Apparently all living humans are matrilineal descendants of a single woman who l

Question

Apparently all living humans are matrilineal descendants of a single woman who lived 200.000 years ago. She is called Mitochondrial Eve.

But at the time she lived there was a different matrilineal ancestor that all living humans shared. And between then and now I imagine many other women have been Mitochondrial Eves of the human population that lived at a particular time.

What I'm wondering is what kinds of events would cause a different, more recent matrilineal ancestor to become the Mitochondrial Eve of all living humans?

One scenario I can image is that the human population is on the brink of extinction and literally only a few people survive. Because there are so few people alive, I imagine that the chance that they share a more recent matrilineal ancestor is high.

Are there other scenarios possible? Does the chance of a new Mitochondrial Eve emerging decrease if the human population is large (billions) instead of small (hundreds or thousands)? Suppose that the human population will not decrease, is it likely future human populations will ever have a different Mitochondrial Eve than the current population? Does it depend on the amount of people that migrate?

The same questions could be posed for Y-Chromosomal Adam and the most recent common ancestor of all humans, I guess...

Explanation / Answer

The new mitochondrial eve is alive right now.

When humans reproduce, mothers pass their mitochondria to their offspring without a contribution from the father. As a result, each human can trace back their mitochondrial lineage as an unbroken chain to a single individual woman in the past. Through random chance (genetic drift) or natural selection women in some mitochondrial lines will pass offspring to the next generation, while others will not. If a woman fails to pass offspring to the next generation then she represents the end (i.e., extinction) of a particular mitochondrial lineage. As time progresses more and more of the original mitochondrial lineages will go extinct until all humans represent one remaining linage.

Note that this is a continual process since lineages accumulate differences through mutation of the mitochondrial DNA. This mutation is the source of the different lineages that that will go forward. Based on the estimated rate of mitochondrial DNA mutation we can estimate how long it would take for extant mitochondria to have developed the genetic differences we now see.

If you take a snapshot of this process at one point in time (e.g., contemporary humans), you can use this estimated time to say how long it would take to accumulate the present differences - that is when the line began. Due to the continual extinction of extant mitochondrial lines, there is some point in the future where if we were to take the snapshot we would estimate that the mitochondrial eve was alive right now.

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