Who was Mitochondrial Eve? And No, She’s Not Lucy
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: The Human Story Begins in Africa
This week’s focus: Hidden History, a facts-based narrative to highlight someone who changed history
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1200 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
As mentioned last week, very little — outside of “pyramids, slavery, and colonialism” — is taught about Africa, especially in U.S. classrooms.
Africa is the birthplace of our humanity. Sometimes this is quickly mentioned in world history textbooks — referenced through a half-page collage of ancient fossils — but the analysis lacks depth. If the human story begins in Africa, then genetics, culture, and everything we consider “human” also begins in Africa.
This is counter to what some people have been taught. For centuries, pseudoscientific racism and eugenics — or junk science — spread false ideas that people with different racial identities were different species of human, and, so the argument suggested, fell on different rungs of a human hierarchy. Distorted, troubling ideas that connect race to ability — such as intelligence, athletics, criminality, even temperament — circulate to this day, especially across supremacist swaths of the internet.
A paradigm shift is needed. One that is rooted in facts, scientific evidence, and the desire to recognize all humans with equal dignity. This shift can begin by embracing the reality that every single human on the planet can trace their ancestry back to a single woman, who lived in Africa.
Who Was Mitochondrial Eve?
Every person in the world can trace their ancestry to one woman who lived in Africa about two-hundred thousand years ago.
Widely considered a common mother to us all, she represents the source of a unique genetic code — specific patterns held in the strands of DNA that exist in our mitochondria — passed down matrilineally, uninterrupted, for generation after generation. Because of this, she’s frequently referred to as Mitochondrial Eve.
She wasn’t the first modern woman ever born, nor was she the only woman who existed at her time, but she is largely believed to be the source of our shared origin. The only woman who had offspring that survived every single generation long enough to make another generation, Mitochondrial Eve represents an unbroken human chain of matrilineal inheritance, connected for millennia.
Her story, her life, means that every single person on the planet, in varying degrees and lengths of time, can trace their ancestry to Africa.
Africa at the Center
Scientists do not know the exact location where Mitochondrial Eve would have spent her life, but nearly all of them agree that she — and other anatomically modern humans at this point in time — lived in Africa.
In the inspiring PBS Series, Africa’s Great Civilizations, Henry Louis Gates Jr., places Mitochondrial Eve in the Great Rift Valley, the eastern side of the African continent, where physical evidence, including numerous skulls have been found. Scientists have named one Idaltu, or “first born,” who may have lived around the same time period as Mitochondrial Eve.
Dr. Gates states: “Africa's Great Rift Valley, this is where humanity’s story most likely begins. Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, have lived here for about 200,000 years. This great geological fault, stretching 3,000 miles through Africa, from Ethiopia to Malawi, with its great lakes and savannahs full of animal life, gave our ancestors the perfect environment in which to evolve.”
Another study suggests that Mitochondrial Eve lived within the Kalahari Desert, or current-day Botswana, specifically Makgadikgadi, which is now dry land, but was once home to an ancient lake: “Today, Makgadikgadi is one of the largest salt flats in the world. Climate models suggest that, 200,000 years ago, it was a fertile oasis.”
While many regions could have been home to Mitochondrial Eve, it’s widely accepted that she, and all modern humans, lived in Africa at this time.
Mitochondrial Eve is Not Lucy
Human evolution is complex. When attempting to illustrate it, it would look more like intricate tree branches than something linear — the simple line that’s often depicted for human evolution, which commonly features images of an ape walking and morphing into a human, doesn’t capture the complexity.
All humans are primates, and took a long and likely meandering path, to evolve into anatomically modern humans.
As stated by the Smithsonian: “Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.”
Oftentimes, Mitochondrial Eve is confused for a famous skeleton, who scientists named Lucy.
In the 1970s, a rare fossil was unearthed in Ethiopia, representing about 40 percent of a skeleton that’s estimated to be 3.2 million-years old! They named her Lucy, after the Beatles song they repeatedly listened to on site, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” While finding Lucy was a big deal, as many considered the skeletal frame to be evidence that apelike creatures were bipedal, or walking on two feet millions of years ago, Lucy is not a modern human, she’s considered to be an Australopithecine.
As described in this article, “Lucy was shorter than the average human, reaching about 3.3 feet (1 meter) in height, had an ape-like face and a brain about one-third the size of a human brain.”
While some call Lucy a human relative, it’s not clear whether or not she had direct influence on the lineage that would become modern humans, as the web of evolution is complex, with many branches.
Often conflated, perhaps due to the underrepresentation of the information about Mitochondrial Eve, both stories are fascinating and important, while only one is distinctly human.
Mitochondrial Eve, Was Her Skin Rich with Melanin?
Mitochondrial Eve was an anatomically modern human who lived in Africa.
While we may not know what Mitochondrial Eve looked like, because she lived in Africa, it’s extremely likely that she was exposed to high levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR), requiring her skin to produce high levels of pigment. The correlation between UVR and skin color is well documented, indicating that it’s highly likely that her skin was rich with melanin, or deep brown.
And, as scientific evidence suggests, if all humans at her time lived across Africa, then it’s likely that all humans had skin that was also, more or less, rich with melanin.
And when some humans began to leave Africa, at least 60,000 years ago (and perhaps earlier than that), they too would have deep brown skin. To survive new environments, especially the extreme cold humans would find in northern Europe, for example, their skin would, over time, produce less melanin. And this is how human skin variation begins.
To this day, every human in the world has about the same amount of melanocytes, or special cells that produce melanin, but our bodies have adapted to produce a range of melanin. Next week, we’ll do a deep dive into the beauty of skin!
Where to Learn More
Discussing Mitochondrial Eve can open many paths for extending learning.
To learn more about the difference between the DNA in our cell’s nucleus, and our mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, consider this video by PBS Eons, as well as this article in Science Daily, or this textbook-like description of mtDNA.
Review the 1987 paper, the Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution, to learn how scientists painstakingly pieced together the scientific evidence to unearth the origins of Mitochondrial Eve.
As mentioned, next week, we’ll discuss how to talk to kids about skin color, making recommendations that are rooted in affirmation and positive identity development.
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