Wrong again. The Mitochondria proves we all came from the same woman. I fully expect that science will one day confirm we all came from the same man, as well.
Just to avoid confusion to the guys not well versed in Evolution (like me), here is something to read.
evolution-101.blogspot.com/2006/06/who-was-mitochondrial-eve.html
The idea of an “Eve,” or a most recent common female ancestor, isn’t really that hard to grasp, nor is it dependent on genetics. It’s just common sense. Think about it- family trees tend to get wider and wider as they progress down the generations, so it stands to reason that they will also get narrower and narrower as you go back in time. If you go back enough generations, eventually every single human living today will have the same female name in their family tree. That’s just logical deduction. The same is true of all organisms, not just humans- there’s a bear “Eve,” a sparrow “Eve,” and an aardvark “Eve.”
The trick, then, is to take a look at the mitochondrial DNA from a wide sample of humans, and upon calculating the mutation rate, work backwards until you figure out when the most recent female ancestor would have lived. And to spare you the trouble of going over the calculations, I’ll just give you what’s been discovered- the mitochondrial Eve lived about 150,000 years ago. That’s quite a bit older than most people associate with the name “Eve,” but that isn’t the only difference. **The mitochondrial Eve wasn’t the only human woman alive at the time- if she had been, then it’s likely humans would have gone extinct soon after. In actuality, the mitochondrial Eve was one of many women alive at the time, **and the only thing that makes her distinctive is the fact that there is an unbroken chain of female descendents going from her to each and every one of you listening to this podcast today. Other women living at the same time may have had only sons, which means that their mitochondria wouldn’t have been passed on, even though their genomic DNA would have. Still other women would have had daughters, but their daughters might have had only sons, with the same result to the flow of mitochondrial DNA. For many years, in fact, the honor of mitochondrial Eve would have switched from one woman to the other, as different lineages either died out or produced only males.
So, to review, the concept of the “mitochondrial Eve” refers to the woman in human history whose mitochondria have been inherited by all humans living today. This is due to the fact that mitochondria remain somewhat separate from the rest of the cell, and carry their own DNA separately from the nuclear genome. Comparison of mutations in mitochondrial DNA from modern humans indicates that the mitochondrial Eve lived about 150,000 years ago, although her male genetic counterpart, the Y-chromosome Adam, lived much later.
