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 p…