Mitochondrial Eve and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge
Day 4: Do you have any Black relatives? Science says yes.
It’s hard to say where my love affair with anthropology began.
The House of Wonders in Philadelphia was probably the beginning. All the little knick-knacks and keepsakes that my grandparents had collected filled me with curiosity and awe. From a young age, I knew there were worlds far distant from my own, and I was already curious about the people there—but that was only part of the journey.
When I reached grade school and junior high, I was enrolled in a series of “Gifted” programs. One fateful spring, the Powers That Be decided that my fellow Gifteds and I needed some special enrichment, so they hauled us up the hill to the campus of Fort Lewis College in a short bus, ushered us into a little gray-carpeted room, and made us watch weekly episodes of a remarkable British television show: Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.
The Ascent of Man was a landmark series in a many ways. Beautifully shot on location with 16mm film, each episode focused on a certain stage of human history, beginning with a summary of how our ancestors split off from other early apes into the hominid lineage. Bronowski’s lectures gave us a simple and eloquent summary of what science could tell us in the 1970’s about human origins, the early migrations of our paleolithic ancestors, the beginnings of agriculture and so on.
I was absolutely riveted by the whole thing. It’s been more than forty years since I first watched it, and there are images from that series that have haunted me to this day. But in the context of my personal Black History, the most important words were in the first episode:
“It’s almost certain that Man evolved in Africa, near the equator.”
As the field of molecular anthropology rose in the 1980’s, “almost certain” lost the “almost”. Researchers began studying the DNA of living human populations all over the world, and quickly realized that there was a special type of DNA hidden in every human cell that could reveal important information about our ancestors—specifically, our female ancestors.
The critical DNA for the study of Human Origins is found in our mitochondria. These tiny little powerhouse organelles exist in every cell of the human body, and they serve a variety of important functions. Our cells live, grow, reproduce and die through the actions of our mitochondria, and they are fundamental to the path that converts the air we breathe into energy.
More importantly in the study of Human Origins, every mitochondria in our bodies is inherited from only one parent—the mother. Because while human sperm are a great delivery system for a DNA, a human egg is a full-sized living cell, and it comes with mitochondria. After fertilization, that first cell divides and subdivides from conception to birth and beyond to form every cell of our bodies—and each new cell always carries that maternal DNA. If we happen to be female, that’s the mitochondrial DNA we will pass to our own children.
So who was Mitochondrial Eve? The cutesy name is misleading. She wasn’t the first anatomically modern human to exist, by any means. But she is common maternal of every human lineage that has survived to the present day. There may have been earlier lineages, but over time the last daughter of those bloodlines died without a daughter of her own. Mitochondrial Eve is the “winner” of Darwinian Evolution, because all of us are her descendants.
The beauty of bioanthropology as that we can actually know that our Magna Mater, the maternal ancestor of all humankind, was not only African but Black. We know it because we know that Blackness is an evolutionary strategy, and one that will always win in sub-Saharan Africa.
On the evolutionary teeter-totter between our vulnerability to cancer-causing UV radiation, and our natural need to absorb sunlight to produce Vitamin D, the human body always develops the right amount of melanin to best survive local conditions. In the presence of overwhelming radiation exposure, human bodies become Black to defend against cancer—the hotter the sun, the darker we become to fend off its rays. On the other hand, when we are deprived of sun, our skin is hungry for light and desperate to absorb every photon. The colder and darker the winters, the paler we become.
The upshot of all this is that the common ancestor of every person who will ever read this essay was Black woman who lived in Africa between 100,000-200,000 years ago.
Scientifically speaking, we all have a Black History.
Our cells divide and multiply and breathe and die because Mitochondrial Eve gave birth to a daughter 100,000-200,000 years ago—a daughter who lived to have a daughter of her own. And then our Mitochondrial Aunties passed on that blessing of life over and over for generations, until a hundred millennia later, your mother passed the latest version of those golden mitochondria on to you.
Scientists tend to cringe when you wax philosophical or poetic about things that come down to chains of protein and rates of mutation. And I’ve seen them tear their hair out over the phrase “Mitochondrial Eve”, which is 100% misleading and survives in the common parlance only because it is catchy—it’s good marketing, not good science.
But it does have a bit of poetry to it, I must admit.
Just remember that the person we’re talking about wasn’t the first woman. She’s the woman whose children survived.
And if there’s anything Blacker than that, I don’t know what it is.
Resources for This Essay
Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man - Episode 01, “Lower Than the Angels”
New Scientist: “Found: closest link to Eve, our universal ancestor” - male DNA recovered in Africa