The special said all races on earth could be traced back to his genes. It was only one person, and he was living in some remote place in some country like Mongolia
Genealogy - 2 Answers
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1 :
Never heard of the special you are talking about. However, considering the thousands of years man has been on earth, the hundreds of thousands of ancestors we each have, the nature of early man to have been nomadic, and later man explorers of other lands, and the pure logical mathematical odds, I would say that there is NOT just one man in billions that can be traced back to every racial gene pool. I would say about 50% of us could. I base this not on any real facts that I can quote without doing any internet research, just the logistics of the situation leading to an educated guess.
2 :
I think what you are referring to is Allan Wilson's "Mitochondrial Eve" (UC Berkley, 1991). In his efforts to identify informative genetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, Wilson started to focus on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - genes that sit in the cell, but not in the nucleus, and are passed from mother to child. This DNA material is important because it mutates quickly, thus making it easy to plot changes over relatively short time spans. By comparing differences in the mtDNA Wilson believed it was possible to estimate the time, and the place, modern humans first evolved. With his discovery that human mtDNA is genetically much less diverse than chimpanzee mtDNA, he concluded that modern human races had diverged recently from a single population while older human species such as Neandertal, Java erectus and Pekin erectus had become extinct. He and his team compared mtDNA in people of different racial backgrounds and concluded that all modern humans evolved from one 'lucky mother' in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve (mt-mrca) is the name given by Wilson et al to the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all living humans. Passed down from mothers to offspring for over a hundred thousand years, her mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is now found in all living humans: every mtDNA in every living person is derived from hers. Mitochondrial Eve is the female counterpart of Y-chromosomal Adam, the patrilineal most recent common ancestor, although they lived at different times. She is believed to have lived about 140,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania. The time she lived is calculated based on the molecular clock technique of correlating elapsed time with observed genetic drift. Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all humans via the mitochondrial DNA pathway, not the unqualified MRCA of all humanity. All living humans can trace their ancestry back to the MRCA via at least one of their parents, but Mitochondrial Eve can only be reached via the maternal line. Therefore, she necessarily lived much longer ago than the MRCA of all humanity. The existence of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each lived within a large human population at a different time. Some of their contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. No contemporary of Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam is an ancestor of only a subset of people alive today, because both of them lived much longer ago than the identical ancestors point.
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