Everyone in the world can be placed on a single family tree, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, because everyone has inherited that piece of DNA from a single female, the mitochondrial Eve, who lived some 200,000 years ago. There were, of course, many other women in that ancient population, but over the generations one mitochondrial DNA replaced all the others through the process known as genetic drift. With the help of mutations that have built up on the one surviving copy, geneticists can arrange people in lineages and estimate the time of origin of each lineage.
With this approach, Dr. Macaulay's team calculates that the emigration from Africa took place about 65,000 years ago, pushed along the coastlines of India and Southeast Asia, and reached Australia by 50,000 years ago, the date of the earliest known archaeological site.
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