The observation that humans (originally human females) descended from a woman who lived about 240,000 years ago in Africa was first demonstrated by Allan C. Wil

The observation that humans (originally human females) descended from a woman who lived about 240,000 years ago in Africa was first demonstrated by Allan C. Wilson, who looked at the evolution of mitochondrial DNA sequences, in 1987. This was a very controversial result, in part because the length of human history was so young (much less than the 1 million years that some fossils suggested), and because the origin was placed in Africa. Shortly after this, I heard Wilson discuss the controversy, and he remarked that he was surprised that there was so much disagreement about the idea that a set of genes in a population could be attributed to a single individual. He pointed out that this was well understood by population biologists in the early 20th century; basically, for any population of individuals at some time in the past, after a long enough time, the descendants of that population will have genes that can be traced back to one individual -- that one individual whose children had children who had children ... Though well established in 1987 (and decades earlier), but it was still argued about (and apparently still is). Mitochondrial DNA can be traced back to an individual Africa (mitochondrial eve), less than 300,000 years ago.