throop@cs.utexas.edu (David Throop) (12/08/90)
We've got Eve. Now what about Adam?
There has been a fair amount of coverage lately of the finding that
about 200,000 yrs ago, there was one woman who was the matrilineal
mother of us all. These studies have used analysis of mitochondrial
DNA, because it is inherited only matrilineally. Genetic drift studies
were used to gauge how far back this "Eve" lived.
[For those not familiar with these reports, this does not indicate
that there were no other women alive at that time. It does not indicate
that those other women have no surviving descendents. It indicates that
those other women have no descendents along purely matrilineal lines of
descent.]
What about finding the same for men? Isn't the Y chromosome the
analog of the mitochondrial DNA? It is passed entirely from the
father's side. Isn't the Y chromosome in my cells just a many-time
copy of my great^N-father's Y chromosome?
Shouldn't genetic drift analysis also be able to gauge how far back
it was that there lived a man who was the patrilineal father of us all?
Or has this already been done?
David Throop