How has mitochondrial DNA been used as such?
Mitochondrial DNA has been particularly interesting in regards to reconstructing the history of human populations because mitochondrial DNA is inherited strictly through the mother. Nuclear DNA gets jumbled up in every generation as the DNA of the two parents of each individual is recombined. But this doesn’t happen in mitochondrial DNA, and so you have a much clearer record of the accumulation of small differences in the mitochondrial genome. Can you touch on the concept of Mitochondrial Eve? Mitochondrial Eve is a common ancestor of all human beings. We know that our species must have originated in a small population, because that’s the only way in which you can get the similarities in mitochondrial DNA that we all share today. Mitochondrial Eve is a notional common ancestor of all living human beings, an idea which is created by tracing all of the various lineages of mitochondrial DNA that we know today back to their common ancestral form. Eve might not necessarily have even been a
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