If family trees were charted indefinitely backward, they would eventually converge on a small group of ancients who were ancestors of us all. Now biologists suggest in a report to Nature that a single female living between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago in Africa was an ancestor of everyone on the earth today. Inevitably -- and to the probable delight of creationists -- many scientists are calling her "Eve."
The authors point out that the hypothetical Eve, unlike the biblical one, was in no sense the one ancestral mother of all humans. There were other females reproducing at the time who...
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