Episode IV -- In Search of Eve

In our quest for the origin of man, it is perhaps prudent to look for the first woman -- more particularly, the first mommy. Greek and other mythologies, for example, often claim descent from a mother goddess -- the mother of all goddesses -- who began the world without the alleged benefit of a male counterpart. Thus it is logical to look for the first woman.

If you think that such matriarchal thinking is detrimental to the fragile male ego, consider the reality that modern science can now fertilize the egg from a female with an egg from another female, and thereafter yield a daughter -- all without benefit of sperm, males, or foreplay!  For those macho men, who in their deepest, darkest moments wonder why women keep them around, or for what possible use truly empowered women would have for men... Those men may now wish to go into a total, blind panic attack.

But that won't help us in our quest to find "Eve." Or any of her daughters, for that matter. For these purposes, we are obliged to turn to such genetic anthropologists as Wes Brown, et al. In Wes' paper in the Journal of Molecular Evolution [June 1980] he suggested "the possibility that present-day humans evolved from a small mitochondrially monomorphic population that existed at that time." The implication was that, based on mutation rates of mitochondrial DNA, there existed the possibility that 180,000 to 360,000 years ago, a solitary woman could have become the mitochondrial mother of every living being.

Importantly, Brown noted that while different mammals of the same species differed by 1.5% in their mtDNA, humans differed from one another by an "anomalously low" 0.18 to 0.4%, suggesting much less diversity and thus the possibility of a small founding group -- even a single mutha. Furthermore, the smaller the founding group, the faster and more dramatic, perhaps, was the anatomical change.

Meanwhile, in order to do true justice to the search for Eve... and additionally, to buttress with current, relevant facts, our case for something funny going on in the evolvement of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Man... we must backtrack slightly in our dating of events. To wit...

c. 200,000 B.C.E.  Somewhen in the time frame of 290,000 to 140,000 years ago, a single, solitary woman living in sub-Saharan Africa became the world's one common grandmother!  In a revolutionary (and still highly controversial) article in Nature [January 1, 1987], Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson asserted the following:  "Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations, have been analyzed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DNAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived about 200,000 years ago." This work effectively took the theoretical possibility of Wes Brown and put it to the acid test. The result was that, in all likelihood, there was an Eve. And probably dressed (or undressed) for the part.

Recall that mitochondrial DNA ("mtDNA") is the energy-eliciting compartments of the human cell -- it is the task of these microscopic components to extract energy from food molecules floating in the sappy cytoplasm outside the nucleus of the cell. The energy of mitochondria is then synthesized as the universal energy currency, ATP. Without these organelles, our biological processes would shut down. These mtDNA lie outside the nuclear DNA -- which is, in turn, responsible for the transmission of most physical characteristics. The DNA ("deoxyribonucleic acid") in a cell's mitochondria contains 37 genes (as compared to perhaps 100,000 genes in the cell's nuclear DNA).

The mtDNA is inherited only maternally, from the mother. It is thus passed intact from great-grandmother to grandmother to mother to daughter with virtually no input from males and thus no mixing, no blending of father's and mother's genes (mixing that could otherwise jumble, complicate, and thus obscure its history).

When the nuclear DNA in a male's sperm unites with the DNA in the egg of a woman, there is a mixing together of genes like marbles in a tumbler. [We'll forego any comments on this analogy.]  Characteristics from both parents are manifest in the baby, a unique human being with a mixture of the parent's genes. But when sperm enters the ovum, only nuclear DNA is believed to enter the egg. So when a baby's cells form and are duplicated, they contain nuclei possessing the genes of both the mother and father, but with the mitochondria containing the genes only of the female parent.  It has been that way since the beginning of woman. And with no tumbling of the mitochondria marbles, mutation is basically the only kind of change that can occur in the mtDNA.

By considering the mutations in the genetic molecules (random, "neutral" ones which accumulate over time, with little or no effect on the functioning of our organisms), Becky, Mark and Allan reconstructed a branching diagram leading back to one mother by taking a count of the number of mutational differences among the twigs. Moreover, they were able to date backward (without studying paleontology, geology, or any other ology), for the mutational differences (or "divergences") between people that occurred, which they calculated at a set rate of 2 to 4 percent every million years. The mutations, they claimed, accumulate at much the same rate in all organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to animals. The longer a population had been around, the more mutations. One could even identify Cleopatra's mitochondrial genes in modern people and, at least theoretically, specify her entire mitochondrial genotype (assuming, of course, that she has an uninterrupted line of daughters since.)

Though mutations via mistakes or accidents in the DNA replicating itself "may be a random mispairing of base-pairs during replication -- i.e. a failure of DNA to exactly copy itself -- they may also be the result of agents in the environment. Candidates for causing such alternations include naturally occurring radioactive compounds, environmental chemicals known as mutagens, ultraviolet radiation from a hot sun, highly penetrating and ubiquitous cosmic rays, or some other unknown agent. Others have gone so far as to speculate that agents in mud eaten by humans can alter DNA, and so can the chemical composition of burned meat." [Please note the possibility of "agents in the environment" as being the cause of mutations -- particularly, unknown agents!]

At the time, the winter of our discontent, 198,005 B.C.E., there were glaciers slowly moving across parts of the globe, sheets of ice that grew like algae from the poles. But in Africa, according to Becky and the Boys, it was eminently hospitable, warm and lava-rich, a virtual vacation land festooned with garlands of flagrant (but sadly, not fragrant) flowers. (The authors, in describing the delights from Out of Africa, were apparently discounting the substantial possibility of being eaten by lions, trampled by elephants, gorged by Rhinos, and dying of thirst, hunger, disease, and/or lack of multi-media intellectual stimulation.)  Nevertheless, here, beginning several million years ago, the first two-legged hominids progressed into man-apes (and and presumably woman-apes), then into the ape-men known as Homo sapiens, and then to the first modern humans.

Though there were at least a million very primitive people living in the Old World, only from this small, isolated population in Africa, according to Becky, et al, did we all descend. These were the only Homo sapiens sapiens at the dawn of modern mankind, and when all their clans were counted, their number was less than 10,000. The rest of Africa and the world beyond was inhabited by far more archaic people who bore many resemblances to this new band in the sub-Sahara but who were still too much like the forerunning erectus -- low-skulled and beetle-browed.

These archaics had spread throughout Africa and into Asia and Europe, many developing into what would be known as Neanderthals. But they were destined for extinction, and it was only the relatively small band of higher-skulled and gracile Africans, evolving much more swiftly out of the erectus stock, who would serve as our ancestors. They spread out of the sub-Saharan savannas and took control of the world -- wrestling it from the archaics -- some 30,000 years ago.

Thirty centuries after that, there would be 6 billion of us. The land of the ape-men had been overrun, conquered systematically (and perhaps brutally) by these fledgling humans from the sub-Sahara. For the conquerors had changed in a unique and fundamental sense. They were, according to the even more outlandish Wilson's theories, now able to speak, make better weapons, and look the part -- no longer apelike or shambling or beetle-browed.

This African scenario, however, comes not from fossils (a fact which really riles the paleoanthropologists), but from DNA laboratories. Furthermore, Eve was old, much older than many paleoanthropologists expected. Think of her as the 10,000th grandmother. [And May first has been set aside as 10,000th grandmother day (ala mother's and grandmother's day).]

It must be admitted that this hypothetical woman was probably not the one and only mother of all subsequent humanity, as the biblical name of Eve implies, but simply one woman whose mitochondrial genes got passed along through an endless string of daughters. She was the only woman her age whose descendants included at least one female in every generation; our oldest known common ancestor. The mitochondrial Eve was probably never the only woman on earth.  There may have been thousands of others, but their mitochondrial lines have since gone extinct.

Anatomically, Eve may have been the very first modern female (and she may even have shopped at Nieman Marcus). But then again she may also have been part of a more archaic group of Homo sapiens. The population to which she belonged may have been very small, or put another way, a population that, at the point of Eve's existence, had crashed to a very small number for some indefinable reason. She may have postdated the first modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

The reality is that Eve's morphology can not be easily pinpointed. The population of which she was representative may have stayed in sub-Saharan Africa for some time, then gone up to some other area and then moved out. "In that movement, at some point, for some unknown reason, the actual transition from an archaic to an anatomically more modern woman took place. Many nuclear genes from earlier people will survive in modern humans, both male and female, and some of those could easily come from something that we wouldn't recognize as Homo sapiens." In other words, our genes didn't come out of nowhere when Homo sapiens suddenly appeared. But keep in mind the idea of our genes coming from "something we wouldn't recognize as Homo Sapiens"!

The fossil record of Africa is such that it has led Mary Leakey to conclude that if nothing else, the basic premise of the Eve argument -- a sub-Saharan origin 142,500 to 285,000 years ago -- remains, "as far as the evidence we have now, a reasonable assumption." In fact, Mary and son Richard had both discovered fossils that lent great credence to the idea that a population of archaic Africans had evolved into the first anatomically modern humans before they had similarly evolved anywhere else.

"While the archaics in Europe had given way to Neanderthals, the similarly heavy- featured archaics in Africa such as Ndutu and Rhodesian Man had made way for a more gracile form of premodern man, who seemed more aligned to populations of today than virtually any fossils from Europe and Asia." In one case the Leakeys found an archaic next to something that was just about modern (c. 100,000 to 130,000 B.C.E.). From the Leakeys' viewpoint, there was a good chance that Eve was Tanzanian, South African, or Ethiopian. Meanwhile, Linda Vigilant (another geneticist, who used DNAs from Africans and not American blacks) calculated the common human ancestor as living 238,000 years ago, probably in Botswana, just north of South Africa.

c. 180,000 to 90,000 B.C.E. Eve's descendants were moving right along, growing increasingly savvy and increasingly migratory, sloughing off old erectus traits and spreading out of Africa to take over the world. "There was little evidence," said the geneticists, "that this advanced African population interbred with existing and more primitive populations in Asia and Europe. Instead, they simply outbred and conquered them. They must have possessed some vast superiority."

This view of no hanky-panky (or at least none manifesting in the mtDNA of any derived offspring) between the Eve tribe and the whole of Erectusland inhabitants, constitutes in the minds of most paleoanthropologists, a severe liability of the Eve Theory. Added to this was the fact that the geneticists had taken the extreme view that there was, perhaps, ZERO reproductive exchange between Eve's descendants and the Asian/European populations the invaders replaced. "Populations in Asia and Europe were not only overwhelmed but contributed virtually no genes to modern humanity." Erectus was still the original founder, but the African erectus -- not Java or Peking Man -- turned into modern form before the Asian erectus could do the same, and then overtook all the Java and Peking descendants, who left not a trace. More importantly," it is alleged, "Java Man, Peking Man and all the Neanderthals made NO genetic contribution to modern man! "

When this particular debate in the scientific community had really heated up, Wilson then took another giant, extreme step for Eve's mankind. He suggested that the "vast superiority" of Eve's band derived from their ability to speak!  (And supposedly, how to sing and dance and play the guitar.) This last assertion (by Wilson) -- which few if any believe -- is that the ability to speak may have come from a mitochondrial (instead of an infinitely more likely nuclear) DNA mutation. According to Wilson, a mitochondrial mutation may have caused more oxygen to go into the Africans' brains. That was, after all, what the mitochondrion was all about: oxygen and energy production.

The motivation for this radical concept by Wilson was to show "how a maternally inherited ability to use language or perform some other vital skill could have allowed modern humans to replace more 'archaic' species about 100,000 years ago with no intermixing." In effect, it was a woman who managed to get in the first word!

In essence, Wilson believed that they had "found a mother who lived roughly 200,000 years ago and that she was one among many mothers living at that time -- many thousands at least -- and that she had two daughters, at least, one giving rise to Lineage I, which largely stayed in Africa, and the other Lineage II, which includes many Africans and all the non-Africans. And in one of those two lineages: the first to really speak." It should be noted that this hypothesis was "data-free." "Others dismissed it -- no pun intended -- as not worth talking about." In academic circles Wilson was doing a "tap dance on the limb of a tree that other scientists -- both geneticists and anthropologists -- were sawing at the trunk." But then, a Neanderthal in Israel was found with a bone structure near the larynx that is crucial to language and was identical to that of modern humans!  Oops.

Nevertheless, the superiority that enabled Eve's band of evolved erectus to replace all the other erectus without so much as a single paternity suit is still not clear to the vast majority of scientists in the field. Most of the paleoanthropologists even found it difficult to accept the one Eve idea. But a willingness to open one's mind has never been a prerequisite for becoming prominent in the field of science. For the genetic mtDNA evidence is more than a little convincing.

For example, the Africans displayed the most diverse DNA types. The longer time a lineage is around, the more mutations it collects, and thus the more diversity within such a population. The divergence of Africans was 0.47%, Asians 0.35%, Australian Aborigines, New Guineans, and finally Caucasians were 0.23%. The Aborigines of Australia actually appeared genetically closer to Europeans than they did to Africans. In fact, the Aborigines' diversity suggested that fifteen lineages had found a way to cross from Asia to Australia. According to Becky, et al, the founding of Australia may have been made by a people "who knew exactly where they were going and had gone there time and time again." [Keep that little quote in mind!]  In other words, it wasn't just some clown in a big canoe, island-hopping. The primordial Aussies had thus come originally not from Asia, their next door neighbor, but from Africa?

The geneticists were also saying that there had been no distinct races until after much of the world was settled!  Rather, the picture was a single population that had spread around the Old World before any permanently distinct racial or ethnic groups had been formed. The process of the formation of human races is one that happened after the founding of the population by multiple mothers.

Masatoshi Nei (of the University of Texas at Austin) has data indicating that "Negroids and the Caucasoid-Mongoloid group diverged from each other 110,000 years ago, whereas Caucasoid and Mongoloid groups didn't separate from each other until about 40,000 years ago. Cavalli-Sforza, a linguistic, showed that "linguistic families shared a striking correspondence with genetic clusters -- in effect, languages evolved along with genes." Wow!  Even further out on the limb, a psychologist from Ontario, Phillippe Ruston, "reported that if races had begun to diverge 110,000 years ago, with blacks emerging first, this indicated, along with other ordered differences among the races that he had noted, that blacks were the least intelligent of the races and had the highest sex drive. Whites, who he said emerged second, had more intelligence but less of a sex drive, while Orientals were of the highest intelligence and concomitantly the lowest sex drive." This actually correlates on the intelligence issue with The Bell Curve book, and the flap it caused in 1994. It may also be garbage.

Critical to Berkeley's claim of Eve living c. 200,000 (or within the range from 142,500 to 290,000) years ago is the RATE of the molecular clock. Berkeley (Becky, et al) assumed a constant  2 to 4 percent rate of mutation. Brown had, on the other hand, assumed 1 to 2 percent per million years (implying a set of revised dates of 285,000 to 570,000). The key is that the slower the rate, the further back in time was any "Eve." Masatoshi Nei came up with 1.4%, i.e. 400,000 years ago. Two others at the University of Texas claimed that "The molecular clock runs more slowly in man than in apes and monkeys. There is no case in which the human lineage has evolved faster. This is true for both nuclear and mitochondrial sequences. When all the nuclear sequences are considered together, the rates in the orangutan, gorilla and chimpanzee lineages are, respectively, 1.3, 1.9 and 1.6 times faster than the rate of human lineage." This comparison may be very important.

African apes and humans, for example, are genetically closer to one another than to other primates. We can think of primate evolution beginning with ratlike, insect-eating little mammals that had begun clinging to trees (picture the tree shrew); then transforming into something like a bushbaby or lemur, with eyes moving to the front of the head, a pre-monkey or "prosimian"; then, from the rootstock, a whole cacophony of monkeys in South America (the "New World"), along with Europe, Asia, and Africa (the "Old World") once the continents floated apart. As evolution supposedly proceeded, there had been another major split, this time between monkeys and creatures developing into the large, tail-less, semi-erect apes. After millions more years there was yet another branching off that went in three directions: one toward the chimpanzee, one toward the chest-thumping gorilla, and another toward hominid man-apes and finally the furless erectus and Homo sapiens sapiens, who were all but nude.

With this in mind, we then can denote the genetic similarity of humans and other species. If a human is 100% human, for example, the chimp is 96-99%, Old World monkey (baboon) 70-75%, a New World monkey (spider monkey) 60%, a lemur 35-40%, a dog 25%, and a kangaroo 10%. Man, chimp and gorilla are as close to each other as zebra and horse!  A pig is closer to a whale than a horse, a pigeon or penguin is closer to a turtle than a turtle to a snake, man is closer to mice than rabbits, and while the giant panda was a bear, the lesser panda was more of a raccoon.

There was also the question of the regular beat of the mitochondrial clock. Most scientists thought it was pretty regular, but there was no guarantee of that, especially over the millennia. One detractor of the Berkeley group, a professor Wolpoff, for example, figured that any mutation in mtDNA that had an evolutionary impact would provoke the forces of natural selection to act upon that molecule in such a way as to muck up its use as a clock. Alternatively, perhaps some force of natural selection reset the clock, then allowed it to operate in a regular, consistent manner.

It's important to note that because we have Eve's mitochondrial genes doesn't mean we have more than an exquisitely small fraction of her nuclear genes. That is why she has been referred to, time and again as a "mitochondrial Eve" and not a real one. The mtDNA that survived down the centuries represented more a "Lucky Mom" -- if only one mom it was -- than Adam's fairest. "While it was suggested that a group of women with identical mitochondrial DNA types -- and not a single ancestor -- may be the source of genetic diversity in modern humans, Stoneking and Cann argued back in their Cambridge paper that "this hypothetical group of women must be descended from a single common ancestor in a preceding generation. It is not biologically feasible to have multiple lines of descent without a common ancestor."

c. 140,000 B.C.E.  Eve's offspring begin arriving in the Middle East and Asia, as evidenced by the divergences in mtDNA which indicate a partitioning of lineages.

c. 125,000 B.C.E.  Eve's offspring's distant cousins, the Neanderthals, begin appearing on the European scene. (Call this period the Eurocene.)  The Neanderthals had developed over the course of some fifty millennia, and then had kept essentially the same form for the next 35,000 years. Then overnight, geologically speaking, something drastic happened. The traditional view is that roughly 40,000 years ago, they evolved into a new subspecies, Cro-Magnon Man.

It is now believed that the Neanderthals, quite suddenly and mysteriously, disappeared (leaving only pockets that survived for a few thousand additional years). The Neanderthals had managed to survive in Europe and the Middle East for about 2,850 generations, making it through glacial weather, fending off woolly mammoth, life insurance salesmen, and other deadly creatures. And then all of sudden: curtains. Suddenly, the air was filled with the sound of music, i.e.,  "The Party's Over." In their place were the Cro-Magnon men decorating caves in the south of France, and who, unlike the Neanderthals, were anatomically modern.

Again, there were no signs of violence, no wars between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, no Super Bowl between the Sapiens Sapsuckers and the Neanderthal Neanderthals. Instead, it was a matter of outcompetition taking a mere 5,000 years to accomplish. The Neanderthals left no genetic input, even though it is clear that they and modern man both descended from erectus-like archaics. [Actually, there is some evidence of Neanderthal traits existing in modern man, particularly in the thinking of many Republicans.] 

Neanderthals disappeared during the last period of Ice Age coldness. Most of these late Neanderthals were associated with the Mousterian culture of the Middle Paleolithic (which was still part of the Old Stone Age, where technology was measured on the basis of flakes and the crudest of tools). But some may have slipped into the Upper Paleolithic (perhaps from watching Cro-Magnons wield their blade tools). Some may even have developed rituals and a spiritual awareness far more definite than the dubious hints of ocher decoration in the archaics who had come before.

Then between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, there was a marked increase in the complexity of sociocultural systems. There was, admittedly, the possibility of hybridization between Neanderthals and Moderns on the order of 35,700 to 36,900 years ago, but it's only a possibility; while in Crete, there are archaic traits dated to more than 50,000 years ago.

The Cro-Magnon apparently had all the cards when it came to outcompeting the Neanderthals. For one, they had technology, which meant for the most part, better ways of cutting up meat and game (the latest stage of this evolutionary trait is the Cuisinart). The initial technology was found in South Africa, dating to 75,000 years ago. The Neanderthals were living in the Middle Paleolithic, using flakes and certain types of prepared cores, while the Cro-Magnons living in the Upper Paleolithic were basing their hopes on a blade technology and a whole range of blade tools, as well as bone/antler tools, even ivory. They may even have been carving turkeys on Thanksgiving Day, and finding ways to prepare and eat cranberries.

One scientist, Desmond Clark, has noted that: "A whole new technology arises between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago." (Verrrry interesting.)  In the Negev [southern Israel] you have true Upper Paleolithic technology -- you can see it emerging out of the Middle Paleolithic technology around about 45,000 or more years ago -- just before Europe." Other precursors which suddenly appeared in Europe around the time of the Neanderthal disappearance were found in Sri Lanka and then to Israel, dated to about 40,000 years ago.

A second advantage of Cro-Magnon Man over the Neanderthal was that the Cro-Magnons had longer arms than Neanderthals. (This may also mean they came from a warmer climate -- i.e., in cold climates, short arms conserve heat.)  At the same time Cro-Magnon Man made warmer clothes, built better hearths, and had better locomotor efficiency. What this all amounts to is that the moderns had style. Style and grace.

They were also pregnant for a shorter period (not the 11 or 12 months for Neanderthals) -- and thus the more modern women were not as thoroughly fed up with being pregnant in those extra months!  This latter fact is probably the single greatest advantage of the moderns over the Neanderthals. Small wonder that the Neanderthals faded from the scene. 12 months pregnancies!!!!?  Argggg!

c. 115,000 B.C.E.  The last resting place, in a place called la grotte de Qafzeh (kaf-sa) (mountain of the jump) in Israel, of the oldest anatomically modern population known to the world.

c. 110,000 B.C.E.  First indication that the Caucasian/Mongoloid races had split from the Negroid race. This suggests not only a prior movement out of Africa, but some sort of fundamental difference in the respective environments of what now constituted two branches of Homo sapiens sapiens.

c. 95,000 to 60,000 B.C.E.  The Wurm glaciation.

c. 40,000 B.C.E.  Official unveiling of the Cro-Magnon gene pool. The new model comes with genetic advantages that allows one to wear improved upholstery, pass every other evolving species on the evolutionary road without even having to shift into passing gear, and curse out every driver that gets in your way. So good were these genes that modern man was being allowed to expand at a previously unseen rate, migrating on a grand scale, or simply settling down to create nations and races (and thus dramatic conflict between the nations and races).

It was a time for Caucasians and Mongoloids to go their separate ways (the possible major difference being the fact that Caucasians may have invented dark glasses and thus were no longer forced to squint). Man was now being allowed to differentiate (find differences between him and others of the same, fairly uniform species), and begin calling himself by reference to his locale -- as if where you're from makes a great deal of difference. Obviously, it doesn't (unless you're from Texas -- an indication of automatic superiority). At the same time, Indians from North, Central and South America carried with them a number of rare Asian DNA types, but also had some unique polymorphisms found only in Amerindians.

c. 30,000 B.C.E.  As Indians were settling the Americas, iron pyrite was showing up in Belgium, clay pots in Japan, Stone Age humans developing permanent communities even before the advent of agriculture, and Cro-Magnons adding last flourishes to the cave art in Europe. Even art!  Home sapiens sapiens artis!

c. 29,999 B.C.E.  First evidence of the appearance of the deadly and degenerative species known as Homo neanderthalensis artis crticalis. DNA from this sub-sub-sub-species still crops up in the most modern of humans even today.

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We've now arrived to within striking distance of history. Man and woman, Homo sapiens sapiens, and Eve's offspring are now ready to start making waves (for better or worse). But before we can go on, there are a dozen questions that need to be answered. In fact, twelve of them (there's that number again!). These are puzzlements that summarize the state of the art of all the scientific achievements relevant to the earliest times of the Earth and the life forms it has fostered (particularly in the form of human beings).

1.        E.g., how did the Sumerians know so much about the cosmology and make-up of our solar system?  Did someone tell them?  Did they have a cheat sheet?

2.        Why, and how, did the "intruder planet" impart the "seed of life" to the primordial Earth after its split with Tiamat?  Was Nibiru guilt-ridden for the way he treated the Lady who bore them all?  Was there (and does there continue to be) some nefarious scheme of Nibiru in sewing his wild oats on Earth?  Was Crick correct in his Directed Panspermia theory?  If so... Who dunnit it?

3.         The mtDNA's ability to convert and utilize energy within the cell is incredibly important to life as we know it. But why is the mutation rate for humans so low, as compared to other species?  Is there some sort of Divine Intervention in our mtDNA?  Are we, like those in Genesis 6: 2, "the sons of God"?

4.         Why would Eve's offspring be able, as so many paleoanthropologists / geneticists have phrased it, to "outlive" Homo erectus?  How does the first of the Homo sapiens sapiens line suddenly develop longevity (and apparently, seniority and tenure)?  Just what happened 250,000 years ago that jump-started the Homo species?

5.         Why did the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon Man evolve so quickly?  Were they trying to hide their identity, deny their ancestry?  What were they running out of Africa from, and why in such a hurry?

6.         Why was there no intermixing of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals; no half breeds or Croanderthals?  And why did the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal shun their immediate predecessor, Homo erectus, from whom they allegedly inherited the family farm and all of their genes (mitochondrial as well as nucleic)?  This zero intermixing is amazing!  No hanky-panky, no slumming, no simple sexual curiosity, nothing!?

7.         Developing an ability to speak is a profound evolutionary event. What happened some 200,000 years ago to Homo erectus to cause speech?  Was it a necessary in order to evolve the earliest form of bridge clubs?

8.         Why would Eve's offspring have initially stayed in Africa, and then made the trek to the Middle East, and thereafter to the rest of the world?  Did it take a few hundred generations for them to hone their conquering skills?  Were they unaware of the Cannes Film Festival for lo those many generations?

9.       Becky Cann said that the founding of Australia was done by Eve's offspring, people who knew "exactly where they were going and had gone there time and time again." (see above)  How could the archaic Homo sapiens sapiens, even with radically evolved tools, an ability to speak, and the other superiorities... know about Australia and "exactly where they were going"?  Did they have maps?  Does Rand-McNally go back that far?  Was one of Eve's brood a travel agent?

10.       If, as advocated by one University of Texas expert (see above), Negroids and Caucasians/Mongoloids diverged 110,000 years ago, and Caucasians diverged from Mongoloids 40,000 years ago, this would support an African genesis, followed by a move out of Africa, and then a later split. Are these dates relevant?  Is intelligence and sex drive inversely related?  Do dumb people have better sex?

11.       Why did the Neanderthals fall by the wayside with so little fanfare around 40,000 B.C.E., and so quickly, taking only 5,000 years to vanish from the scene?  After such an auspicious beginning as a radically advanced species from Homo erectus, what did they find lacking?  What distinguished them to the point that they and Cro-Magnon Man (who lived virtually side-by-side) never mixed?  There were no wars, no Super Bowls between them. So why such a division?  Was this the first and most extreme example of Sibling Rivalry?  Exactly what happened 40,000 to 35,000 years ago?

12.        And looking ahead, where does Sarah, Abraham's wife and half-sister, get off denying Ishmael, Abraham's first son, his birthright?  What's this half-sister rule and where does it come from. Is incest really best?

These and other questions will, incredible as it may seem, actually be answered in the next Episode! (Just not necessarily correctly.)

Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of referencing  Sumerian and Biblical sources such as  Genesis, all the questions concerning the evolvement of man will become clear. (At least, in theory.) This doesn't mean we won't generate more questions in the process, but at least some of the current puzzlements will mitigate as the pieces of the puzzle finally come together. Stay tuned!