Mitochondrial Eve

Once upon an actual time—200,000 years ago, give or take—there lived a woman who eventually gave birth to some children, and her children survived long enough to give birth to children of their own. Let’s call this woman Eve for now.

So it went for generation after generation, with Eve’s great-great-great… grandchildren spreading out all over Africa, slowly populating the continent.

This was still more than a thousand centuries before the advent of farming, so hunting and gathering were the normal way of life. Times were good for hunters in a lot of Africa during this time, and the Sahara we know today as a desert was more like a savanna back then, with lush greenery supporting plenty of wildlife.

At some point, there was what anthropologists call a population bottleneck. Very few humans survived, and lots of genetic diversity was lost. Eve’s descendants made it through to the other side, probably not because of any sort of advantage, but more because they happened to be in the right place at the right time.

This woman is my ancestor. Eve is my great-great-great…. (ten thousand greats) grandmother.

Want to hear something funny? She’s yours, too.

That’s right: every single human being alive is a descendant of one single human woman.

Before we get too carried away with this idea, it’s important to understand that our genetic heritage is far more complex than a single line of descent. While it's 100% true that Mitochondrial Eve is a common ancestor in the matrilineal line, our genetic makeup is a mosaic composed of contributions from a vast number of ancestors, each contributing to who we are today.

Eve wasn’t the only woman alive at the time, either. However, none of the other women around back then matter quite as much to me, seeing as how she’s family.

So while Eve holds a special place in our lineage, she represents just one part of our diverse genetic history.

Nevertheless, when I think about how diverse human beings are today, and yet how we all share a common ancestor, I can’t help but feel more connected to everyone else.

Perhaps if the entire world understood that there was a Mitochondrial Eve, there would be less conflict in the world, but I kind of doubt it. Schismogenesis quickly rears its ugly head, and people find reasons to fight one another.

Still, the study of our common origin has tremendous potential to tell us more about who we are. Science continues to inform philosophy, just as our ancient ancestors looked at the world with wonder and began to ask questions beyond where our next meal would come from.

From a single human being whose DNA we all share today, to the eight billion or so of us alive now, we’ve seen an awful lot of “fruitful multiplication.” Today, we are connected more by our technology than by our genetic markers, but we are still very much all related.