Lab 10: Mitochondrial Eve

One could say she's the Mother of Modern Humanity and it would not be hyperbole. Mitochondrial Eve is where all Homo Sapien gets its mitochondrial dna. This tells us some very important things about humans, and enables science to trace our path from obscure North African tribe to the dominant species on Earth.

It's been a long road.

The reason we can trace our ancestry all the way back to the first modern human is Mitochondria, an organelle located in the cells of all humans. This small, bean-shaped organelle supplies energy to the cell for it to work more efficiently. We can use this to trace our lineage because of the unique Mitochondrial DNA inside the organelle, completely different from the rest of the cell's DNA. This information, unlike normal gene transfers which use both mother and father DNA, is purely matriarchal. One Hundred Percent of the DNA in a mitochondria is derived from the mother of the child. This gave scientists the ability to trace the path of humanity from it's first beginnings to it's spread across the entire globe (See map above).

If nothing, those little bean-shaped organelles have shown the scientific community that no matter how disparate we look and how different our languages are we are all from the same place and are part of the same family.