A maternal ancestor to all living humans called mitochondrial Eve likely lived about 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged, a new review study confirms.
The results are based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA. Found in the energy-producing centers of cells, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the maternal line, and can be traced back to one woman.
However, this doesn’t mean she was the first modern woman, rather it indicates that only her descendants survive to the present day. “There is always some other female that predated mitochondrial Eve, whose DNA didn’t make it up to modernity,” said Marek Kimmel, a professor of statistics at Rice University. “So the age of the mitochondrial Eve is always less than the age of the true, first female modern human.”
Full Article at LiveScience
Surely evolution is continuous? This is just one way of digitising the information because for some reason humans feel the need to assign labels to everything…
I can see how you can date mitochondrial DNA by averaging out the expected number of mutations over a certain time period, but how did they manage to work out her name?
“Happy Birthday To You”
Dear Mr. Brown,
Correction!!! Eve was not the mother of all humans, Adam was already there…LOL. Thinking outside the box.
Do we have to call her Eve? I’m sick of these biblical references. What’s wrong with Slutty Mabel?
Carlos, this article was posted by Phillis, not by Derren
Should predated be hyphenated ie pre-dated? I read it as ‘predated’ as in ‘eaten’!
Not sure that this date will be final… but it makes Hitchens argument about God ignoring man for at least 98.000 years before it was time to interfere at least 100.000 years longer.