A universal family tree?
A long time ago, when I was just a high school student, Allan Wilson and two colleagues published a paper that introduced the world to the idea of the "Mitochondrial Eve." This was back when you had to gather placentas (no kidding) to harvest enough DNA to sequence and about a decade before Windows95. But it was kind of state of the art at the time, and Wilson's conclusions stirred up a bit of controversy. First, he claimed that the mitochondrial DNA of all living humans could trace its ancestry back to a woman who lived about 200,000 years ago. Second, he claimed that that ancestor probably lived in Africa. Why was this controversial? Some anthropologists (like Milford Wolpoff) had argued that modern humans had much, much deeper roots and that we had no single geographic origin. These results from mitochondrial DNA suggested otherwise. Given the state of phylogeny reconstruction at the time, there were some inevitable technical critiques...