nathaniel stuart

In January 1987, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson published a paper in Nature that dropped a bombshell of our understanding of human evolution. Until then, the prevailing theory held that different groups of humans had evolved separately in different regions, beginning about two million years ago. Their groundbreaking work revealed all humans carried mitochondrial DNA in their cells that dated back to a single woman who had lived just 200,000 years ago. This woman was dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.

—How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution