🧬 05 — TWO CHAINS, ONE CONTINENT
Two people who never met. Same continent. Every family tree on Earth runs through both of them.
Every mitochondrial genome alive today is one unbroken mother-to-child chain that passes through a single woman in East Africa. Every Y chromosome is one unbroken father-to-son chain through a single man, elsewhere on the same continent, tens of thousands of years apart. Press play, or drag the timeline — then click any node to open the bottleneck behind it.
155,000 years ago — 0 lineages revealed
The strip below is a flattened globe. Each arc is a migration wave: the pulse travels from the East African origin to the region a lineage reached.
Click a node — or pick a lineage from the list — to read what happened at that branch: who carried it, who lost it, and why the diversity behind it changed.
Haplogroup ages are the published ranges, not single facts: the Y-chromosome root has been estimated anywhere from ~120,000 to ~580,000 years as data improved. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam were not a couple, were not the only people alive, and almost certainly lived tens of thousands of years apart. Node placement uses one midpoint from each range purely to draw the graph. Sources: Behar et al. 2008; Soares et al. 2009 & 2012; Karmin et al. 2015; Poznik et al. 2013; Mendez et al. 2013 (A00); Underhill & Kivisild 2007; Ramachandran et al. 2005.
