What about HER mother?

Maybe they just stopped at the first one they came to??

This concept is what is referred to as “mitochondrial Eve”, and it points to the most recent matrilineal common ancestor. This might help.

Edit: Link now direct to image. Mobile was redirecting to Wiki article.

Thanks @hominid…so the most recent. That explains it. But…how in the world do they even determine this? I know I could go do some research, and I will, but I want to discuss it too. See where it might lead.

BTW, this means all of you are related to my cousin. :D

Actually, your chart explains another question I had, which was, what if a woman had no daughters?

That’s what you get for watching Nature. It makes you think too much.

You need to be watching one of the church-based channels. That way you wouldn’t even question the evolutionary process – you would deny it entirely. And you wouldn’t need to worry your pretty little head about things like mitochondrial DNA.

Now to the real answer:

Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline – and I am not sure where – the ape lineage morphed (for lack of a better word) into the first human female. Why? How? I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. But my guess is that the so-called ‘first woman’ came shortly after that evolutionary event.

There was a similar Science show a couple of years ago about Ghengis Khan, specifically showing that as he was doing his thing all over Europe, he was also impregnating women as well. The tracked back whole long lines of tribes, in different areas of Europe, to his DNA pattern. Granted, that was only 900 years ago, but the same idea,....

That would be over a span of millions of years, not a single generation. The African “Eve’s” mother was identical to her in every way.

I agree with @hominid, that they stopped at the most recent ancestor.

Yes, “mitochondrial Eve” (can I just say how much I hate that she was given that name, since it implants the wrong idea in many people?) is the most recent common ancestor that all currently living humans have. She’s not the female from which all humans have descended, just the ones living now. There have have been other matrilineal lines in humans, but they have all died out by this point in time.

Coolness.

I concur with @Darth_Algar. What it means is that, through some fluke of selection, the progeny of this woman were more successful in the breeding process than others of her generation.
I believe the reason it stops with her is that they haven’t been able to go further up the chain yet.

How do they do the testing? I mean, how can they know she lived 100,000 years ago?

^ Estimation based on mutation rates of mitochondrial DNA (see molecular clock).

Interesting.

I don’t mind calling her Eve, because I was told that the story of Adam and Eve is supposed to remind us that we are all related. We are all from the same family. It is similar to we are all God’s childen. I don’t care that it references God, even though I am an atheist.

I don’t mind it either. Here is the etymology of the word: ” proper name, Biblical first woman, Late Latin, from Hebrew Hawwah, literally “a living being…”

It isn’t that the name references religion/mythology, it’s that it gives people the impression that this woman was the first human woman.

Well, you’d have to be pretty dumb to think that there is any such thing as a “first woman” who didn’t have a women before her. And you can’t fix that kind of dumb by changing words.

Careful now @Dutchess_III! You are treading on sacred ground there

LOL!

Also, if you are interested in how something like this could happen look up “Founders Effect”, “Bottleneck Effect: and “Genetic Drift”.

There is some good stuff there like this:

“A recent study concluded that of the people migrating across the Bering land bridge at the close of the ice age, only 70 left their genetic print in modern descendants, a minute effective founder population—this can be easily misread as though implying that only 70 people crossed to North America.”

Interesting observation.