90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/228798/20180530/massive-genetic-study-reveals-90-percent-of-earth-s-animals-appeared-at-the-same-time.htm

Massive Genetic Study Reveals 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species.

In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time.

More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

"This conclusion is very surprising," says Thaler, "and I fought against it as hard as I could."

All attempts to find out who Tech times are, has failed for me. I searched it a dozen different ways, and the only information I can find is information produced by them. To me this is a red flag. I tried to find a Wikipedia page, instead I came to a page created by Tech times, explaining to me what Wikipedia is. I've experienced a similar situation when trying to find out about Infowars or others who pedal nonsense news. I'm not saying that this particular thing is nonsense, just that my inability to find information on them, leaves me to doubt.

Edit
I tried a different way. I searched the 90% thing and numerous news companies have reported the same thing. So, it sounds more legitimate now.

If anyone has any sort of review of tech times that's produced by someone not associated, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Based on the ideas of how evolution is supposed to work, this isn't really shocking. In theory, big die-off events lead to a lot of open ecological niches. When that happens, changes happening take advantage of those openings and lead to a lot of splitting.

Just a couple additional news articles, found by searching the studies’ authors names and the journal name.
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/06/humans-and-animals-are-mostly-the-same-age/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/genetic-differences-people-dna-pigeons-mitochondria-world-a8362336.html

And a link to the actual study.
http://www.pontecorboli.com/digital/he_archive_articles/he122018/1_Stockle_Thaler.pdf

The phys.org article has a perfectly mundane explanation:

"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.

"It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

"...At The Same Time," doesn't mean "in the exact same moment."

It hardly surprises me that once the global conditions existed for animal life to flourish, it did so at the same time (read: same geological epoch). It also doesn't surprise me that recovery from population bottlenecks due to disaster would necessarily take the same form.

Matt Coston
Post Today 8:36:37 AM    
Subject: 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time

The phys.org article has a perfectly mundane explanation:

"The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving," said Stoeckle.

"It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently."

In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

 

I think this sums it up quite nicely, too.

-CK

from the first article:

As to how that could have happened, it's unclear. A likely possibility is the occurrence of a sudden event that caused large-scale environmental trauma and wiped out majority of the Earth's species.

"Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply," explains Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment.

Such times give rise to sweeping genetic changes across the planet, causing new species to appear. However, the last time such an occurrence took place was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs and half of all other species on the planet.

so the question is:
what happened 200,000 +/- yrs ago
to cause this  worldwide reset?
do we see anything in the geological record to point a finger at?

My guess would be a relatively sudden climate shift, such as an ice age, where perhaps knowledge how such a thing might be survived hadn't been developed, or hadn't been passed around sufficiently; mass-starvation due to a climate shift and inadequate adaptation seems plausible to me.

Another possibility might be a similar circumstance, but one caused by the byproducts of increased volcanic activity, where one or more large volcanic eruptions block out the sun for a season or more.

-CK