It’s approaching dusk on the savannah. The searing heat of the day is no longer baking me from above, it’s now radiating up from the ground. I’m walking aimlessly, not sure where I came from, or where I’m going. Darkness is on the way and my visibility is becoming limited, but I can faintly see ahead of me, a woman walking. From this distance, I can see she’s wearing a long robe that appears to be made from animal skin. Her hair is black and flows down to her lower back. The woman is walking very slowly away from me and I’m gradually catching up to her.
‘Hello.’ I say from behind her. The woman pauses and slowly turns around. Now able to see her face, I see she is in her late 30s or early 40s with dark brown skin. The whites of her eyes are glowing in the faint light.
‘Hello,’ says the woman, pausing. Her voice is soft and welcoming.
‘My name is Grace,’ I say.
‘Yes, I know,’ she says. ‘Hello Grace.’
‘Do you know me?’ I ask, surprised to see she recognizes me.
She looks in my eyes and acknowledges, ‘Yes, I do,’
‘You look familiar to me. What’s your name?’ I ask.
‘You wouldn’t know me by my real name, but the people in your day have given me a name.’
‘You’re Eve. Aren’t you?’
She gives me an approving nod. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Where did you come from, Eve?’
‘I’ve always been here,’ says Eve. ‘Where did you come from, Grace?’
I look at her, confused, ‘I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know where we are.’
‘We’re in the valley,’ she says in a comforting way.
‘What valley are we in?’ I ask.
‘This valley is my home. This is the only place I know,’ says Eve. ‘I’ve never been anywhere else. Come with me,’ she says and she continues walking while motioning for me to follow. I follow her a short distance to a camp fire, she sits down on a log and asks me to sit down.
‘This is a beautiful fire,’ I say admiring the heat radiating in my face. ‘Do you keep it burning all night?’
‘We keep it burning all day and all night. We never let it go out. It takes a long time to start another.’
‘Is there somebody else with you?’ I ask.
‘Yes, my family.’
‘How many are in your family?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to use numbers. There are a lot of people in my family. I have a lot of children. Some of my children have children. Some other mothers in my family have children, but not as many as me. There are as many children here as my fingers and toes and your fingers and toes together. There are some fathers as well, they are off hunting tonight. I stay close by the fire with the children and the babies and the mothers.’ Eve stands up and walks around the fire and sits down beside me hip to hip. She looks closely at me. ‘Where do you come from, Grace? Do you live outside the valley?’
I have now suddenly become completely aware of my surroundings and I realize exactly who I am speaking to, ‘Eve,’ I say. ‘You are my ancestor. I am your descendant. I live across the ocean in another time when the world has many more people. So many people you can’t imagine. And all of them… every, last one of them is a descendant of you. In my day you are known as Mitochondrial Eve. Your blood is in almost every woman in the world in my day. This valley you live in is a very small place in the land called Africa. Africa is so big it would take a lifetime to explore. And there are more places beyond Africa that are even bigger. Your children and their children left the valley many, many generations ago and walked to these places, and they set up their homes. They hunted and they kept fire and they had families just like you.’
‘I don’t understand why my family would leave the valley.’ ponders Eve.
‘There is only enough food in the valley to support one family. As your family grew, the younger people moved on to make a new life for themselves beyond this valley.’
She pauses, looking very interested. ‘How many people are in your world, Grace?’
I pause for a moment, ‘As many people as there are blades of grass in the valley.’
‘Wow. And all those people came from me?’
‘Yes, they did. You are the grandmother of humanity.’
‘Grace,’ she says, looking closely at my face. ‘Why is your skin so white? I have never seen that before.’
‘Because,’ I explain. ‘Some parts of the world are hot like the valley, but some are cold. Where the weather is cold the sun is weaker and our skin changes to a lighter colour. That’s why my skin is so white, I come from a colder place. But even though my skin is lighter than yours, I am still your family. We are all one family.’
‘Do all the people in your day have white skin like you?’
‘No. Some do, some don’t. There are many colours of skin from darker than yours to light like mine and all shades in between.’
‘But all of my children here have dark skin like me. I don’t know how you can be my child with your skin colour.’
‘I am not your child, Eve. I am your descendant. There have been many generations between you and me, but everyone’s lineage leads back to you. Over thousands of years there have been many changes including the colour of our skin. It happens gradually over the centuries.’ I went on to describe how generations upon generations can lead to people that look somewhat different from each other, even though they are all related. And how subtle changes over a short period of time lead to significant changes over a long period of time. ‘This is how a person with white skin can be a descendant of a person with dark skin. Even though we have many different shades of skin we are all descendants of you. Over thousands of years as we moved around the world our skin colour adapted to our environment.’
‘How do you know all of these people came from me and from my children?’ she says. ‘What about the other mothers in the valley?’
‘Because it’s written in your DNA.’
‘My DNA?’
‘Your blood. Eve, how many of the children in this family are born from you?’
Eve thinks for a moment, reaches, and grabs my right hand, unfolds my fingers and gets me to hold it up with all five fingers extended. Then she holds up both of her hands extending all ten of her fingers. ‘This is how many children I have given birth to.’
‘And how many of them are girls?’
‘I have a lot of girls.’ Eve reaches over again and lowers 3 of my fingers keeping two up and puts both of her own hands back in the air with all ten fingers extended. ‘This is how many are girls.’
‘Twelve girls! That’s a lot of girls! By having so many girls at a time when there were so few people, you regenerated the population of the human race. Without you and all your girls, I can tell you there would be no people in my day.’
She looks at me inquisitively, ‘And what about you, Grace? Do you have any children?’
‘No, I don’t. And I don’t think I ever will.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ she says. ‘I feel like you just might have a child one day.’
‘If I do, and it’s a girl, I’ll name her after you.’
She looks pleasantly surprised to hear this. ‘Well thank you!’ she says. ‘Grace…?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why did the people of your day name me Eve?’ She asks and then stands up and stokes the fire one more time as she awaits my answer.
‘You were named after the biblical character, Eve. She was the first woman ever to live, according to the legend of the time. And every person that ever lived, so the legend goes, descended from her. Now science has proven that every person that lives in my day is a descendant of you. So, they named you Eve. You were named after her.’
‘Grace, this is all a wonderful story. You’ve taught me so much today, I have to thank you for this, but for now, I must go. I seem to be in a fair bit of pain.’ She bends over and places her hand on her belly. ‘I have to go see one of the other mothers now. Thank you for everything. Good bye, Grace.’
‘No, thank you, Eve. I should be thanking you.’
As Eve turns to walk away, I catch a glimpse of her side profile for the first time, and I see the familiar rounded shape to her belly. And I know exactly where she is going.
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“How is it possible, Dr. Thompson, that one woman, who lived 50,000 years ago, could be the ancestor of almost every woman alive today?”
The question came to me from the back of the auditorium, somewhere behind the large congregation of 200 or so students in my Human Genetics and Evolution lecture.
“That’s a great question. Can I ask your name?” I said, holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the glaring lights.
“It’s Roger McTavish.”
“Oh, hello Dr. McTavish! What a surprise that you’ve joined my class today.” Dr. McTavish is my psychologist that I’ve been seeing recently to help me with my insomnia and my problem of recurring nightmares. He graciously concealed his identity, except for his name, from the students in my class.
“The population of the world was very low at that time,” I explained. “Perhaps a few hundred people. And everyone lived in close proximity to one another. And this one woman, Eve, obviously, had a lot of children, mostly girls. Perhaps the other women of her day were not so fertile. Or perhaps, many of them were fertile and they had boys.”
“But how could we trace DNA back 50,000 years?” someone called out, “We can’t collect DNA from people that lived back then. How do we know almost every woman alive today descended from Mitochondrial Eve?”
“Good question. The answer lies in a woman’s mitochondrial DNA.” I pointed at a girl in the front row.
“Your mother had mutations in her genetic sequence and she passed them along to you, unchanged in your mitochondrial DNA. Her mother passed them to her, and you will pass them along to your daughter, unchanged.”
“And you can trace them back 50,000 years?”
“Yes, you can. Almost all women alive today have common mutations early in their DNA sequence, these mutations can be traced back to a common ancestor from about 50,000 years ago, Mitochondrial Eve. Of course, we have no fossil evidence of Eve, we have no physical evidence whatsoever, just the DNA mutations pointing directly at someone who lived in that time. (Of course, we also have my recurring dream where Eve and I visit by the fire.) We truly are one species, one huge family.”
“One more question, Grace,” called out Roger from the back.
“Yes, Dr. McTavish?”
“If you could travel back in time to visit Mitochondrial Eve, what would you like to tell her?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “Great question. I would like to tell her that if it weren’t for her, there would be no human race today. I’d tell her she is the most important person in the history of humankind. I’d tell her she’s the grandmother of humanity.”
BT
