[net.women] One female ancestor

jtb@phs.UUCP (11/10/83)

In refrence to:
^   A rather astonishing discovery was announced by Allan C. Wilson of UC
^   Berkeley at a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY) held in
^   August '83.  Another group led by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford has
^   verified this result.  Briefly stated, their result is as follows:
^
^   All living people (or at least ~99% of them) have a single common female
^   ancestor on their purely maternal line.  In other words, tracing back to
^   one's mother's mother's mother's ... mother will bring everyone back to a
^   single individual woman.  She is estimated to have lived between 50,000 and
^   500,000 years ago.

This is a result so remarkable I suspect a joke. Would someone please post
a complete refrence to a published paper?
Is the interpretation of one ancestor by the origional authors or the person
who posted the item?  There are other reasions besides common decent for
many individuals to have the same allele at a given loci. For instance in man
the genes for hemoglobin and cytochrome C both have a domanent allele which
is found in more than 99% of individuals.  This does not prove common decent
but rather that those alleles are so favored by natural selection that the
spread of alternate alleles created by mutation is prevented.  There are ways
of determining whether common decent is the explanation but I would like to
see some more information in this case.

BTW In case anyone on the net is wondering the statements in the origional
article about maternal inheritance of mitocondria and their genes are correct.

Jose Torre-Bueno
Dept. of Physiology
Duke U. Med. Center
decvax!duke!phs!jtb

phil@amd70.UUCP (11/18/83)

Am I supposed to believe someone so well educated he spells "descent"
as "decent"?
-- 
Phil Ngai (408) 988-7777 {ucbvax|decwrl|ihnp4|allegra}!amd70!phil

courtney@hp-pcd.UUCP (Courtney Loomis) (11/23/83)

#R:phs:-214600:hp-pcd:19100024:000:137
hp-pcd!courtney    Nov 14 09:58:00 1983

Any evidence which suggests that this woman lived between "50,000 and
500,000 years ago" obviously has a very high degree of uncertainty!