Mitochondrial Eve -- Mother to us all?

Mitochondrial Eve is the name given to the idea of our most recent matrilineal decedent of mitochondrial DNA. In other words, she is the woman who all current living humans can trace their lineage back to, a distantly related mother to us all. This theory states that this common ancestor wasn't necessarily even close to the first woman alive, but that all other women's ancestors eventually did not produce female offspring and therefore their mitochondria line died off.

Tribes of Men:

Ashanti tribe in the area of Ghana

Dogon tribe of cliff-dwelling people in Mali Africa

Elderly Indian man showing signs of adaptation to a harsher, desert-like habitat
European woman (Queen Elizabeth) showing the loss of pigmentation from a habitat with less harsh UV sunlight
Native American Apache dressed in ceremonial clothing

Elderly Mexican woman

It is definitely possible for us to have all descended from a common ancestor. Migration and then many many years of adaptation to environments can explain the differences in culture and appearances of today's diverse people. I believe that in 1000 years, the people of earth will still be just as diverse as today, obviously with different, blended "races," but still diverse nonetheless.

Life

The two essential features of life are replication and metabolism. Our book, The Origins of Life, uses a computer analogy to describe these two essentials.

Metabolism is like the hardware of a computer system: it processes "information," keeps the cell alive, and is primarily thought of occurring with the protein of a cell.

Replication is like the software of this computer system: it embodies "information," allowing copies of the cell to be made, and is mostly thought of as occurring in cell Nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA.

Using this analogy, the author makes the argument for a dual-origin hypothesis in which the first life only had metabolic functions, and replication was added later. This makes sense in the analogy because without hardware, software cannot run, but hardware without software functionally does not make sense. Thus 'software' (nucleic acid) came along as a parasitic existence after metabolic life had been around for some time, using the protein based metabolic cells as hosts to live off of.