Everyone with Blue Eyes May Descend from a Single Human Ancestor

Re:Everyone with Blue Eyes May Descend from a Single Human A... by SideburnsOfDoom on Saturday April 22, 2023 @10:22AM (#35666864)

> everyone may descend from a single ancestor! ... This would actually be really surprising, wouldn’t it?

No, it would be statistically inevitable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

"around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago"

although we're not descended from _only_ this one ancestor on each side, we are all descended from that one.

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Re:Everyone with Blue Eyes May Descend from a Single Human A... by irrational on Saturday April 22, 2023 @10:50AM (#35667117)

For everyone alive today, it is probably even much closer in time (perhaps as recently as 2,000 years ago).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-mo...

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Re:Everyone with Blue Eyes May Descend from a Single Human A... by SideburnsOfDoom on Saturday April 22, 2023 @10:59AM (#35667219)

Right. Those are via different methods. "Mitochndrial eve" is via female line only - i.e. mother's mother's mother's mother etc. Similarly the Y-chromosome Adam is via male line only. If we use both sides (e.g. mother's father's mother's father), then it's much closer.

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Re:Everyone with Blue Eyes May Descend from a Single Human A... by pfannkuchen on Saturday April 22, 2023 @11:06AM (#35667292)

I believe the article is claiming that the feature "blue eyes" has a single organism bottleneck (or origin) in the past. If this were also true for the feature complex "human", that would be very surprising. If all that is being claimed here is that humans all have at least one common ancestor among many non-common ancestors, then sure that is trivially very likely. It is also nothing like what is being claimed about blue eyes IIUC...

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