Human Migration

Question 1

How is mitochondrial inheritance used in population genetics?

Answer 1

Mitochondrial inheritance has been used to to study human evolution. Eg. by drawing mitochondrial DNAs from 147 people of 5 geographic populations, they found that they all stemmed from a woman that lived 200,000 years ago in Africa.

Question 2

In the last example how did they know that out of the 5 populations, the woman from africa was the origin?

Answer 2

4/5 populations had multiple origins African population had one origin. This implied that 4/5 populations were colonized repeatedly except African population.

Question 3

What does the human mitochondrial DNA contain? OR What is the human mitochondrial DNA made of?

Answer 3

Question 4

What are the 2 things you need to reconstruct a mitochondrial tree?

Answer 4

population splits and lineage specific mutations.

Question 5

Which alleles serve to provide better evolutionary information? sex restricted alleles or autosomal alleles?

Answer 5

we can classify humans based on autosomal allele frequencies to find where a person came from.

Question 6

Example of how they used autosomal alleles to find where a population of humans came from?

Answer 6

Europeans interbreeding with Neanderthals

and modern humans with Denisovans