HOUSTON -- (Aug. 17, 2010) -- The most robust statistical
examination to date of our species' genetic links to
"mitochondrial Eve" -- the maternal ancestor of all living
humans -- confirms that she lived about 200,000 years ago. The
Rice University study was based on a side-by-side comparison of
10 human genetic models that each aim to determine when Eve
lived using a very different set of assumptions about the way
humans migrated, expanded and spread across Earth. The research
is available online in the journal Theoretical Population
Biology. "Our findings underscore the importance of taking into
account the random nature of population processes like growth
and extinction," said study co-author Marek Kimmel, professor of
statistics at Rice. "Classical, deterministic models, including
several that have previously been applied to the dating of
mitochondrial Eve, do not fully account for these random
processes." The quest to date mitochondrial Eve (mtEve) is an
example of the way scientists probe the genetic pa