Publication Date:
1995-12-22
Description:
It has been proposed that modern humans descended from a single woman, the "mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. The human immune system DRB1 genes are extremely polymorphic, with gene lineages that coalesce into an ancestor who lived around 60 million years ago, a time before the divergence of the apes from the Old World monkeys. The theory of gene coalescence suggests that, throughout the last 60 million years, human ancestral populations had an effective size of 100,000 individuals or greater. Molecular evolution data favor the African origin of modern humans, but the weight of the evidence is against a population bottleneck before their emergence. The mitochondrial Eve hypothesis emanates from a confusion between gene genealogies and individual genealogies.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ayala, F J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1995 Dec 22;270(5244):1930-6.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉University of California, Irvine, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8533083" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Africa
;
Animals
;
Cercopithecidae/genetics
;
Computer Simulation
;
DNA, Mitochondrial/genetics
;
DNA-Binding Proteins/genetics
;
*Evolution, Molecular
;
Female
;
Fossils
;
Genes, MHC Class II
;
Genetics, Population
;
HLA-DR Antigens/genetics
;
HLA-DRB1 Chains
;
*Hominidae/genetics
;
Humans
;
Kruppel-Like Transcription Factors
;
Male
;
Mutation
;
Selection, Genetic
;
Transcription Factors
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
