The Neandertal Enigma: Solving The Mystery of Modern Human Origins, James Shreeve, c. 1995

Some trivia.

Blood types

• American Indians: virtually all are type O
• Rh negative: almost exclusively among Europeans; most prevalent in Basque (western Pyrenees)
• Africans and Australians: blood types about as far apart as two populations can be
• Caucasians and Negroids more closely related to each other than either is to the third major population grouping: the Mongoloids

Some names, geneticists

• 1960's: Cavalli-Sforza, research on blood types suggested Asia was origin of all races
• late 1970's: Douglas Wallace, in Cavalli-Sforza's lab; began using mtDNA to construct a human evolutionary tree; Wallace was the first to prove that human mtDNA was inherited maternally
• 1986, one year before Eve made her debut, Oxford geneticist, James Wainscoat, focused on a particular region of the beta-globin gene (hemoglobin); examined haplotypes in eight diverse human populations (Europe, Asia, New Guinea, south Pacific, Africa) -- research hinted that one continent was the origin of all living races -- but it was not Asia, as Cavalli-Sforza had maintained
• 1987, Nature, three authors -- Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking (graduate students) and their famous mentor, Allan Wilson

Key points:

• Wainscoat, p. 61: "Wainscoat's research suggested that everyone alive today ultimately derives from a group of Africans who may have numbered no more than a few hundred people.
• mtDNA: mutates at a rate about ten times that of nuclear DNA; a watch with a second hand can tell time more precisely than one that ticks off only minutes
• mtDNA: only from the maternal line

Wallace's key four points:

• little difference between any two people's mtDNA (everyone's common ancestor had lived surprisingly recently)
• pattern of variation in mtDNA among the five populations often correlated to geographic and ethnic origin
• Old World populations sorted out into two distinct groups: African and non-African, with the African mtDNA types showing much more variation than the non-African ones
• taken together: results suggested that there had been a recent, single point of origin for the modern human race

But, results suggested place of origin: Asian, but Africa still a possibility

1979: Cann, Stoneking, Allan Wilson put "mitochondria" into Newsweek