did you see the hilarious bad genetics story in the maily telegraph?

In genetics, "Mitochondrial Eve" is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of living humans. She's not the "first" or "oldest" female. Obviously she had ancestors and contemporaries. And her contemporaries had descendants, and her contemporaries are ancestors of living humans. But none of them left an unbroken female line to the present day. Trace all female lines back and they converge at Mitochondrial Eve. Hence the name: mitochondria are bits of our cells that we only inherit from the mother.

Therefore, bearing in mind the fact that by definition everybody alive today is a descendent of Mitochondrial Eve, look at this hilarious story in the Maily Telegraph. Just look at it.

"A retired lecturer who took a DNA test to find out where his ancestors came from has been found to be directly descended from the first woman on earth, who lived 190,000 years ago."

The actual story, though I wouldn't expect many readers to be able to work it out from the gibberish in the Telegraph, isn't really about "mitochrondrial eve", but it is about the branching female lines of her descendants and their spread and migration around the world. The story seems to be (if I've deciphered it correctly, and it's so bad that I'm not sure that I have) that the mitochondria in the cells of this one retired lecturer from the north of Scotland are just like the mitochondria commonly found in folk from a part of Africa rather than like those that are usually found in Scottish Highlanders or their neighbours around Europe. The most obvious explanation for that would, I'm guessing, be that one of this Scottish chap's female ancestors not so many generations ago was a black African.

Apparently mixed race families are news in the Telegraph.