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Mitochondrial Eve
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Mitochondrial Eve

human ancestor
Also known as: Genetic Eve
Written by
The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Information Architects maintain a master list of the topics included in the corpus of  Encyclopædia Britannica, and create and manage the relationships between them.

The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Learn about this topic in these articles:

  • mitochondria
    mitochondrion
    / Research on human evolution

    …can be traced to a single woman ancestor living an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Scientists suspect that this woman lived among other women but that the process of genetic drift (chance fluctuations in gene frequency that affect the genetic constitution of small populations) caused her mtDNA to randomly…

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    …can be traced to a single woman ancestor living an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Scientists suspect that this woman lived among other women but that the process of genetic drift (chance fluctuations in gene frequency that affect the genetic constitution of small populations) caused her mtDNA to randomly…

    Read More