I am in facepalm mode over a science story today, which was prompted by two papers published in Science, the press release claim itself is erroneous (as some bloggers have pointed out) but even more so the popular reporting is, and I know this is not unique, just plain bad.

Bloomberg:

Adam Roamed With Eve as Male Ancestor Older Than Presumed

“Adam,” humankind’s most-common male ancestor, is from an older era than once thought, living about the same time as genetic “Eve,” a study found.

Using the complete strand of DNA that determines male sex, researchers have determined that Y Chromosome Adam lived 120,000 to 156,000 years ago, overlapping with Mitochondrial Eve, who probably lived 99,000 to 148,000 years ago, according to a paper published today in the journal Science. Researchers previously thought Adam lived 50,000 to 150,000 years ago.

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One of the most stupid and backward steps in science communication was using the names “Adam” and “Eve” for the most recent common male ancestor FOR THE Y CHROMOSOME for all humans and the most recent common female ancestor FOR THE MITOCHONDRIA for all humans.

Down buried in the article is this:

Despite the Adam and Eve nicknames, the two most likely didn’t coexist, Bustamante said. There were other people around when Adam and Eve were alive; these two were simply the most successful at producing surviving offspring.

Even that is misleading, as stating they were the “most successful at producing” is misleading because “most successful” doesn’t mean what most people will think it means, and the individual involved wasn’t actually responsible for the passing on of genes hundreds of generations downstream.

This story has sprung from this paper:

Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males Versus Females

The Y chromosome and the mitochondrial genome have been used to estimate when the common patrilineal and matrilineal ancestors of humans lived. We sequenced the genomes of 69 males from nine populations, including two in which we find basal branches of the Y-chromosome tree. We identify ancient phylogenetic structure within African haplogroups and resolve a long-standing ambiguity deep within the tree. Applying equivalent methodologies to the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial genome, we estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of the Y chromosome to be 120 to 156 thousand years and the mitochondrial genome TMRCA to be 99 to 148 thousand years. Our findings suggest that, contrary to previous claims, male lineages do not coalesce significantly more recently than female lineages.

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