3 ms·
Ancient yet Cosmopolitan
- c-smile 6y ago> And you have to go back only 2,000 years to find the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive on Earth today. I suspect that 2000 is a bit optimistic, no? But "never overestimate power of exponent" so asking.
- eindiran 6y agoYeah, unless I am missing something, this is way off: both Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve are estimated to be from >> 100K years ago. > As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve [EDIT] Apparently I misunderstood how things work. mt-Eve is not necessarily the MRCA for all living humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_the_most_recent_ancestor_shared_by_all_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_the_most... This paper from 2004 uses Monte Carlo simulation to estimate that the MRCA for all humans may have occurred in the last 5K years: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842 This Wikipedia article explains how that might be the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMRCA_of_all_living_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TM...