
Ancient yet Cosmopolitan - prismatic
https://aeon.co/essays/the-modern-human-mind-evolved-further-and-farther-back
======
c-smile
> And you have to go back only 2,000 years to find the most recent common
> ancestor of everyone alive on Earth today.

I suspect that 2000 is a bit optimistic, no?

But "never overestimate power of exponent" so asking.

~~~
eindiran
Yeah, unless I am missing something, this is way off: both Y-chromosomal Adam
and Mitochondrial Eve are estimated to be from >> 100K years ago.

> As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial
> uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago
> (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly
> consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve)

[EDIT] Apparently I misunderstood how things work. mt-Eve is not necessarily
the MRCA for all living humans:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_the_most...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_the_most_recent_ancestor_shared_by_all_humans)

This paper from 2004 uses Monte Carlo simulation to estimate that the MRCA for
all humans may have occurred in the last 5K years:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842)

This Wikipedia article explains how that might be the case:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TM...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMRCA_of_all_living_humans)

