The Eve Hypothesis: is everyone on Earth related to the same woman?
Over the past few years, genealogy unexpectedly became cool. Millions have suddenly taken an interest in looking into their family history. While there is plentiful stories about the unpleasant discoveries that can arise from these cases, the majority of them tell the people who commission them nothing they didn’t already know. Until they got to the Eve Hypothesis, but we’ll get to that.
For the most part, their dad was their dad, their mum was their mum, their grandparents were their grandparents, and so on and so forth until probably the 1800s, at which point things tend to get a little murky. In the meantime, there’s a whole bunch of people who died years and years before you were born who had relatively humdrum lives and died long before you had the vaguest conception of them. So… why are so many people enthralled by this?
I speak as someone who has had a portion of their family history unearthed by a friend of mine, and it is a genuinely incredible feeling. Suddenly, your own history becomes something viscerally real to you. History in general becomes not the study of great men and women who “go down in history” but of real people who lived and loved and died without the world’s eyes upon them. There’s a democracy to genealogy, so what would happen if the study of it led to the discovery of a common ancestor to us all?
One would hope that it could connect us. That the divides put between us to make a few hyper-rich people richer could be bypassed in favour of a genuine understanding. It could provide genuine knowledge that no person, no matter their creed or class, are any higher born or bred than anyone else. That all of us are, to be disgracefully cringe about it, family. A pity that it’s a fantasy, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about the divisions between us.
Or so it seems.
What is the Eve Hypothesis?
In 1987, a study was published in the journal Nature, one that put forth a discovery so awe-inspiring that it sounds difficult to believe nearly 40 years later. The researchers for this study examined the mitochondrial DNA (or mtDNA) of 147 people taken from all of today’s major racial groups. The study showed that humans are descended from one of two branches in humanity’s family tree, one that comes directly from Africa and another that contains the other groups, where those African genes interlock with those from other countries.
That alone is a remarkable discovery, but only part one of the mindblowing study. The second part is even more absurd and wonderful. Not only was the study able to narrow down the origin of the human gene pool to one continent, it was able to narrow the gene pool down not to the same country, not even the same city, but the same woman. It’s true, we all have a single common female ancestor that lived around 200,000 years ago. The scientists called her Eve, and each of us shares the Eve gene.
Given that the two major branches of human life stretch back to Africa, it stood to reason that whoever Eve was, she was from the continent. One that was probably alive during the period of time after the eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra 70,000. The eruption was so intense that it lowered global temperatures and brought the human population of Earth down to a mere 15,000 people. Stands to reason that Eve was probably one of them, and everyone alive today owes her a debt.
Fingers crossed, those of us who are still here can repay that debt by avoiding another extinction event in the near future.