How old is mankind? Genetic research at Rice University and Silesian University of Technology indicates that “mitochondrial Eve”, the maternal ancestor of all living humans, is about 200,000 years old.

Rice said that its conclusion followed a side-by-side comparison of 10 human genetic models that each aim to determine when Eve lived using a very different set of assumptions about the way humans originally expanded and spread across the globe.

“Our findings underscore the importance of taking into account the random nature of population processes like growth and extinction,” said study co-author Marek Kimmel, professor of statistics at Rice. “Classical, deterministic models, including several that have previously been applied to the dating of mitochondrial Eve, do not fully account for these random processes.”

It is the first time genetic research seems to correlate with the estimated age of first humans on Earth. Back in 1967, the bones of two early humans were found in Ethiopia and estimated at an age of 130,000 years. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered human bones that were believed to be about 160,000 years old. In 2005, the age was pushed back to about 195,000 years as researchers dated mineral crystals in volcanic ash layers that contained the early human bones.

Rice’s findings, which are published in the current issue in the journal Theoretical Population Biology, no indicate that the first human being may be about in the same range, and possibly slightly older. The scientists said that “the quest to date mitochondrial Eve is an example of the way scientists probe the genetic past to learn more about mutation, selection and other genetic processes that play key roles in disease.”

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