THE EVE GENE: ALL HUMANS CAME FROM AFRICA

"The black woman is the only human that has the mitochondrial DNA with all the possible variations for every kind of human being. When the DNA of black women mutates, all other types of human being come about. This “Eve gene” is only found in black women.”

According to Magnus Itland,Norway, argues that:

This claim is “not even wrong” in the sense that genetics just don’t work that way. Each individual human has one set of mitochondrial genes, from their mother, and two sets of genes in the cell nucleus, one from each parent. And yet, the claim is close enough to truth that I can see how it may have started. Only the last sentence is flat out false.

It is true that the genetic variation within Africa is greater than among the natives of any other continent. This is assumed to be because of population bottlenecks among the groups that colonized the other continents: Only a few small tribes survived to reach these places and then rapidly expanded to fill them with people. In Africa, humans have lived continually since the human race came into existence, and so there is a great deal of variation both in visible traits and hidden traits, and the genes that cause them. But each individual African, just like any other human, has only a limited set of genes. You cannot have the genes for every kind of human being in one body, sorry.

It is also a scientific fact that all human beings alive today descend from a woman more than 100 000 years ago who almost certainly lived in Africa (because we have no reason to believe that Homo Sapiens Sapiens existed outside Africa until much later.) But this woman did not have some kind of super-gene that could change into all other genes. Rather, all genes are always able to mutate, but this seems to happen randomly and over a very long time. Most mutations have no effect, and most of the rest are harmful, but sometimes a mutation is useful.

The mutations that make people on other continents different from native Africans are mostly not mutations in the mitochondrial DNA, but in the DNA of the cell’s nucleus. It is this DNA that caused changes related to skin and hair color, and to the ability to digest certain foods more efficiently and others less, and some changes to the immune system. These are changes that have slowly accumulated over time, except for a small part of the DNA that was acquired by crossbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

So there is no single “Eve” gene found in all black women and nowhere else, which makes them better or worse than other women. As a group, Africans have more variation. But each individual African has not.

But According to New scientist.com:

A man who died in 315 BC in southern Africa is the closest relative yet known to humanity’s common female ancestor – mitochondrial Eve.

HE DIED later than Socrates and Aristotle, but a man who fished along the coast of southern Africa is the closest genetic match for our common female ancestor yet found.

If you trace back the DNA in the maternally inherited mitochondria within our cells, all humans have a theoretical common ancestor. This woman, known as “mitochondrial Eve”, lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.

Within her DNA, and that of her peers, existed almost all the genetic variation we see in contemporary humans. Since Eve’s time, different populations of humans have drifted apart genetically, forming the distinct ethnic groups we see today.

Now a skeleton from around 315 BC, not long after the death of Alexander the Great, has been identified as a member of a previously unknown branch on the human family tree. It is the earliest group to diverge from all other modern humans ever identified (Genome Biology and Evolution, doi.org/v59). The man was 50 years old when he died, and is the first ancient human from sub-Saharan Africa – the cradle of humanity – to have had its DNA sequenced.

“He belongs to the earliest diverged lineage – the oldest we know of,” says Vanessa Hayes of the Garvan Institute in Sydney, Australia, who led the work. She says his ancestors diverged from other humans roughly 150,000 years ago.

“This is a very exciting paper,” says geneticist David Reich at Harvard University. “It is the first old ancient DNA ever to be convincingly extracted from an African context.”

The man was found at St Helena Bay in South Africa in 2010 by archaeologist Andrew Smith at the University of Cape Town, and examined by anthropologist Alan Morris at the same university.

Morris discovered that the man was a marine forager. A bony growth in his ear canal – known as “surfers’ ear” – revealed he spent a lot of his time in the cold waters of the South Atlantic Ocean, gathering food (see “A fisher’s life“).