How did we manage to become so diverse if we all come from the same “mother” is my question. The blood thing is a correlated thing
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Mitochondrial eve does not mean that she is the only “mother” in that generation. Mitochondrial eve is just the unbroken maternal lineage. You have thousands of ancestors from the same generation as mitochondrial eve, and they are likely to be different from another random person you meet on the street.
Mitochondrial eve isn’t a specific individual. Mitochondrial eve is derived from statistical analysis on mutation rates in the DNA of our mitochondria. It exists because we all inherit the complete mitochondrial genome of our mothers because of the egg. There’s one for all people in the US. There’s one for all people in Europe. There’s a different one for all people in the world. You can figure out a mitochondrial eve across species as well. It’s a similar process when we use statistical analysis to figure out when two species diverged in evolution, like between us and our ape cousins.
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