Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Unfortunately, the name mitochondrial Eve has now become so fi rmly
embedded, even in the scientifi c literature, that it is impossible to avoid using
it. Let me emphasize again that she did exist, but that she was simply an aver-
age woman of her time and was not the mother of us all!
The best estimate of when the Eve lived is about 170,000 years ago, plus
or minus 50,000 years or so. This happens to be roughly at the time that the
coincidence has led to another widespread canard about the mitochondrial
Eve, even more insidious than the one about how she was the ancestor of us
all. This canard is that she was the fi rst modern human.
Nonsense! Modern humans did not spring suddenly into being, like Ath-
ena from the brow of Zeus or Eve from Adam's rib. It is distressing to see
how science writers (and once again some scientists) have carelessly applied
the metaphors of the topic of Genesis to human origins.
There were far fewer people living at the time of the mitochondrial Eve
than are alive today. The people of that time were all hunter-gatherers, like
the present-day San. They survived from the animals they could catch, the
tubers they could dig up, and the nuts, fruits, and wild honey they could
gather. But they were not exactly like us. All of them were slightly dif er-
ent from any humans alive today. They were part of a complex and continu-
ous evolutionary process that has given rise to the diversity of present-day
humans and that will continue generating diversity and evolutionary change
far into the future.
The mitochondrial Eve simply provides us with a kind of yardstick. She
carried the common ancestor of all our present-day mitochondrial chromo-
somes, and we can estimate when and where she lived. But her existence tells
us nothing about when the fi rst modern humans appeared. That question is
like asking when the fi rst modern automobiles appeared.
Fossil evidence that modern humans lived in Africa approximately
160,000 years ago is dramatic and convincing. Modern-appearing skulls
and other bones dating from that time were found by Tim White and his
for ritual purposes—the lower jaws had been removed and the brains had
apparently been extracted. Stone tools and butchered animals bones were
