Mitochondrial Eve

Mallon said:

if you subscribe to a literal Eve.

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Mallon said:

Second, Mitochondrial Eve is not the first woman of all, but 'merely' the first woman who gave rise to all human lineages living today. Many human lineages existed before and alongside Mitochondrial Eve and have since gone extinct. The lineage of Mitochondial Eve is the one that went on to survive.
More here:
Mitochondrial Eve - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam lived at different times, were probably separated by thousands of years and quite possibly were in different locations. Thus, a pictorial diagram tracking all men’s Y-chromosome DNA would not trace back to the spouse of Mitochondrial Eve. Although coalescence does not indicate that all humans descended from a single couple, Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam are nonetheless the source of a portion of our DNA, namely the Y-chromosome DNA and the mitochondrial DNA. The rest of our DNA, located in the nucleus, comes from a large number of other ancestors. Looking at the total variation in the DNA of humans around the world, scientists have estimated that all our DNA came from an original population of several thousand individuals. This relatively small population size suggests there was at least one bottleneck — a period of time where the population was reduced significantly — from which our current human population expanded.

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