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~Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA)~
By: Justin Tobias
The most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is the one male and/or female that is the ancestor of all humans alive today. This would mean that everyone is really blood-related to each other and family. Although this may seem unbelievable, it is a real fact that has been proven by scientists and been known since about the early 20th century. The MRCA, however, does not instantaneously prove that Adam and Eve, the first humans according to the Hebrew/Christian Bible, ever existed, it does serve as potential proof and evidence for their existence. The MRCA is important to everyone one because he/she is the person/people that everyone descends from, connecting us as a family and giving us a chance to learn more about ourselves as members of the human race. It may also be a good way to end, or at least slow,trivial things, such as, racism, hate crimes, murder, and stereotypes, although it is not guaranteed to change anything and probably will not change the minds of those who are deeply into their hateful ways. An equivalent term for the most recent common ancestor would be concestor, which was dubbed by the well-known biologist, Richard Dawkins.
The reason I choose this topic is because ever since I was young, others who knew me personally have always considered me as a very loving and caring person. For this reason, I have always wanted peace in the world. This in turn made me want to find ways to end all the violence and wars that I came up to learn about while in school. So as I was growing up, I saw first-hand all the potential causes of the violence and wars, and I noticed that it was nearly always caused by people hating each other for the most trivial things, such as being of different ethnicities/nationalities/tribes/etc., being apart of different religions, being of different sexual orientations, speaking different languages, having different skin colors, basically just being different and looking physically different from others. I noticed this pattern and isolated the problem, in order to come up with a valid solution. Though as the years went by, I could not find a definite answer, as most, if not all humans, are hard headed and will not listen to rational reasoning. So I had to think of another way that would prove to be very effective, so I realized that I would have to put the values of humans into the equation.
Humans value many things in their lives, but the most highly valued to many is family. Family, to different people, can mean a handful of different things, i.e. people that one is "blood-related" to, one's close, loyal, and highly trustworthy friends, one's pets/animal companions, and to a lesser extent the people of the same ethnicity/nationality/tribe/etc. as the person. Seeing that this was such an important value in human lives, I decided that I could use this to my advantage. So knowing that most humans greatly value their "family", whatever their family may be to them, I realized that I had to find a way where I could show them that the entire human race is or is like a family, which would hopefully force people, whose values are highly about "family", into treating each other with love, respect, and kindness, similar to the way they would treat members of their own "family", though this way they would do this to a much bigger family. So, as my journey continued I tried to come up with simple solutions with evidential proof, but to my avail the only thing I could use was the story of Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and his three sons, and the Tower of Babel, while they were great sources they, however, would not be fully acceptable in today's society, seeing that it is more based on religious proof rather than scientific proof. Although there currently is some sort of evidence to support the validity of the Noah and Babel stories, they cannot fully be proven to be true at this moment.
Before I started researching about the MRCA, I did not know that there was a specific term for it; I did not even know that the MRCA even existed, I actually stumbled upon it while I was looking up information regarding Adam and Eve on Wikipedia, where there was a link to "Most Recent Common Ancestor", I thought that it sounded very interesting, so I decided to check out what it was a little more. Among other things, I also did not know about the study of genealogy, which of course the MRCA is apart of, or how you tell what type of relation someone is to you.
My journey in researching about the MRCA was quite fun and interesting to say the least, and it was and still is more interesting than people would probably give it credit for, because while researching this, a person can find out a lot about themselves, this is because they are looking into the past, in the form of their ancestors, and they may even be lucky enough to find out how closely related someone is to them, whether it be their best friend, spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, a historical figure, even a famous celebrity or all of the above.
The first step I took in my journey to find out more about the MRCA was that I first had to get a preview of the idea, so I read a quick overview from a Wikipedia article on the MRCA just to get a feel of what it was. After learning a good amount of information, I had to understand what everything meant, such as vocabulary that is not regularly used in the common vocabulary of Americans. The vocabulary used in the Wikipedia article was more scientific, specifically from the science of genealogy and anthropology. So to learn what those words were, I had to research every word until I had a good enough understanding of each to be able to understand what they meant when they were spoken of in the MRCA article. After finally understanding what certain words meant, I was at last ready to go on to the next step. The next step was to search for other articles that were more detailed with more information. So, I first checked some links on Wikipedia that were used as sources for the Wikipedia article, then I searched for "most recent common ancestor" in two search engines on the Internet, Yahoo! and Google, and found some sites that were very useful for my research. I printed copies of the articles that were the most useful to me and then I took notes on them, only writing down what was necessary.
From the whole experience of the research, I learned many things about the MRCA. By learning these things I was now able to at least give a brief description of the topic to others, giving them a good understanding of the topic, enough to understand the basics.
While the time period in which the MRCA lived in is currently unknown for sure, some statisticians have come up with a few time approximants. There is a very simple equation that one can use to show how many ancestors they had any number of generations ago, and can even help show how the MRCA came to be. Every human will all have two parents each, a mother and a father, and their parents will also have two parents each, giving them four grandparents, then their grandparents also will have two parents each, giving that person a total of eight great-grandparents, so then it can be said that a person has twice the amount of ancestors each generation. According to Rich Holmes, you would then be able to make a simple mathematical equation like this: n generations = 2ⁿ ancestors (i.e. 30 generations = 2³º [1,073,741,824] ancestors). To use this equation is very simple; you must first plug in the number (n) of the generations you want to go back. Joseph T. Chang, a professor in the Department of Statistics at Yale University, has used this equation and has given his estimated time of the MRCA to be less than 1,000years ago. "While we may not all be 'brothers,' the models suggest we are all hundredth cousins or so," said Chang. Also, the more further back a person goes into the past, the more it will be likely to find a common ancestor with anyone in the world, this is because when you look at your ancestors, the further back in time you go, the more ancestor you will have, however at the same time, the further you go back, the population of humans decreases. "Science writer Guy Murchie explains,"no human can be less closely related to any other human than approximately fiftieth cousin, and most of us are a lot closer. The main point about our universal interrelatedness is not that we are all descended from some common ancestors. Rather it is that each of us contains genetic contributions from practically everybody who ever lived. A single indirect genetic contact between Africa and Asia in a thousand years can make every African closer than fiftieth cousin to every Chinese. This can occur simply in consequence of the wanderings of nomads in intermediate territory," according to what was taken from 'The Mountain of Names' by Alex Shoumatoff in 1985.
We know that two siblings are closely related to each other; however, their descendants in about a few thousand years time will most likely be more distantly related to each other, even though they share consanguinity. This is what has happened already in the world, thousands of years ago everyone's ancestors were all at one point closely related to each other, either being as close as siblings or first to fifth cousins, but as time went on their children or descendants over time split and separated, for many different possible reasons, such as overpopulation, disagreements between themselves, and various other reasons.
The area of which the MRCA lived at is not known for certain, however, researchers have suggested that the MRCA lived in eastern Asia around1,500 BC. From there, his/her descendants migrated to all the regions of the world, thus making the many different peoples of the world today. "No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu," according to Douglas Rohde, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues' paper on the MRCA.
There are some historical figures that may be possible ancestors or will most likely be the ancestors of most of the people in the world today, and they are Charlemagne (742/747AD-January 28, 814 AD), Mohammed (ca. 570 AD-Monday, June 8, 632 AD), and Confucius (September 28, 551 BC-479 BC). Charlemagne is said to be the ancestor of everyone in Europe, while Mohammed is said to be more likely the ancestor of all Jews, Muslims, and Arabs. The reason why these figures are said to be the ancestors of all humans today is because they had many children, and the more children a person had back then, the more like they would be the most recent common ancestor(s) of the entire human race.
In the not too distant future, about a couple of thousands of years, there will be a new common ancestor to all the humans currently living then, and by that time, there will also be one surname that everyone will have because all other surname and heredity titles will die out, thus further proving how recent a common ancestor of humans can be, according to http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.genetic.h<wbr>tml.
To conclude my essay, I thought that learning more about the Most Recent Common Ancestor of all Humans alive today was quite interesting and enjoyable. I also believe that more people, if not the entire world, should learn about this important figure in the history of our race. |
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