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Mitochondrial Haplogroup L7a
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Distribution
Found in Ethiopia, Sudan, Nubia, Egypt, Arabia
DNA haplogroups are the basis of how deep ancestry is traced and a knowledge of how old they are and where they originated is relatively recent.
In the 1980s a New Zealander of Scots extraction, Allan Wilson (right) was working on what he called the molecular clock. This was postulated as a means of dating the evolution of Homo sapiens, modern human beings, by looking at how DNA changed over time. Wilson and his team noticed that mitochondrial DNA, what women pass on to their children, mutated more readily and more regularly than the rest of our DNA. This made it easier to plot changes in mtDNA over relatively short periods of time, and not the millions of years of evolution conventionally envisaged.
This research led to a bombshell. Allan Wilson announced the existence of the woman he called Mitochondrial Eve, the mother ancestor of all of us. Using the molecular clock, he believed that it was possible to estimate the time and place where modern humans first evolved. About 150,000 years ago, Wilson asserted, all of us, from Apaches to Aboriginal Australians, from Scots to Zulus, descended from one woman who lived in East-Central Africa. The announcement of the findings caused a sensation and a very attractive, black Mitochondrial Eve found herself on the cover of Newsweek Magazine.
In Europe it was thought that humans descended from Neanderthals, in China from Peking Man and in Indonesia from Java Man. But the new research insisted that we all have African ancestors, and a great deal of more recent work has supported Wilson’s revolutionary view, although it has now been recognised that a small proportion of the DNA of non-Africans descends from these archaic humans.
Mitochondrial Eve is now thought to have lived approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa, the area centred on modern Tanzania (although it must be added that evidence exists for a South African location for this prehistoric Garden of Eden since the lineages of the Kalahari Bushmen and others are very ancient and very diverse). Fossil evidence confirmed the earliest appearance of modern humans, people who looked like us, at this time and as its techniques have developed, readings of DNA samples began to convert a theory into a fact. Researchers now believe that a man who might be called Y Chromosome Adam also lived in Africa but not at the same time as Eve in a real version of the Garden. The ancestor of all men, traceable back through a Y chromosome line, is thought to have lived some time around 200,000BC. Theirs are the only lineages that survive in the male and female lines, while others have died out. But it is, sadly, clear that Adam and Eve never knew each other...The newly discovered mitochondrial haplogroup, L7a, goes back over 100,000 years, & is the oldest, & so far discovered haplogroup..