3 ms·
Age confirmed for 'Eve,' mother of all humans
- btilly 16y agoThe research is interesting, but I have to register strong disagreement with Marek Kimmel's comment that the age of the mitochondrial Eve is always less than the age of the true, first female modern human. If the defining characteristics that define "modern human" arose outside of the mitochondria (which is very likely when you consider evolutionary adaptation happens far faster with traits that have sexual recombination), then those characteristics can easily arise and spread through the population without strongly selecting for or against any particular mitochondrial line. Therefore there is little logical relationship between how far back the speciation event was, and when the mitochondrial 'Eve' happened. That said, the theory of punctuated equilibrium predicts that speciation tends to take place in small, isolated populations that are a potential mitochondrial bottleneck as well. But that bottleneck is not necessarily going to lead to a mitochondrial 'Eve'. And when the new species spreads out, it may breed true but it is not necessarily entirely reproductively isolated. That could reintroduce old mitochondrial lines. See, for instance, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8660940.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8660940.stm for a description of recent evidence that homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals, long after those two had diverged in different directions.