The Geneticist Who Found Mitochondrial Eve Wanted to Call Her the Lucky Mother

In 1987, three biochemists at Berkeley — Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson — published a paper in Nature that showed the mitochondrial DNA of 145 women from around the world all converged on a single common ancestor in Africa, somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 years ago. The press picked up the result and christened her Mitochondrial Eve. Wilson, who had to give the seminars, hated the name. He thought "Lucky Mother" was closer to honest, because the woman in question was lucky in exactly one technical sense: every other woman alive at the same time eventually had a generation that produced no daughters, and her line did not.

That is the part that is constantly misread. Mitochondrial Eve was not the first human female. She was not even, particularly, special among her contemporaries — population-genetic models put the female effective population size at her time well into the tens of thousands. She is just the last shared point on the maternal-only line. If a single living woman never has a daughter, the title can — eventually — shift forward in time to a more recent ancestor without anything biological changing.

More recent estimates have pulled her in slightly, to roughly 99,000–148,000 years ago, and located her in East Africa near the divergence of the mitochondrial L0 lineage. The position is a moving target, by design.