"When scientist announced their "discovery" of Eve last year, they rekindled perhaps the oldest human debate:where did we come from? They also, in some sense, confirmed a belief that existed long before the Bible, Versions of the Adam-and-Eve story. Which date back at least 5,000 years and have been told in cultures from the Mediterranean to the South Pacific to the Americas.
The myth makers spun their tales on the same basic assumption as the scientists: that at some point we all share an ancestor …
Trained in molecular biology, they looked at an international assortment of genes and picked up a trail of DNA that led them to a SINGLE WOMAN FROM WHOM WE ARE ALL DESCENDED. MOST EVIDENCE SO FAR INDICATES THAT EVE LIVED IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA… {read Genesis 3:20}
Harvard paleontologist and essayist. "it makes us realize that all human beings, despite our differences in external appearances, are really members of a single entity that’s had a very recent origin in one place. There is a kind of biological brotherhood that’s much more profound then we ever realized."
…Either way, it appeared that all these ancient humans traced their lineage back to Africa, because that was the only place with evidence of human living more than a million years ago … Working with Wilson and a Berkeley biologist, Mark Stoneking, Cann selected women in America with ancestors from Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Her collaborators in New guinea and Australia found Aboriginal women there … This DNA came from outside the nucleus, in a compartment of the cell called the mitochondrion, which produces nearly all the energy to keep the cell alive. Scientist didn’t learn that the mitochondrion contained any genes until 1960s. Then in the late 1970s they discovered that mitochondrion DNA was useful for tracing family trees because it’s inherited only from the mother.
It’s not a mixture of both parents’ genes, like nuclear DNA, so it preserves a family record that isn’t scrambled every generation …The DNA seemed to form a family tree rooted in Africa. The DNA fell into two general categories, one found only in some babies of recent African descent, and a second found in everyone else and the other Africans.
There was more diversity among the exclusively African group’s DNA, suggesting that it had accumulated more mutations because it had been around longer -and thus was the longest branch of the family tree.
Apparently the DNA tree began in Africa, and then at some point a group of Africans emigrated, splitting off to form a second branch of DNA and carrying it to the rest of the world …
At the moment, the evidence seems to favor an African Eve, because other genetic studies (of nuclear DNA) also point to an origin there and because that’s where the earliest fossils of modern humans have been found …
If Eve lived in the past 200,000 years, she may have been a modern human, perhaps one of the first to appear. In that case she might look like a more muscular version of today’s Africans."
