The Real Eve
The Real Eve
In the documentary, I met the Real Eve – the one prehistoric woman who is believed to be the mother of us all, who lives in Africa more than 150,000 years ago, and whose mitochondrial DNA is being passed down from generation to generation, supplying the “chemical energy” to us, humankind. From the documentary, I got to know her better as the Mitochondrial Eve – the most recent common ancestor of all of us humans in the matrilineal (mother to daughter) line of descent. In other words, the Real Eve is the woman from whom all of us living humans today descend, on our mother’s side, and through the mothers of our mothers, and so on, back until all female lineages converge.
Important genetic markers, along with reasonable archaeological and anthropological evidences that support the Out of Africa Theory, point toward the Real Eve playing a thought-provoking role in human origin and evolution. Hypothesis that modern humans have a single origin was first proposed by Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, and was verified by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA. Within nearly all human cells there are tiny structures called mitochondria, which generate the energy in our bodies. They contain their own separate DNA, called mitochondrial DNA, which is commonly used to trace ancestry being a part of the genome not shuffled about by the evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity with each generation. Instead, mitochondrial DNA is passed down intact, from mothers to daughters, along the maternal line, or matrilineally. In the documentary we may assume that the Real Eve is interchangeably referred to as the Mitochondrial Eve because she owns the only strain of mitochondrial DNA to survive and be inherited by us humans. By having the knowledge of mitochondrial DNA capable of tracing ancestry from daughter to mother for 7,000 generations, we can clearly confirm our origins back to the one African woman, Eve.
In addition, physical anthropological study of
In the documentary, I met the Real Eve – the one prehistoric woman who is believed to be the mother of us all, who lives in Africa more than 150,000 years ago, and whose mitochondrial DNA is being passed down from generation to generation, supplying the “chemical energy” to us, humankind. From the documentary, I got to know her better as the Mitochondrial Eve – the most recent common ancestor of all of us humans in the matrilineal (mother to daughter) line of descent. In other words, the Real Eve is the woman from whom all of us living humans today descend, on our mother’s side, and through the mothers of our mothers, and so on, back until all female lineages converge.
Important genetic markers, along with reasonable archaeological and anthropological evidences that support the Out of Africa Theory, point toward the Real Eve playing a thought-provoking role in human origin and evolution. Hypothesis that modern humans have a single origin was first proposed by Charles Darwin's Descent of Man, and was verified by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA. Within nearly all human cells there are tiny structures called mitochondria, which generate the energy in our bodies. They contain their own separate DNA, called mitochondrial DNA, which is commonly used to trace ancestry being a part of the genome not shuffled about by the evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity with each generation. Instead, mitochondrial DNA is passed down intact, from mothers to daughters, along the maternal line, or matrilineally. In the documentary we may assume that the Real Eve is interchangeably referred to as the Mitochondrial Eve because she owns the only strain of mitochondrial DNA to survive and be inherited by us humans. By having the knowledge of mitochondrial DNA capable of tracing ancestry from daughter to mother for 7,000 generations, we can clearly confirm our origins back to the one African woman, Eve.
In addition, physical anthropological study of