User talk:Cathay

Vee (talk) 23:30, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

"from whom all living humans are descended"
That's not the correct definition. The other humans alive at the time have descendants too (ie all of us), they just don't have an unbroken line of descent, so their individual presence is not detectable in the genetic record. Populations evolve, not individuals, so all the members of a population, given a sufficiently long enough span of time, either have all descendants or no descendants. Vee (talk) 00:40, 8 January 2023 (UTC)


 * OK, you've reverted it, but I think I'm confused about the definition. M-Eve is surely the most recent woman from whom all living humans have inherited mitacondrial DNA? Cathay (talk) 21:06, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes. That doesn't make her the most recent woman from whom all modern humans are descended, or that other humans alive at the time had no descendants (they did). It's just purely a matter of luck that it was her specific mitochondrial lineage that survives unbroken (as in all the other women alive at her time's lineages either died out or were broken cause somewhere along the way their descendants had purely male children) to the present day. Also the date of the Mitochondrial Eve can (and IIRC has) been pushed back whenever new mitochondrial lineages have been discovered. Vee (talk) 18:51, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Autopatrolled
Vee (talk) 22:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)