Editing Mitochondrial Eve (section)

===Not the most recent ancestor shared by all humans===

{{Main|Most recent common ancestor}}

Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ''matrilineal'' ancestor, not the ''most recent common ancestor''. Since the mtDNA is inherited maternally and recombination is either rare or absent, it is relatively easy to track the ancestry of the lineages back to a MRCA; however, this MRCA is valid only when discussing mitochondrial DNA. An approximate sequence from newest to oldest can list various important points in the ancestry of modern human populations:

* [[most recent common ancestor|The human MRCA]]. The time period that human MRCA lived is unknown. Rohde et al put forth a "rough guess" that the MRCA could have existed 5000 years ago; however, the authors state that this estimate is "extremely tentative, and the model contains several obvious sources of error, as it was motivated more by considerations of theoretical insight and tractability than by realism."<ref name=Rodhe2004>{{cite journal |vauthors=Rohde DL, Olson S, Chang JT |title=Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans |journal=Nature |volume=431 |issue=7008 |pages=562–566 |date=September 2004 |pmid=15457259 |doi=10.1038/nature02842 |s2cid=3563900 |citeseerx=10.1.1.78.8467 |bibcode=2004Natur.431..562R }}</ref> Just a few thousand years before the most recent single ancestor shared by all living humans was the time at which all humans who were then alive either left no descendants alive today or were common ancestors of all humans alive today. However, such a late date is difficult to reconcile with the geographical spread of our species and the consequent isolation of different groups from each other. For example, it is generally accepted that the indigenous population of Tasmania was isolated from all other humans between the rise in sea level after the last ice age some 8000 years ago and the arrival of Europeans. Estimates of the MRCA of even closely related human populations have been much more than 5000 years ago.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Zhou |first1=Jin |last2=Teo |first2=Yik-Ying |date=August 2016 |title=Estimating time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA): comparison and application of eight methods |journal=European Journal of Human Genetics |language=en |volume=24 |issue=8 |pages=1195–1201 |doi=10.1038/ejhg.2015.258 |pmid=26669663 |pmc=4970674 |s2cid=965600 |issn=1476-5438|doi-access=free }}</ref>
* The [[identical ancestors point]]. In other words, "each present-day human has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors" alive at the "identical ancestors point" in time. This is far more recent than when Mitochondrial Eve was proposed to have lived.<ref name=Rodhe2004/>
* Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent female-line common ancestor of all living people.
* "Y-chromosomal Adam", the most recent male-line common ancestor of all living people.