ancestry

Simon Southerton [00:59:51] And it's a beautiful story of how we share basically fossil virus fossils in our genome in exactly the same locations as chimpanzees. It's just a beautiful story. So he talks about endogenous retroviruses. So HIV was a retrovirus. What that basically means is that hiv, in order to reproduce, it needs to hop in the cell and get into the DNA. Yeah. Okay. Coronavirus doesn't get into your DNA. It's just a regular virus. It gets in to your cell and then reproduces. It's got its own machinery for copying itself, whereas hiv, a retrovirus gets into your DNA. Well, there are endogenous retroviruses. All they are is just a virus that's got into your DNA, but it's no longer functioning as a retrovirus.

Simon Southerton [01:00:46] It's sort of, I think it's a useful term, is a virus fossil that's floating around in our genome. So, yeah, I might just get you to click that one into life, Gerardo. And we'll just sit back and relax for six minutes and watch an absolute master of animation take us through this story.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 [01:01:11] So how does this all act as evidence that humans, chimps and other primates really evolved from a common ancestor? In 2003, the first draft of the chimp genome was published. Overall, chimp DNA and human DNA sequences are incredibly similar. But unless we dive deeper, this fact alone can't tell us for sure if evolution is a better explanation than the fixed species idea. We already know that humans and chimps have similar traits. If DNA codes for traits, we should expect our DNA to be similar as well, right? In many cases this is a reasonable point, but not in the case of endogenous retroviruses. Remember, your endogenous retroviruses show you the unique history of specific virus infections suffered by your ancestors.

Video Clip 1 [01:01:56] They're like scars in our DNA that an individual acquires during its lifetime and can pass on to his or her descendants. But only his or her descendants. Here we're looking at maps of human and chimp chromosomes side by side. Chromosomes are the structures in our cells that contain our DNA. If humans and chimps share a common ancestor, and if at least some of the infections we find in our genome occurred before the chimp human split, we should find the same virus genes in the exact same locations in both human and chimp genomes.

Video Clip 1 [01:02:29] In contrast, if humans and chimps are not related, they should not share the same history of virus infections. Now, of course, it is possible that throughout history, both species, humans and chimps, were infected by some of the same viruses. Humans and chimps sometimes get each other sick today. But if chimps and humans are not related, those virus genes will not be found in identical locations of both chimp and human DNA. This is because when a retrovirus infects a host, there are many different spots in the host genome where it might end up inserting itself. Extensive lab experiments with retroviruses have found that there are far more than 10 million possible insertion spots in the human genome.

Video Clip 1 [01:03:09] In other words, the chance of a human and a chimp getting infected in the exact same spot by the same specific type of virus is far less than 1 in 10 million.

Video Clip 1 [01:03:20] So you're telling me there's a chance?

Video Clip 1 [01:03:24] Well, it's ridiculously unlikely, and it gets worse fast. If two individuals are both infected with just 12 of the same viruses, the chance that each of those 12 inserted themselves into the exact same DNA locations in both hosts is less than one in the number of all the atoms estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.

Video Clip 1 [01:03:46] To get a rough idea of how many insertions are shared between humans and chimps, researchers scanned both of our genomes looking for a type of retrovirus they knew was common in humans. They found 211 insertions in the human genome and 208 in chimpanzees.

Video Clip 1 [01:04:04] To figure out if any of these insertions are in the same locations in both humans and chimps, they compared the unique flanking DNA sequences on either side of each insertion. If you think of the virus as a scar, the flanking sequences are the healthy bits of tissue around the scar that tell you where the scar is located.

Video Clip 1 [01:04:24] They found that we share not just 1, not just 12, but 205 insertions, 205 out of 214 for this particular virus group. This makes perfect sense if we consider the evolutionary view of life. The 205 shared viruses were inserted sometime before the chimp human split. The six insertions unique to humans and the three unique to chimps either represent insertions that happened after the split, or they represent deletion mutations that removed a few viruses in just one lineage after the chimp human split. In contrast, if we want to believe the fixed species view, we're forced to conclude that these viruses are simply shared by coincidence. When we do the math, even making sure to account for the nine viruses not shared by the two species, the chance of this happening by coincidence is less than 1 in this crazy number right here.

Video Clip 1 [01:05:23] This evidence should be enough for even the most reluctant yet rational person to carefully set aside the fixed species view. Endogenous retrovirus DNA alone is, is more than enough to independently confirm what we already knew from the study of fossils. That said, what we've seen here is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other lines of DNA evidence available. Together they demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that humans and chimpanzees did evolve from a common ancestor.

Simon Southerton [01:05:57] We are

Guest [01:06:04] family. Wow.

Gerardo Sumano [01:06:11] Case closed.

Simon Southerton [01:06:12] Yeah. That is, that is just so amazing. I mean, John is just a beautiful storyteller and he gets the science so solid, the research that he does with scientists in. He's just incredible.

John Dehlin [01:06:30] And, and he's, and he's ex Mormon and he's ex.

Simon Southerton [01:06:33] Yeah, he's very happy to come on the podcast at some stage. John, he would have come on today except he's just so got so many commitments on. But he, these take a lot of work, these, these videos and he's, he's working on new ones all the time. This is a, this one's fairly fresh and, but yeah, look, I highly recommend his stuff because it's scientifically, he's very careful to be completely accurate. So he, he'll ring scientists up and say, you know, does this, is this sound right? So he double checks all of his stuff. So. But what a beautiful story. It just shows quite clearly that we are, we share a very common ancestor. A very, they're our closest living relatives and we share, we share ancestry with them. I think about 8 million years ago. Yeah. Any, any questions or comments? Further comments? No, on that.

John Dehlin [01:07:36] Oh, that's super cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Simon Southerton [01:07:38] Yeah, I think that's really useful background for what we're going to now talk about. We're just going to talk about

Gerardo Sumano [01:07:45] the

Simon Southerton [01:07:45] column, basically the origin of our species, Homo sapiens, our connection with other species that are now extinct, although we do carry a little bit of them with us. If you go to the next slide. So we, yeah, so we.

Simon Southerton [01:08:08] There's now a complete scientific consensus that the origin of the human families is in Africa. So and there are four species that are listed on this side. So there's Homo sapiens, that's us, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus and Denisovans. I think there's a little bit of debate as to whether or not Homo erectus may actually be Denisovans.

Simon Southerton [01:08:37] I don't know. Michael may have an opinion on it later on. But the most widespread archaic relative of us is Homo erectus, who was found pretty much right across Africa, Middle east and southern, you know, India and southern Asia and down into Indonesia.

Simon Southerton [01:09:02] The earliest fossil, homo sapien is Omo 1 in the rift Valley in south in southern Ethiopia. Now it was thought to be about 195,000 years old, but in a very recent paper, I think it was this year, earlier this year, they, they redated the fossil because there was a layer of pumice immediately above the fossil.

Simon Southerton [01:09:28] And they date this was from a volcanic eruption and they matched up the volcano. So the geochemistry of the soil, that pumice layer was matched to a volcano. And they were able to, I think, was through argon dating, determined very accurately. So they grind up the pumice and then they measure the Argon 40 and Argon 39 and determine when that eruption took place.

Simon Southerton [01:09:54] So that's now 230 years old is the, that's the minimum time age for the earliest Homo sapiens. So it may be maybe quite, you know, maybe up to, up to 300 years old. So the move out of Africa probably took in was probably around about a hundred.

Simon Southerton [01:10:18] I can actually read the size of. I think it's about 150,000 years ago, about 100,000 years ago that humans entered the Middle East. And then the earliest humans, Homo sapiens in Europe, are found about 45, 000 years ago.

Simon Southerton [01:10:36] And that's when they encountered Neanderthals. So Neanderthals were a distant relative that had moved and colonized Europe since about 800,000 years ago. And humans, there was an overlap of 5 to 10,000 years between homo sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe.

Simon Southerton [01:11:00] And then it's probably worth mentioning at this point, the climate has been a very. We're all sort of focused a little bit on climate change at the moment. Climate has always been a problem for colonization of the planet.

Simon Southerton [01:11:19] And about 40,000 years ago, just outside of Naples, there was a massive eruption. It's called the Campanian ignabrite eruption. And it's the last largest eruption in Europe in the last 200,000 years. And it pretty much killed anyone within a few hundred kilometers radius of the eruption and changed the climate. So it dropped the global climate by at least a couple of degrees. And this probably contributed to the demise of one of the things that contributed to the demise of Neanderthals. Another thing may have been that their populations was too small and they, they started to inbreed.

Simon Southerton [01:12:01] So effectively, humans then shifted it back out of Europe. There might have been small corners of, say, southern Spain where they hung on. I think there were, but then they moved back in after the end of the last ice age and colonized Europe.

Simon Southerton [01:12:19] But meanwhile, humans moved east as well. So they're in the Middle east about a hundred thousand years ago and they shifted into, into Asia, so India and Asia about 75,000 years ago. And it's there that they encountered another species.

Simon Southerton [01:12:39] And we see signs of this species in our DNA. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. So it was about 50,000 years ago that humans reached Australia and about 25,000 years ago when they reached the Americas.

Simon Southerton [01:12:58] So if we hop onto the next slide, this slide shows, I think, probably the sort of the major difference in the appearance of the Neanderthal skeleton, because we've got many Neanderthal skeletons and skulls now it has. Neanderthals had a slightly larger hind brain compared to, to Homo sapiens, which is a larger forehead.

Simon Southerton [01:13:22] That seems to be the major difference between the two. Yeah, and you know, there's, it's, it'd be fair to say that if, you know, if a Neanderthal was alive today and dressed in regular clothes, you'd probably hardly even notice them. Well, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be all that much difference between them, between them and, and irregular, you know, crazy American or crazy Australian.

John Dehlin [01:13:51] Hey, watch it.

Simon Southerton [01:13:53] Yeah, but so early on there was, you know, this image that they were sort of like a humpback and stooped and like, you know, an ape and whatever. But that's, that's absolutely nonsense. So as I mentioned earlier, there was a lot of debate, if we go to the next slide, there was a lot of debate about, you know, are these guys in our if do we ever interbreed with these guys? Well, we now know for a fact that humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in the East.

Simon Southerton [01:14:31] So there's just been some fascinating stuff that's been published just recently. They isolated DNA from a 90,000 year old individual and I think was in the Denisovan Cave. Denisovan Cave is a cave in Asia where the, that finger bone was found. And they sequenced the, the genome. There's been a lot of other skeletons that have been sequenced from that cave. They sequenced an individual's 90,000 years old and it had a Neanderthal mum and a Denisovan dad. So it was a pure hybrid of the two. So they could clearly interbreed.

Simon Southerton [01:15:07] And they've sequenced the earliest genomes out of about five individuals in Europe that were 47,000 years old. And they could detect Neanderthal DNA there that had, that had entered the family tree only about five or six generations earlier.

Simon Southerton [01:15:26] So, so in other words, the individual, one of their great great grandparents was a joined in the family tree. So their DNA would have looked a lot different to us. So some of us, all of us or many of us have traces of Neanderthal DNA. And that Neanderthal DNA is scattered as tiny fragments throughout most of our genome. Whereas this individual, these individuals from 47,000 years ago, there were sizable chunks of Neanderthal DNA present.

Simon Southerton [01:16:02] And this is, there are fascinating things that are coming out of this because Neanderthals and Denisovans have lived in environments that are pretty hostile to humans for a long, long time. So it's possible and it's very likely that they.

Simon Southerton [01:16:22] There's been evolution and adaptation and survival of people who have genes that are better suited to a particular environment. And it turns out that a gene called EPAS1, which influences a person's ability to adapt to high altitude and live at high altitude, Scientists first discovered this Gene back in 2010, before the Denisovan genome had been published, and they thought, something amazing is going on here. This is an incredible selection going on for this gene. It was the most selected gene, intensely selected gene in, I think, in existence at that time. And then two years later, it was sequenced. The gene, the Denisovan genome, was sequenced and it was found that the EPAS1 gene is a Denisovan gene, or it's an allele of that gene.

Simon Southerton [01:17:18] When I say allele, we all have two copies of every gene, one from her mum and one from our dad, and they're called alleles. So. So. So people in Tibet who live at high altitude have a much higher frequency of the Denisovan allele of the EPAS1 gene because it gives a survival advantage at higher altitude, and that's because Denisovans have lived in that area for a long time.

Simon Southerton [01:17:44] Yeah, so that's a really fascinating little story. But there are other genes, Neanderthal genes, that have been under selection, positive selection, because they give some sort of an advantage. So it's. Yeah, so it's really fascinating. So on this slide, you can actually see that Asian, most Asians have tiny traces, you know, a couple of percent of Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA. Europeans tend not to have Denisovan, they have Neanderthal DNA in the ancestry. So Australians have Denisovan and Neanderthal. Africans have tiny traces of Neanderthal, which seems to come from back migration.

Simon Southerton [01:18:31] And of course, American Indians carry Neanderthal DNA and tiny traces of Denisovan. Virtually all the genomes they've looked at of Native Americans have tiny traces of Denisovan. Another piece of. We go to the next slide. Another piece of evidence that's really difficult to reconcile with all of us descending from an individual lived 7,000 years ago. Is this the massive amounts of genetic diversity. There are just so many mutations, you can't sort of trace them all back to one couple that lived 7,000 years ago, where there's only four chromosomes for each four copies of each of our chromosomes, when you have just the massive diversity. So I've got a tree here that shows them.

Scientific Consensus on Human Origins

Simon Southerton [01:19:20] They've looked at the mitochondrial genome and they've determined how Long ago was a common. The common ancestor of, of all human mitochondrial genomes, and that was about 200,000 years ago. They often refer to that as the mitochondrial Eve. But it's not likely to be a single individual. It's likely to be a sort of a small population of people that shared or shared. That carried that. That lineage. So any questions on that before we invite our guests in?

John Dehlin [01:19:57] I was just. I was just going to say, and if, and if genetic material evidence wasn't enough, Simon, I'm going to guess that, that in addition, we have archaeological evidence, we have carbon dating evidence, we have all the different dating methods evidence, linguistic evidence, geological evidence. Just, it's, it's not just DNA genetics plus carbon dating that's going to validate. It's going to be all the other scientific disciplines that are probably in. In very core ways agreeing and supporting each other. In terms of. In terms of everything you've been saying today.

Simon Southerton [01:20:44] Yeah, yeah. As I mentioned earlier, consensus science, this one. What we're talking about here is the scientific consensus. And, and really, to be honest, you know, BYU scientists, members of the church, faithful members of the church that don't have any problem with all of this.

John Dehlin [01:21:02] Yeah, yeah. That's just so important.

Gerardo Sumano [01:21:05] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:21:06] Not terribly controversial.

John Dehlin [01:21:08] Consensus across multiple disciplines.

Simon Southerton [01:21:10] Multiple disciplines.

Gerardo Sumano [01:21:11] Something that I'm just thinking. I know we're talking about Adam and Eve, but like, isn't it interesting that we can trace just the smallest part of Neanderthal. Neanderthal genes into, you know, like today's humans, but then for some reason, Lehigh's DNA got so watered down in the last couple hundred years.

Simon Southerton [01:21:37] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [01:21:38] We can't find it on the, on the.

Simon Southerton [01:21:40] Yeah, yeah. The apologists like to use the excuse because we don't have Lehi's DNA. We can't. We can't find anything.

Gerardo Sumano [01:21:47] Right.

Simon Southerton [01:21:47] Well, if Lehi had ancestors. Yeah, that's. That's what had. That's how all this DNA works. You're going to learn an awful lot about our ancestry by looking at the living people today and their DNA. Yeah. But at this point, I'm really, really delighted to welcome Michael Westaway, Professor Michael west, away from the University of Queensland to our group. Hi, Michael. Have we got the audio going? Yep.

Guest 2 [01:22:15] Should be able to hear me.

Simon Southerton [01:22:17] I really appreciate Michael joining us. Michael has just come back from Taurus Straight, and he might tell us a little bit about that. But Torres Strait is a critical junction between Australia and Papua New guinea. And obviously our past was connected, but.

Simon Southerton [01:22:32] So Michael is an archaeologist, but he's. He's been drawn over to the dark side with genomics and DNA because it's just such a powerful tool. And he's the author of a very highly cited paper in 2016 on the the genomes of Australian Aboriginals and voted a paper that was voted in the top 10, I believe in science published in Nature. But the two scientific journals are very friendly to each other and if they like a scientific article in the other journal, they'll, they'll rave about it. So. And, and maybe Michael will tell us a little bit about that. But yeah, I. Welcome aboard. Michael, I'll introduce you to. You've probably seen a couple of other faces there, John. John De Lin and Gerardo.

John Dehlin [01:23:24] Welcome.

Guest 2 [01:23:25] Thank you.

Guest Introduction: Archaeology and Human Migration

Simon Southerton [01:23:27] Excellent. Michael, I'd be just interested to hear you talk about how you got into archaeology. What drove that fascination then maybe talk about your PhD research. And I hope you don't mind if we occasionally pop in and ask you a few more questions.

Guest 2 [01:23:45] If we.

Simon Southerton [01:23:46] You've certainly had a fascinating last decade of research. So. Yeah. So tell us a bit what drove you and about your PhD work.

Guest 2 [01:23:56] Yeah, well, I, I was always very interested in ancient history and studied that at school. I grew up in the north coast of New South Wales, halfway between Sydney and Brisbane on the east coast of Australia and loved ancient history and thought I'd go and study Near Eastern archaeology. And then I went to the Australian National University in Canberra and, and had some remarkable teachers and they introduced me to the archaeology of this continent, which I was very naive about. And Isabel McBride, who was the first professional prehistoric archaeologist to work in Australia, the female prehistoric archaeologist, she did her work on the. The archaeology of New England which is north north coast of New South Wales.

Guest 2 [01:24:42] And so she'd excavated all these sites in my own backyard where I'd grown up as a kid and I had no knowledge of the great antiquity of Aboriginal Australians. It was really that experience at Australian National University being taught by another man, Colin Groves, who was a leading sort of a primatologist and biological anthropologist.

Guest 2 [01:25:04] I studied my PhD under Colin and I was inspired by these people, by the information they presented on the antiquity of human origins in this area and the great span of time from the first colonisation in Australia. So it was a pretty inspiring environment the Australian National University back In the early 1990s when I studied, I did my PhD studying about 2005 or 2004.

Guest 2 [01:25:33] I did it part time and I decided to look into the question of modern human origins in our region. That was a great time because it sent me all around the world to look at the earliest fossils of modern humans. So you mentioned Omo, and there's another site called Jebel Uhud and there's another site, Laetoli in East Africa and Tanzania, and the fossils from Israel, Palestine called Shkul and Kefsa. And so I went around the world to all the major museums studying these fossils to compare to the Australian record. And the largest record we have for fossil ancestral remains in Australia is from a place called Lake Mungo, which is actually one lake in a chain of 13 ancient lakes.

Guest 2 [01:26:21] And it's a World Heritage area called the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. So I actually took on a job to work in the World Heritage area for four and a bit years. And I worked very closely with the traditional aboriginal groups, the Barkandji, Mudi, Muddy and Niampa. And they gave me permission to study the fossils of their ancestors. So and this is an extraordinary place, the lakes, it's a fossil lake system and it hasn't actually been excavated by archaeologists. It's actually sheep that have played the major role in excavating that landscape. So it's a large series of crescent shaped dunes on the eastern margin of these ancient lakes.

Guest 2 [01:27:02] They're all dry today. We call these crescent shaped dunes lunettes and they are layered up in different layers of time. And the erosion that's been caused by sheep farming over the last 170 years has essentially removed all the vegetation. And you see these deeply incised guys, gullies cutting through these, these lunettes, these crescent shaped dunes. And as they cut through you can see changes in sediment over time. And so you can see nice sandy layers which represent the time when the lakes were full of water and the wind blew the, the nice beach, sorted sands and they would blow up in a nice sand dune when the lakes were dry.

Guest 2 [01:27:47] The, the, the, that clay nodules would form in the clay bottom of the lake and it would be blown by the same winds and they would form a clay layer. So you can see in the Willandra Lakes layers of sand, clay. Sand, clay. And they reflect the time of environmental change over some 140,000 years. These dunes have been dated in the last 50,000 years we see evidence of humans interacting with that landscape.

Guest 2 [01:28:17] So we see extinct animals and we dated the latest extinct animal, Zygomaturus, which is a massive wombat sized marsupial, a bit bigger than a rhinoceros. These animals seem to die at around 30,000 years ago. So people coexisted with them in that landscape for 20,000 years.

Guest 2 [01:28:36] But the record continues for humanity even at the peak of the last glacial maximum. So the last glacial maximum is the really bad ice age, where sea levels drop 140 meters. You see, what occurs is, you know, with glacial increase this and the expansion of Antarctica, sea levels drop by 140 meters. So Australia becomes much more arid. We call the larger continent of Australia at that time Sahul. Sahul is connected to Papua New guinea and to Tasmania. And so during that time we see, you know, that the, the ancestors of the Aboriginal people there today still thriving in that environment. I was very fortunate to be involved in about 2006, I think it was the excavation of a fossil trackway site which showed, you know, family groups moving across this system at the peak of the last ice age.

Guest 2 [01:29:30] So Australia in that part of the continent at that time would have been more like out of Mongolia or Teotifuego. It was a very arid, cold place, but still human populations thrived. So I had the great fortune of being able to study the ancestral remains of the current Aboriginal people there. Today there are over 100 fossils from that landscape and more and more will be eroded over time. And I compared them to the fossil record across the globe for my PhD of modern humans. Most of the modern humans dating from around 100,000 years ago from Africa and the near east, or the Middle east as people more commonly know it.

Guest 2 [01:30:06] Then I also worked in a place called Nandong in Java and I excavated that site. That's the latest known Homo erectus site. So there was a controversial paper published in Science in the late 90s 96, I think, by a chap by the name of Swisher who argued that Homo erectus had survived until 27,000 years ago.

Guest 2 [01:30:28] So I worked in that site with the now late Professor Jakob and also Professor Baba from National Science Museum in Tokyo. And we studied these fossils and we, we established that the age, the very late age for Homo erectus was wrong.

Guest 2 [01:30:44] And this undermined the idea that, you know, these two species had coexisted for a long time. And I studied these fossils to try to see if we could establish traits of Homo erectus in the first Australians. When the first fossils were found in Australia in the early 1900s at a place called Cow Swamp in central Victoria, these were very heavily built, robust fossils. And so for many, many years, paleoanthropologists like Alan Thorne believed very strongly that the origins of the first Australians was closely linked to Indonesia, the mark of ancient Java they referred to. My PhD established that there wasn't a mark of ancient Java, that the traits that we could see, the characters we could see in the first Australians, were also seen in all these African early modern human fossils.

Guest 2 [01:31:35] So that was basically the sum result of my PhD. It was a huge body of work that took seven and a half years to complete while I worked part time as a government archaeologist. But it really inspired me. And because of that experience and working with Aboriginal people and working sensitively with their ancestors, Australia has a bad past of stealing the remains of Aboriginal people and sending them to museums across the world. A lot of people were fascinated with the idea of the missing link. And they thought that because early European observations identified what they called at the time a primitive culture that they didn't really understand, they relegated them as a lower link on the evolutionary table.

Guest 2 [01:32:18] So museums across the world in the 1800s wanted Aboriginal ancestral remains. And this has been a huge legacy of that science from the 19th century and early 20th century. So it is a lot of Aboriginal people very suspicious of archaeologists wanting to study their ancestors. And it's understandable.

Guest 2 [01:32:39] I've worked with lots of Aboriginal communities and as you just mentioned a moment ago, Simon, I was in the Torres Strait helping a community who have their ancestors being washed into the sea as a result of climate change, and they want to work out how to move this ancient cemetery site into a higher ground.

Guest 2 [01:32:55] So I work very closely with Aboriginal people to investigate their past by looking at the remains of their ancestors and helping them with current problems. This experience really brought me to the attention of a number of people working in ancient DNA. And that's how I became involved in collaborating with geneticists to investigate the story.

Guest 2 [01:33:19] So, you know, I investigated the story looking at the fossil record, the earliest modern humans and the earliest first Australians. But there's only so much that the fossil can tell you. And over the years it's been revealed that we can recover ancient DNA from fossil remains if the conditions are right, but also more recent archaeological remains. We can also study the DNA of living populations as well. And so in 2016, I think it was, we released the results of research that was actually looking at the diversity of modern DNA across Australia that was led by a very well known geneticist called Eska Vilaslev from Copenhagen and Cambridge University.

Guest 2 [01:34:07] And, and Eska is quite an extraordinary individual, about a year or two younger than me, and has written a huge number of nature and science papers studying the ancient DNA and modern DNA of populations across the world. And the work that he has done is really sort of changing our understanding of modern human origins. So While I couldn't detect signatures of admixture between other species of early humans with modern humans in our region, the DNA has revealed that signature. And in the first Australians, we see evidence of interactions with two populations. So everybody living outside of Africa today has in their DNA the signature of past interactions with Neanderthals.

Guest 2 [01:34:57] But 2, 2% of your DNA today is from Neanderthals. But the first Australians also carry the signature of intermarriage or interaction with this enigmatic population called the Denisovans. We actually have very few fragments of their fossils. The main cave is in Siberia called Denisova Cave, and there are quite interestingly in that cave, the remains of Neanderthals and Denisovans. So the two species were interacting. Modern humans move to that area.

Denisovans, Hobbits, and Ancient Human Diversity

Guest 2 [01:35:31] Interestingly, we're now finding DNA signatures of other Denisovan lineages. One in Southeast Asia, the island Southeast Asia, around Indonesia. And there seems to be another one east of that in an area we call Wallachia, east of a place called the Wallace Line. The Wallace Line is like a biogeographical divide between the Asian plate and the Australian plate. So on, on this side of the world, our mammals are marsupials and monotremes. So kangaroos, koalas and platypus and echidna. On the other side of the Wallace Line, you get, you know, monkeys, there were tigers, there are elephants. It's a different fauna. So that these two, these two land masses has been, have been separated for at least 50 million years.

Guest 2 [01:36:21] When modern humans move into this region, they cross east, heading east of the Wallace Line, and they move into the Australian continental plate and they meet, we think, the, the, the ants, well, the Denisovans, another lineage of the Denisovans. And they also meet a very strange looking fossil human, which was coined the hobbit, I think, discovered in or published in Nature in 2004. The real name is Homo floresiensis. And this is a fossil that, you know, created a huge amount of debate. A lot of people argued, oh, this is someone with a congenital condition, it can't be a modern human. The dates are too late.

Guest 2 [01:37:06] This fossil actually looks like something you'd expect to see in Africa 3 million years ago. The Australopithecines. So the hobbits of Homo floresiensis really shook up our understanding of modern human origins in this part of the world, because there is, there's interaction with these species. There's no evidence that they interpret, but there certainly seems to be evidence that there was intermixture with Denisovans. So a really complex picture, the evolutionary story in this part of the world.

Simon Southerton [01:37:31] Yeah. Oh, that, that was fascinating, Michael, thanks very much. I really enjoyed that. To hear somebody that's sort of had such a long and such a productive, you know, research experience in this field. It's particularly relevant for our discussion because we've, we've just followed the, we're talking about how humans moved out of Africa and, and your work, and the, the work of others with you is just showing really quite clearly how humans have occupied this Australia for such a long time.

Simon Southerton [01:38:11] If I wouldn't mind you just we running through some of the slides that we had and just, and having you just comment about some of these. The first slide I've stolen from your publication from 2016 and the thing that really stands out to me because I've had such a focus on, and the origins of Native Americans and there's such enormous debate in America about whether humans have been there for 20,000 years or 30,000 years.

Simon Southerton [01:38:41] And, and this slide just shows how much evidence there is of human occupation in the Australia. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about that slide, the, the remains of that lovely slide that you had in your Nature paper.

Guest 2 [01:38:56] Yeah, well, you can see the light green shading shows what the sea level was like at the time of the, you know, the Pleistocene, the ice ages. So the sea level had dropped considerably. Well connected to Papua New Guinea. So most of the human history of Australia the last 65,000 years, the majority of that time, Papua New guinea has been part of the landmass. And you can see across that region there is a huge number of archaeological sites that date to greater than 40,000 years ago. Lake Mungo, you can see that the, the, the white circle in the star. That's the area that I did my PhD research on.

Guest 2 [01:39:34] The sites 10 and 11. Majibebe, I think there's number 11 was excavated by a colleague of mine from the University of Queensland, Chris Clarkson, published in Nature a few years ago. And that's a 65, 000 year site. So that is the earliest evidence we have of human occupation. And the people at these sites, you know, the early archaeology at Majibabi, this site in Harnham Land, you know, there are, there are ochre crayons and there are grinding fragments from seed grinding implements. So they're making bread. It's a fairly sophisticated group of hunter gatherers that colonized the continent at that early phase. And you know, these are the first, you know, know, these are the first real seafarers.

Guest 2 [01:40:17] They had to make a journey of at least around 120, 140ks to get to Australia. And at that time it would have been, you know, equivalent to a trip to the moon, you know, to actually set off beyond the horizon knowing that there must be something else over those seas. So it's an extraordinary record and it's an incredibly rich one. And unfortunately, not all Australians appreciated as, as we would like, like to see in West Australia. Just a year, a bit over a year ago, Rio Tinto, a mining company, destroyed one of these 47,000-year-old sites, destroyed it with dynamite in an area they were doing mining.

Guest 2 [01:40:58] And there was international condemnation and the, the, the senior executive of Rio Tinto was replaced. But, you know, it's an incredibly rich and important record, but it's also something that we don't all appreciate as much as we should, I think.

Simon Southerton [01:41:12] Yeah. Michael, can I ask a question about that, your Nature paper? You know, I don't think it was voted in the top 10 because it's got pretty pictures. It's probably because of the impact of the science. So in a nutshell, what was the, what were the things that you've discovered that were just really fascinating?

Ancient Australians and the Genomic Evidence

Guest 2 [01:41:33] Well, it was at, you know, it's the largest genomic study that's been done in Australia. There were 82 complete genomes, I think, from memory, from across the continent. And it revealed a whole range of new insights into the population history of the country that you really can't recover through archaeological evidence alone. Archaeology can tell you when people are present. It can tell you when there's changes in material culture or adaptations to new environments. But, but what the genetic record said, and these are modern genomes, mind you.

Guest 2 [01:42:04] It told us a lot about when people first arrived. It told us the timing of the interaction with Denisovans, which is around 40,000 years ago. And that was quite controversial at the time. But now that we're seeing Denisovans on this side of the Wallace Line, on this side of the Australian plate, with suggestions that they may have even been in the northern highlands of, of. In the highlands of Papua New guinea, you know, it's really shaking up the way we think about origins in this part of the world.

Simon Southerton [01:42:34] Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:42:35] Genetics also showed us that the divergence between Papuans in Australia occurred around 27,000 years ago, which is much earlier than we thought because the straits are cut off around eight and a half thousand years ago. So the area between Papua New guinea and Cape York, the northernmost part of Australia, is cut off eight and a half thousand years ago, but the people actually diverged, you know, 27,000 years ago. But we also see evidence of, you know, population structure and divergence between east and west Australia at the peak of that last glacial phase. So when the country starts to really dry out, you don't see hardly any gene flow between the east side of the country and the western side and the. And so those populations are more divergent than Alaskans and people living on the other side of the bering.

Simon Southerton [01:43:27] Yeah. Because central Australia is a pretty desolate place, isn't it? It's very hard to.

Guest 2 [01:43:32] It's a desert place now, but during the last glacial maximum, there was absolutely no water. It was a massive barrier to any movement. So we see this structure forming across Australia and it's, you know, it's really opened up our eyes as to the power of DNA to reveal things that, you know, you can't basically recover in the archaeological record.

Simon Southerton [01:43:53] Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:43:53] So I was sold, you know, it was, it was a. My main role was working with Aboriginal communities, talking about the research, collecting the genomic samples and then putting the genomic results into the archaeological context of the continent.

Simon Southerton [01:44:05] Yeah, yeah. Well, it's easy to see how crucial your archaeological work was for the. In for that publication, hence the, you know, first, first authorship. So that's beautiful work. We've got a couple of other pictures that I might just, we might flick through and, and you might want to say a couple of things about them, but I actually visited Lake Mungo about 18 months ago with my son and he's a photographer and I, I. Forgive me for not using one of his photos, but it's actually a beautiful landscape. And in this, and in this slide you'll see, you can see the multi layers that you were talking about. And I've actually walked up, I, I was fascinated to hear you talk about those narrow canyons. You go up, you can see all the layers. So I did all that.

Guest 2 [01:44:54] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:44:55] But there you can see Mungo. The original excavation of Mungo Man, I think, which is, was that 1976?

Guest 2 [01:45:03] 74. Mungo man is excavated and Mungo Woman is 1968. So Mungo, they're both now established to be around 42,000 years old. Mungo woman was, is the world's earliest cremation. So she was a cremated individual among a man. You can see some, just below his skull, you can see some red staining. And so he was adorned in a huge quantity of ochre which came from the barrier ranges, we think over 200km away. So it's a. He's obviously a very significant individual that was adorned and open from a long way away. But it's the, it's the beautiful sands of the Willandra and at the time there was water on either sides of these lakes and, and the water would move through the sand dunes and, and slowly fossilize these, these remains.

Guest 2 [01:45:51] Yeah, that. It's not been possible to recover ancient DNA from these early people because they're, they're, they're bones. There's not much collagen left. They've all been heavily mineralized. DNA has been recovered from one individual. WH4 and he's, he's probably only, you know, in the last thousand years but these very ancient ones, we haven't been able to recover their DNA. But you know, he's, he's the poster child, child monger, man of, of the place in Australians. But the reality is there's another hundred individuals in that landscape at least.

Gerardo Sumano [01:46:20] Least.

Guest 2 [01:46:21] So it's a, it's rich place.

Simon Southerton [01:46:24] Yeah, that's a beautiful place. Yeah. So, yeah. And of course there was a little bit of controversy over the age of Mungo man, but that seems to be completely resolved using really neat technology. But yeah, we've got, we've now got a footprint. We're going to actually talk about footprints in America in a moment. But this is some. A footprint that. Was this the one legged man?

Guest 2 [01:46:50] This is the one legged man, yeah. This is an extraordinary. There are over 800 fossil footprints at this site. And we published a paper in Australian Archaeology several years ago refining the age to around 19,000 years or something. But these are people living at the peak of the last Ice age. And we have over 800 footprints that have been exposed in this site and there are actually a family group moving west to east. And the interesting thing about that is there's a child meandering behind them. And then you see the child wandering off in his own direction heading back west. And it's almost like you can imagine the mother calling to the child and the child scampers after the rest of the group.

Guest 2 [01:47:34] So you get these really personal insights into family groups and the peak of the last Ice Age. But you know, then another group comes perhaps a few days later. We can't actually refine the chronology that well, but they are a hunting group and they're pursuing something. And we actually got some trackers from the Pintabi. And the Pintabi trackers are quite famous in Australia. They were brought in in the 1960s and they had hardly seen any Europeans and their tracking skills were Remarkable. They could tell if someone was carrying a kangaroo on their shoulder, then swap shoulders. They could see the change in weight distribution and footprints.

Guest 2 [01:48:10] And we were trying to work out how on earth is there just one foot? Maybe it was a shallow pond, we thought, and that's someone scooting along on a raft or something. But they pointed out the very obvious thing, that his footprint was much, much deeper than the other footprints. And they said there's a lot more weight bearing on that one footprint. And they said this is a one legged man. And they said we had a one legged man in our group who just died two weeks previous to their visit. And they believed it was the same person. It was, it was a connection between the two and it was just this incredible event where they connected.

Guest 2 [01:48:42] And they said this is an individual who's pursuing something they found where he'd thrown his stick and then he took off on one leg, pursuing some kangaroos. It's a remarkable story. They even picked up places where they were walking and they started laughing. They were speaking in language where someone had thrown a spear and missed the prey. So an incredible story came out from traditional knowledge that, that archaeology had no chance of revealing. So that was really quite an amazing sight.

Simon Southerton [01:49:11] Yeah, that's beautiful. It's nice to hear the, you know, the humanness of these people. You know, these were, I mean, the fact that this Mungo woman was, you know, these are carefully buried. These are, these people cared about their ancestors who died and they went to extraordinary lengths to warn them. Yeah, so it was, yeah.

Guest 2 [01:49:35] What is really interesting, I think is that there are, you know, there are a large number of cremations. I think there are 14 cremated individuals and they range from males and females to children. So quite often in archaeology and anthropology we say, oh, you know, funeral rights are only afforded to very significant individual individuals. Complex funeral mortuary rituals are afforded to really, you know, high profile males and blah, blah, blah. But you know, you see children that have been cremated and afforded these complex mortuary rituals as well. So it's, you know, it's, you know, and to see something like the fossil trackway, which is a very, you know, a real living site, it's provides a glimpse that you really get in studying the archaeology of the place, places seen.

Simon Southerton [01:50:17] Yeah, yeah. Well, that's fascinating. I just thought just before we let you go, Mike, we've certainly really appreciate your time. It's been a wonderful experience listening to you talk about your, your work in such a sort of emotive way. But I, I dug around and Found some literature about some cave art. And I think this is for those who are listening, you may want to pop in and see that, have a look at the video visuals here. But there's some beautiful cave art of. Of kangaroos that was painted about 6, 6 17, 000 years ago.

Simon Southerton [01:50:55] And yeah, the scientists very cleverly dated this by. There were mud wasps that built nests and some of them in the cave and some of the nests were underneath the art. So the artists had painted over the top of them and then there were mud wasps on the top. And they.

Simon Southerton [01:51:11] The carbon dated the little remains of carbon that were in the mud wasp nests to determine how old they were. I think it's certainly. I think that's the oldest rock art in Australia. I don't know. That's the oldest in the world though. Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:51:25] There's some earlier art in Sulawesi, to the north in Indonesia, which dates around 40,000. But here they very cleverly were able to date organic material in the wasp nest and bracket wasp nests on either side of the art. So, yeah, painted over and then nests again. So it's a, it's a really clever paper. It's a nice bit of scientific research.

Simon Southerton [01:51:48] Yeah, I think that was only published just last year. Yeah. So we might have links to that. Some of these you can't actually get. There's a paywall. But yeah, and we might just flick to. There's a couple of slides there, but we might click to the last slide that we have, which is about the colonization of the Americas, and run through this while you're here with us, Michael, because it's a. It's also a fascinating story about human footprints preserved in a lake in New Mexico.

Early Humans in the Americas and Cave Art

Simon Southerton [01:52:19] And so this was published in Science and it's the earliest firm evidence we have of humans in the Americas. There was a lot of debate, you know, was it 15, 17,000 years ago, years ago, based on archaeology and DNA. And then here this comes along. Boom.

Simon Southerton [01:52:36] Very accurately carbon dated and revealed some really fascinating stuff. So they carbon dated that. It went through similar things, I think, to the Mungo Lake with dry periods when you had sand and then. And then you had grass growing and that grass dropped lots of seeds. And so they had these neat layers of seeds, pods from. I think it's ditch grass here. Ditch grass. And they just got really accurate carbon dates from that.

Simon Southerton [01:53:05] That was fascinating. They also found mastodon footprints alongside the humans and a canid footprint. So that's either a wolf or a fox or a dog. And I'm tempted to believe. I don't know what your opinion would be about that, Michael. Is there much chance of it being a dog?

Guest 2 [01:53:25] Yeah, dogs are domesticated quite late in the piece and we know that from genetics. So, you know, wolves are the answers of dogs. So it's probably something along those lines. I mean, it's interesting that the scientists have sort of, who've put this forward, paper forward, have argued they need to do further OSL dating as well. They're very excited by the results and a lot of people seem to be in agreement with them now. But yeah, you know, when you want to confirm something, I mean, if you can apply in a technique like OSL dating, where we date the sand grains the last time they were exposed to sand, to sunlight, that would be another way of verifying this.

Guest 2 [01:53:58] But, you know, these are results that can be further checked and analyzed. It does push back the pre Clovis occupation of America by a few thousand years. And it's a really exciting discovery. So, yeah, I'm sure there's more to come out.

Simon Southerton [01:54:11] Yeah, well, that's, it's interesting you giving us a little insight into how science works. So this comes out, it breaks a, it's a paradigm breaker or threatener and other scientists will come along and, and if they don't believe it, they're going to use another technique to see if they can verify that age. So. Yeah, but I thought it was a nice connection through to your, your footprint work in, in Australia.

Guest 2 [01:54:39] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:54:41] Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:54:42] Okay, well, thank you very much. No, it's all about.

John Dehlin [01:54:45] But before you leave, is it okay if I ask you just a final quick set of questions? Is that okay?

Guest 2 [01:54:50] Absolutely, John.

Simon Southerton [01:54:51] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:54:51] Okay. So again, I'm, I'm John, it's so nice to have you on Mormon stories. It's a real honor and I'm really grateful, Simon, that you would bring Michael on. So Michael, we've just spent a couple hours now really kind of laying out the science between what, what Simon has said and you have said, Michael, there's going to be, you know, we also live in kind of a tick tock in an Instagram world where we create shorts. And so what I want to do just right before you leave is just ask you a few really quick questions. And I just want to be clear. What we really value about you, Michael, is you're from a Mormon perspective.

John Dehlin [01:55:24] You're an outsider. And so we know that scientists generally don't like to be brought into religious debates or faith debates. And even though scientists may have their own views, secular or religious, you know, we also, you Know, as people within a faith tradition, it's really valuable. Sometimes we get in our own silos of understanding. Sometimes we tend to just communicate with each other. And then when we have sort of a scientific minded person like Simon Southerton who comes out of our tradition, who then has critiques, you know, those, sometimes those scientists get labeled as apostates and get excommunicated as a way to discredit them. So for us, whether it's Dr.

John Dehlin [01:56:10] Michael Coe or Dr. Robert Ridner, it's been the, it's been the tradition of Mormon stories. You know, whenever we were able to find a scientist who works outside of the tradition, who's willing to sort of just give us the understanding of the general scientific consensus, not as someone tainted like, you know, Simon, who's an evil apostate by, you know, by, by orthodox Mormon standards. And again, not to have you, Michael, be someone who's trying to take away faith or destroy faith or even weigh in on the debates. We're not asking you to do that per se, but what I'd like to do is just ask you to summarize your understanding of the general scientific consensus around a few of the major points that we're discussing today. So can we do a quick couple minute firing round, Michael? Is that okay?

Guest 2 [01:57:00] Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Reconciling Mormon Doctrine with Human Prehistory

John Dehlin [01:57:01] Okay, so, so first of all, the idea that the earth is 7,000, let's just say 7,000 years old or 14,000 years old, what was your understanding as an outsider scientist as to the scientific consensus around, you know, that, that claim?

Guest 2 [01:57:19] Well, the world. Well, we do have an extensive fossil record now that shows, you know, extensive change and evolution over tens of millions of years. So my specialty is looking at the modern human story. And that's what I can speak about with some confidence. And we know that the earliest human fossils now are found in actually northern Africa, Morocco, at a place called Jebel Urud. And they date to around 300,000 years. There are other early moderns at Omo and other sites that are around 200,000 years.

Guest 2 [01:57:57] So our species has a very old antiquity. And we know by looking at the layers in the rocks, how deep these fossils have been discovered and the discovery adjacent to extinct animals that no longer exist with us today. We know that the relative age of these fossils is very, is quite old.

Guest 2 [01:58:15] We now have many scientific techniques of dating and, and it's not just relying on one or two. There are multiple avenues of inquiry that geochronologists, the people that study the age of ancient fossils, can apply to understand the antiquity of fossils. And These techniques are developed and they're critiqued by scientists all across the globe. So it's a system of regularly checking and rechecking the results and critiquing the science. It's very clear that modern humans have a great and ancient antiquity that really we should all celebrate. And the first Australians and we talk about faith based conflict. You know, the Aboriginal people believe in something called the dreaming, where their, their ancestry is closely tied to the land that they lived in.

Guest 2 [01:59:01] But many Aboriginal Australians are now realizing that there's carbon time and dreaming time talk about similar concepts. You know, we talk about a time that occurred very long ago, tens of thousands of years. And in the case of Australia, now 65,000 years. We have a rich record in Australia of around 40 sites that now date to beyond 40,000 years. So the record in Australia is strong.

Guest 2 [01:59:28] It's inspiring. And many Aboriginal Australians don't see that as a threat to their religious beliefs. They actually see it as a way of confirming that, you know, they have a long connection to the land and their stories aren't necessarily in competition.

John Dehlin [01:59:45] I love it. Okay, and so the, the earth has to be older than 7 or 14, 000 years then obviously the idea that all humanity today sprang from a single man and woman about 7, 000 years ago. I'm asking you to kind of repeat yourself, but your understanding of that, that the, the possibility of that being our origin would be.

Guest 2 [02:00:10] Well, in Africa, north and east, we see anatomically modern humans evolving over 200,000 years ago. So, and this is also now supported by genetic evidence suggesting that our lineage's antiquity is that long too. So not only do the fossils and the archaeology associated with the fossils, but also the DNA of modern humans, they show this story of our ancient origins in Africa.

John Dehlin [02:00:36] Okay, and then you're being really, you're being really generous and patient. So do you, do you have a quick personal feeling about the probability of a global flood happening where water covered the whole earth during, around the time the Bible would claim Noah? Do you have any, do you have any thoughts or experience around the possibility of that really quickly? And then I'll just have one more quick question question after that.

Guest 2 [02:00:58] Well, you know, we know that sea levels are changing today. And I've just come back from the Torres Strait Islands looking at some ancestral remains of some Aboriginal groups who are, you know, eroding into the sea. So in the past there were changes in sea levels, but there is no evidence suggesting that there was one great cataclysmic event that wiped out you Know, huge numbers of different species and that humanity escaped on a large floating vessel. I think, you know, the geological and archaeological record push back in time, deep time, over a couple hundred thousand years, showing our evolution is complex. And there were catastrophes in the past.

Guest 2 [02:01:42] There's something called the Mount Toba eruption that happened in northern Indonesia, and, you know, it spread volcanic ash across much of Asia. But humanity survived that. So humanity has been able to survive many cataclysmic events, and there are always environmental impacts. But yeah, look, I can't see any evidence for a cataclysmic event that, you know, wiped out all this, these species and then resulted in, you know, an exodus in a vessel that saved a couple of individuals and then they repopulated the world. It's, it doesn't really add up against the science.

John Dehlin [02:02:19] Okay, and then this is, this question's a little bit outside of your geographic expertise, but the idea that, you know, North, Central and South America was populated primarily by Hebrews that sailed to the Americas around 2600 years ago, and that they have kind of a Middle Eastern or even a Israeli origin to, you know, as, as the primary ancestors of the Native Americans. Your thoughts around that?

Guest 2 [02:02:49] Yeah, well, there's fairly clear evidence in the archaeological record that the people that populated the Americas in the Pleistocene. So the Pleistocene is the last ice ages, which are over 10,000 years ago. And there is DNA from people like Kennewick man. And Kennewick man is one of the earliest burials. He dates to, I think, around eight or nine thousand years. Kennewick man has Asian DNA. And we know that the, the people who populated the Americas and the, the descendants who live today, the Native Americans, are descended from these East Asian population. So genetics and archaeology don't really support the idea that there was a population of people from, from, you know, the Middle east that colonized the Americas.

John Dehlin [02:03:39] And to what extent. Is there any evidence that Dr. Simon Southerton bribed you in his evil ways to persuade you to state these things, or do you state these as an independent.

Guest 2 [02:03:51] I do say this is independent scientist. And look, I, I, I must apologize to some because I've been tripping all over the country at the moment. I've missed emails and phone messages. So, yes, I've been hard to catch. So I'm grateful that I made it to the show today and thank you for the opportunity to talk about these sort of things.

John Dehlin [02:04:09] Thank you, Michael. Thanks for being a good sport. What's that, Simon?

Simon Southerton [02:04:16] Thanks very much, Michael. That was wonderful. Really appreciate it.

Guest 2 [02:04:19] Okay, thanks.

John Dehlin [02:04:21] Thanks, Michael.

Guest 2 [02:04:22] Goodbye.

Simon Southerton [02:04:23] Bye. Wow, that was wonderful.

John Dehlin [02:04:30] Yeah, thank you.

Simon Southerton [02:04:31] Yeah, I could have listened. I knew he'd had a favorite of breadth of experience, but. Yeah, he's just been so intimately connected with the work done in Australia. And I thought it'd be valuable to put this in as a little story and go into a fair bit of depth here because I don't think Americans hear too much about the debate about, you know, when did humans reach the Americas.

Gerardo Sumano [02:04:58] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:04:59] And it's still debatable, you know, 20,000 years ago. And here, that illustration from his Nature paper, you've got 18 sites, archaeological sites across Australia where they have firm evidence, you know, rock tools and not, not bones of humans, but, you know, human art and, and tools that are over 40,000 years old. So it just shows you just how, how much evidence there is for human occupation of Australia, which is a really important part of the story. That's why that paper was voted so highly that year. So. But yeah, look, I just love the way he talked so passionately about his science and you can tell that he's just loves what he's doing and he's not motivated by trying to harm anyone's faith. It's just motivated by trying to find the tr.

John Dehlin [02:05:52] Truth.

Simon Southerton [02:05:54] So, yeah, I'm really, really grateful to him for the.

Gerardo Sumano [02:05:58] So are you saying, Simon, that he doesn't start with a conclusion and then. And then fits the evidence he finds?

Simon Southerton [02:06:06] No, it's. It's interesting how some of his work in. Yeah. I mean, scientists tend to view the consensus as something to, to challenge. Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:06:19] It was so interesting that he said, you know, that that was. He wanted to challenge what the consensus was or.

Simon Southerton [02:06:26] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. And, and bad science is when a scientist will set out to prove a conclusion that he's already reached. Yeah, yeah. And so. But love it. Yeah, it was, it was, it was wonderful day to hear an archaeologist and to hear how. How the molecular work has complemented these. His work so, so well. Yeah, no, I'm really. It was wonderful at him on. All right, we're going to change gears now. Yeah.

LDS Apologetic Responses to Evolution and Science

Gerardo Sumano [02:07:02] You have some, some questions raised by science.

Simon Southerton [02:07:05] Yeah, look, let's, we've got a. I don't know. Do you want to. Do you want to. There's a bunch of questions questions, obviously the. Raised by the science. Why do our, My tear. Why do our mitochondria look and behave like they were once bacteria? Why do we look like we're related so distantly to everything else on the planet, every other living thing? Why do we share so much fossil, you know, fossilized virus with our closest living relative. How can Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans descend from Adam when they have been separated from the rest of the the global population for from 25000 to 60000 years? Yeah. How do we explain fossils the 40, 000 years, 230000 years old and as Michael said, potentially up to 300000 years old fossil humans.

Gerardo Sumano [02:08:06] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:08:07] Do spirits make fossils? What were these pre Adam beings like? And how, of course, how do we explain the presence of Neanderthal DNA and Denisovan DNA in US today when they went extinct? In the case of denisovans, it's about 60000 years ago or potentially 40000 years ago, I think from Michael's work. But generally they were mostly extinct by 60,000 years ago, but you know, 35000 years ago for Denisovans. So these are all serious questions that are raised by the science. Yeah, yeah. And how is it that, you know, all non Africans have 2 to 3% of Neanderthal DNA? Yeah. So these are just really small serious questions. And there are scientists of BYU that are grappling with them and. Don't. Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:09:12] There's this quote right from Dr. Michael Whiting.

Simon Southerton [02:09:17] Yes.

Gerardo Sumano [02:09:19] And he says nothing has been more destructive to our students than giving them an ultimatum. They must either believe the gospel or believe in evolution. And that was on the byu, BYU Maxwell page.

Simon Southerton [02:09:36] Yeah, yeah. So I've got absolutely no doubt that all of that stuff that we've just talked about, Michael Whiting would accept because I believe he's a competent scientist. He teaches human evolution. And you know, one of the comments is there from one of his students, obviously learning about ancestors, learning about my ancestors with Dr. Michael Whiting. There's a, what looks like a skeleton of a chimpanzee. So yeah, it's just clearly that we descend from common ancestor.

Simon Southerton [02:10:09] Now the next slide. I, Michael Whiting wrote a, an essay back in 2011 which was published in a lecture on Science and religion series published by byu. And so he talks very passionately about evolution and he's clearly believes it is true.

Simon Southerton [02:10:30] But then at the end of this essay has the hard questions and it's what we're talking about today that he does not answer. He, he can't answer. He's not delved into pre Adamites or death before the fall. And he makes the observation that, you know, the evolutionary theory can be spun in such a way as to be in direct Conflict with the doctor Rules of the Church. I don't think there's any spinning going on.

Gerardo Sumano [02:10:56] Yeah, I don't think we've spun any, any of the scriptures that you present. Right.

Simon Southerton [02:11:03] And he says that there are interpretations of Latter Day Saint scripture that can be formulated in such a way as to contradict current ideas and evolutionary theory. I just think there are conflicts and there is no resolution. And we're going to talk about, just to wrap up, we're going to look at some of the comments that have been made more recently by LDS apologists to, to look at just which I think illustrate the, the quandary that they're in.

Simon Southerton [02:11:34] And yeah, the first comments that I want to look closely at, comments of a 20 from a 2017 interview with this was on the Gospels Tangents website where Hugo Perego was interviewed. Hugo Perego got his PhD at, I think it was BYU and has done a lot of work on the mitochondrial DNA of American Indians.

Simon Southerton [02:12:02] And he's, he's Italian, so he's a little bit disjoint. He's. He's. I might read this out because it's a, A little. Sometimes it's a little bit.

Gerardo Sumano [02:12:16] Yeah. He didn't write this. He was speaking about it. Right. It was being interviewed. Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:12:20] Yeah. So he's asked about, you know, human evolution, and he clearly believes it. And he says that's what genetics says, that's what the DNA says. Okay. Archaeological evidence is the same. Carbon dating is the same. Fossil record strata. Whatever discipline you take and you look at it, there were people living on the Earth, humans living on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, 200,000 years for our species. But so clearly he accepts all of the stuff that we've just talked about. I mean, that's basically a summary of what we've talked about. Fossil strata, DNA genomics. And then he says this is where it gets problematic. Can all these data from different fields be affected by outside environmental happenings like volcanoes, a catastrophe, a meteorite, a flood, and everything looks a lot older than it is? Absolutely. That is problematic.

Gerardo Sumano [02:13:18] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:13:19] Problematic.

John Dehlin [02:13:20] Is he saying two things at the same time?

Simon Southerton [02:13:22] That, that he is saying that you can jam this whole 200,000 years into a 7,000, potentially. If there was a catastrophe of fish and magnitude, I don't know what particular catastrophe that could be, but he's giving. Bear in mind that Hugo Prego is not a scientist now. He is a CS instructor in Rome. He's employed by the church. And to me, he is just speaking to the Church. He is giving them all an out.

Gerardo Sumano [02:13:52] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:13:53] There's an escape clause here. Yeah. Look, it might look this way, and I don't have it. I. This is what I believe.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:01] This seems to be his style. Right. Because that's how he wrote the DNA Lemonade Book of Mormon essay, which we know he was the one in charge of.

Simon Southerton [02:14:11] He was the main author of the Book of Mormon DNA essay.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:16] Right. And he writes like three or four different. About three or four different ways in which he thinks there could be an out to the, to the evidence.

Simon Southerton [02:14:25] Right. But.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:26] But yeah, I mean, you've talked about this extensively on Mormon stories, how any of the theories that he puts out really holds any water. And there's no way that. That the theories that he. He tries to put forward could really explain away why. Why there's no, no any Hebrew DNA in Native Americans.

Simon Southerton [02:14:50] Yeah. We'll get. We'll. We'll do an episode entirely on American Indians in the future. And that's gonna. That's where I'll talk about some of the similar sort of approach that he's taking in the DNA essay.

Gerardo Sumano [02:15:05] Right.

Simon Southerton [02:15:07] Just. Just. He's just miss. I think he. He's sort of misleading people because. Yeah, but I. In this particular interview, I think I'm. It's really quite disappointing to see that he's claiming that all of this variation in the human genome, all these fossils, all that sort of stuff, it could act. It could be the result of a. A, an asteroid or a meteorite or a volcano. Yeah. Yeah. So it's quite disappointing.

Gerardo Sumano [02:15:39] Here's another quote. Right.

Simon Southerton [02:15:41] Yeah. So if we go on to the next page, there's some, Some more quotes because Hugo was in. He was intimately involved with the publishing quite a lot of work that proved that the DNA of American Indians clearly showed that they'd been in the Americas for 15,000 years.

Simon Southerton [02:16:04] And I might just read the first one out and then match. Perhaps you could read the second one. Gerardo. Yeah. Can there have been people living in the Americas 15,000 years ago, pretty pre Flood, pre Adam time? And the answer is, why not? Because the Church does not have a position about who lived before Adam and Eve, in spite of all the things that we've read in the Scriptures. Right, right. We know through Revelation there was an Adam and Eve. We know that they're all descent, that we're all descendants of them. But the Church has never said there was nothing before. In the next section, which perhaps you could read out Gerardo, he talks about.

Gerardo Sumano [02:16:43] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:16:44] He thinks it might have worked out.

Gerardo Sumano [02:16:46] Yeah. Could it have been that there was some human like individuals under the direction of Heavenly Father and that he is involved in the creation of the earth over really billions of years. There was some sort of evolving process that was utilized to create what we have today. And then at a certain point a spirit was placed into this already existing physical body. So, so he's kind of like asking questions, right? Like saying, yeah, like is it possible that God used evolution? And then finally when, when Adam and Eve were ready or the evolution was sufficient, then. Then he put a spirit inside their

Simon Southerton [02:17:23] bodies 7,000 years ago.

Gerardo Sumano [02:17:25] Right.

John Dehlin [02:17:27] I mean, I guess that's with God. Any. Anything's possible just to play devil never can. Is that right?

Gerardo Sumano [02:17:34] You have Scripture saying that there was no death before Adam.

John Dehlin [02:17:37] Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:17:37] So. And then we have all the fossils. But, but he's trying to say that the church has no position, but the scriptures are very, very clear. So he's ignoring, he's lying because the church clearly has a position when canonized. Scripture says very, very clearly that there was no death before Adam. Claiming that the church has no position. It's, it's not, it's not being honest.

Simon Southerton [02:18:03] Yeah. To be fair to you go. This is in an interview and he's on the, he's speaking on the cuff. So I, Yeah, probably. Probably saying he's lying. Might be. That's a bit, probably a bit unfair. But, but I think as we've discussed, there's clearly a problem. The problem is how do you reconcile the scripture, which is really quite explicit.

Simon Southerton [02:18:26] And yeah. How do you say something that can maintain people's faith? And the last slide, which we'll move on to is, is a, A fair Mormon attempt to reconcile some of these, the problems of the, that we've been, we've been talking about.

Simon Southerton [02:18:51] So for those who aren't familiar, Fair Mormon is pretty much now the major apologetic, one of the major apologetic organizations dealing with the clash between Mormon doctrine and science. Having said that, it's unofficial and anonymous. This is something that I'm find quite troubling. They will write all of these apologetic defenses and there's no name, there's no author, and there's no date.

Simon Southerton [02:19:22] And so if somebody comes along and criticizes something, they say they can just go out and change it the next week and you, you won't. No one will realize it.

Gerardo Sumano [02:19:30] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:19:31] So, but I, I ran, I read through a, One of the most, the current fair Mormon sort of response to some of these. The questions that we've been dealing with Adam and Eve are historical people that's clearly what the, the doctrine says. And he says there's no way to locate them in any scientific way because we can't. We haven't got their DNA. This is like the Lehigh, the Lehigh excuse. We haven't got Lehi's DNA so we can't find his descendants.

Simon Southerton [02:20:03] Yeah, your current, the contemporary. The DNA in contemporary populations comes from those ancestors. So I find that really problematic. The, the fall about 7000 years ago. They, they're even trying to wiggle their way out of that one. As I said earlier, that was a Q A. Joseph Smith was asking God to clarify something he was uncertain about. I don't. Why would God come back with a figurative wishy washy vague response quite clear in section 77, verse 6, that Adam and Eve live 7,000 years ago.

Simon Southerton [02:20:46] Okay. To get around the. No death before the fall is quite a normal one here they've come up with it may or may not have been limited to the garden. So there might have been, there might have been a garden where there was no death. But all around them outside of the garden is the world. I hadn't heard that one before. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:06] So Joseph feeling Smith is turning over in his grave.

Simon Southerton [02:21:13] And then they say in response to the Garden of Eden, there doesn't seem to be any requirement for us to believe that God created a literal garden. Oh boy.

John Dehlin [02:21:24] Except for the fact that Joseph Smith basically said it was in Missouri.

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:29] Right.

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:29] And that's what

Simon Southerton [02:21:33] Adam dwelt.

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:34] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:21:35] And we talked about this in the previous episode. Yeah, it's quite explicit. It's Missouri. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:41] Even the. I actually looked it up.

Simon Southerton [02:21:44] Adam was an American.

Gerardo Sumano [02:21:45] Yeah, I looked it up like a couple days ago on the church's website. It says still till today that they. The church believes that the Garden of Eden wasn't in, in Jackson County, Missouri. So it's not something that they are shying away. But fair Mormon is.

Simon Southerton [02:22:04] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [02:22:04] So that's interesting.

Simon Southerton [02:22:05] This is what this is. This is so typical. We might just finish off this last one. After the fall, Adam and Eve mixed with other extant populations or were given bodies of that extant population and with each relationship began to bring God's children into the world. Thus being the father of us all.

Gerardo Sumano [02:22:24] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:22:24] Okay. So. But the, the crux of the problem for me is this stuff is written and it's hidden away, it's unofficial, it's anonymous. Yeah. They have absolutely no authority to speak for the church unless and until the senior leaders of the church grapple with the challenge and the problem. I just it's just going to stay in the same way it is now in this holding pattern that we're in now where, you know, the, the, the fundamentalist beliefs are perpetuated in public meetings and blah, blah, blah, and the, you know, the, the malou of church. And then, oh, if you've got a problem with any of this, go and talk to our apologist. And you go to the apologist and they're just talking a different language, they're reading different scriptures and they can just completely and utterly dismiss something from Scripture.

Gerardo Sumano [02:23:26] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:23:27] That's absolutely black and white.

Gerardo Sumano [02:23:29] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:23:30] And they find. So as I read through this document, I was just blown away by the number of times I read language like presented as a metaphor. Flexible understanding may or may not be possibly this could have been that

John Dehlin [02:23:46] just.

Simon Southerton [02:23:47] Yeah. And to be fair to these guys, they're in a predicament. They're in a really difficult situation.

Gerardo Sumano [02:23:55] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:23:55] And I wouldn't like to be trying to defend and wiggle my way out of the problems that they've got to be faced with.

John Dehlin [02:24:02] For, for me, the problem with, with Mormon apologists is they, they have to reinterpret and nuance to the point where words don't mean anything anymore, where the question the value of prophets in scripture dwindles to almost nothing. Because if they can just say, well, they were speaking as a man there and there and there and there, and the scriptures are not to be taken literally, there and there and there and there. Well, if that's the way you're approaching scriptures and prophets, all of a sudden, they're not worth a whole lot. Unless you're just saying when the prophet says, and revelators say, be good, be nice to people, be good to people, be kind.

John Dehlin [02:24:40] And you don't really need prophets to tell you that. Oprah and Dr. Phil are, are able to say that. So that's the problem with apologists, I think. Plus, they're contradicting very definitive statements made by prophet sirs and revelators in scripture that all outrank them. So who are apologists to, to supersede scripture and prophetic utterances? They're, they have no authority, like you said, Simon.

Simon Southerton [02:25:07] Yeah, yeah. And they're twisting words. You know, translate doesn't mean translate anymore. And yeah, yeah. It just gets, it just gets exhausting. Yeah. Well, that's my last slide. Apart from the next episode. We're going to jump in and talk about now on the Flood. We had a. I was really. I'm glad you asked Michael today about his views on the flood.

Closing Thoughts and Recommendations

Simon Southerton [02:25:32] Because that's, that's going to be really fascinating. We're going to be joined by a professor of, I think it's geomorphology from University of Washington in Seattle, David Montgomery. And he's actually done a TED Talk on the flood and he's an expert on big floods. So the, he's done sort of, he's done scientific research which has actually taken him back to myths. What were myths? I mean, myths have kernels of truth in them.

Simon Southerton [02:26:06] And he was researching floods in, in Asia and finding out how they, how they occurred, massive landslides and whatever. And, and then they got, they, you get these dams formed behind the landslide and then the, you get the overflow and then it rushes out and these massive floods. But yeah, some of these things that he'll talk about have entered into the, the local mythology.

Simon Southerton [02:26:36] So he's very sympathetic to, to people. Two flood myths, you know, the occur the occurrence of the flood myth in the Bible. Yeah, that was a very common thing for these massive catastrophes to occur and then to, for people to sort of find a way to explain how they, how, you know, what was the reason for them, why did they occur? And people had to make sense of the world they're in.

Simon Southerton [02:27:02] So. Yeah, so we'll also talk about a couple of other things, other scientific riddles that sort of are difficult to explain with a global flood. But, but yeah, when you look at all the human ancestry that we've talked about here in the fossils and the story of a colonization of Australia and whatever, and if there'd been a massive flood in there, it would, absolutely nothing would make sense. It would just be so apparent.

John Dehlin [02:27:34] And Simon, I just have to thank you. Like getting Robert Ritter and getting Michael Coe, I kind of think of that as, you know, two of the most important moments in Mormon stories history. And we've got what, 1600 episodes and you know, a couple thousand hours. But I, I didn't know that we would ever be bringing scientists, you know, non LDS scientists on to speak definitively about other matters of con, you know, consensus. I don't want to say consensual, what's the word?

Gerardo Sumano [02:28:05] Consensus.

John Dehlin [02:28:06] Consensus science. But you're doing it so, so Simon, you're bringing more scientists to our community. And I just want to not only thank you because it's so powerful, I want to remind our viewers and listeners that there's a way they can, if they value this content, there's a way that they can support it. They can go to mormonstories.org Simon and they can click on the donate button and become a monthly donor and.

John Dehlin [02:28:34] And support this series. We're paying Simon $1,000 a month to do these episodes. We're proud to do that. You will get a. A free book called the Sacred Curse, which science has written as a way to update, you know, our understanding of the DNA Lamanite myth. And it's. It's actually really important. So you'll get a free copy of that when you sign up to support this science versus Mormon doctrine series.

John Dehlin [02:29:08] But as I've looked at the. You know, we're committed to this series. So, Simon, I don't want you to get nervous, but for those listening, the total amount of money that's been donated so far is less than a thousand bucks. So we've. We've kind of already paid you for your first episode, and now we'll. We'll pay you for your second. But we. We really. For. For this series to continue. And we want to cover things like the flood, like, you know, Lamanite DNA. There's so many evolution. There are so many important topics that we want to cover, but we also want to be able to have this be sustainable and pay Gerardo and pay Simon and just keep the lights on.

John Dehlin [02:29:47] So please become a monthly contributor to this series, and we'll be able to go at least 10, 15 episodes, and maybe, Simon, we can get a book. Book out of this when we're all done. What do you think about that?

Simon Southerton [02:30:01] Yeah, that's. That's a pipe dream. Well, no, that's a possibility. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:30:08] All right, Gerardo, anything else you want to add?

Gerardo Sumano [02:30:10] No.

John Dehlin [02:30:11] This one.

Gerardo Sumano [02:30:11] This is great. Yeah, it's been great.

John Dehlin [02:30:13] Yeah. Wasn't this amazing?

Gerardo Sumano [02:30:15] Yeah, super excited for the next one.

John Dehlin [02:30:18] All right, and then I'll. I will go ahead and right now paste into the chat comments, both on YouTube and on Facebook, a link to where they can donate to support Simon. Simon, you're the best. You're a treasure. Any. Anything you want to say before we wrap up?

Simon Southerton [02:30:37] No, I think I'm all out of words. All right, well, that was great. That was. I was just absolutely thrilled with Michael. He's just a great. He's really great communicator. He can meet. Just was brilliant, and it's just lovely to hear and talk today.

John Dehlin [02:30:54] Yeah. Well, you, Simon.

Simon Southerton [02:30:58] All right, thanks, guys.

John Dehlin [02:31:00] All right, thanks, Simon.

Gerardo Sumano [02:31:02] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:31:02] Thanks, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano [02:31:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:31:04] And thanks, listeners and viewers. Thanks for your Support. Go to Mormons stories.org if you want to support the podcast also generally. And then finally, email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com and we'll make sure if you have any feedback for Simon, you can either include it in the Facebook comments or in the YouTube comments. But the best way to get any feedback, ideas, recommendations to Simon, email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com we'll forward that to Simon and make sure he gets your feedback. All right. All right. Thanks, Simon. Thanks, Gerardo. We'll see you guys all soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.

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