Mitochondrial Eve
Mitochondrial Eve was not the first human woman, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, so their mitochondrial DNA was not passed down. As a result, every human alive today is descended from the same original African mother.
There is no diety in the sky who is not also present in the dirt beneath our fingernails, left after digging in the earth.
We are intricately part of this place. Maybe wild is not a thing to be tamed, but a common home we are beginning to recognize as our own.
Mitochondrial DNA is inherited solely from the mother. This thread of matrilineal descent goes back through our mothers, to their mothers, and so on, and finally reaches a woman in whom all female lineages converge.
Scientists have traced the origins of these mother lines back to a woman who lived 200,000 years ago. She is known as Mitochondrial Eve and is the common maternal ancestor to all living humans today.
Mitochondrial Eve was not the first human woman, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, so their mitochondrial DNA was not passed down. As a result, every human alive today is descended from the same original African mother.
In genetics, wild type refers to the most common form of a species existing in the wild, before a mutation is introduced. It refers to the allele, one of two or more alternative forms of a gene found in a chromosome.
The wild type is the gene variant present in the majority of a given population. Wild type alleles could have once been mutant alleles that were selected for and became wild type.
Who was this great mother we all have in common? How much of her wild do we carry?
