| > Because it seems to say that all humanity comes from one father it's also interesting. It's just property of trees. If you go back and observe male member of generations and their descendants you'll see that you have less and less men who have surviving descendants today AND none of their male descendants had only female children. You go back as far as you need to for this number to drop to 1. That's your "father of all humankind" which might as well be a small rodent (though he isn't because it was only 340,000 years ago). "Father of all humankind" is very misleading because with him (and before him) there were many other fathers of humankind whose (some) genes located on all 45 other chromosomes except for Y are in many of us. Those men just didn't pass their Y chromosome to us because at some point one of their descendants had only daughters. All modern man share mutated copies of Y chromosome of this Father of all humankind so it's kinda interesting. What's more interesting is most recent female common ancestor. Logic goes same way but this time it's not about crappy Y chromosome. This time it's about mitochondria which are passed from mother to all her children (not just females). It's way much more interesting because this means that all people share mutated copies of mitochondria of this "Eve" and mitochondria are power plants of every cell in your body which seems significant. Generation after generation other "strains" of mitochondria died out (due to women dying or having only male children) and only the one we are all carrying lasted to this day. Of course it's not as dramatic as it sounds because if we discovered some other "strain" of mitochondria among human today we'd just have to place "Eve" label few generations earlier. But it's still cool. I'm sure I don't have to tell that "father of humankind" and "mother of humankind" lived in completely different times and places and that there's no snake or fruit tree. |