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Recent dates for viral origins
Posted by delwart
on
01 Sep 2011 at 18:35 GMT
Key phrase from paper: "These findings also indicate that more recent dates of origin obtained for other virus families using molecular clock-based extrapolations are artifacts [30]."
Doesn't the detection of these very ancient but clearly recognizable integrated viral genomes invalidates the common methods of calculating the time to most recent common ancestor with results typically in the tens of thousands of years ? Could all these early dates be wrong ?