It doesn't mean no one else from that era has living descendants, just that at some point in the intervening 150,000 years, there was a male in the line of descent and so their unique mitochondrial DNA was lost because you always get that from your mom.
Just to be all nitpicky, that sentence should read "there was ONLY a male in the line of descent." i.e. A woman in a certain lineage either only had sons, or her daughters didn't survive to have female offspring of their own and pass on her mtDNA.
HOWEVER, the tag at the end of show explains Mitochondrial Eve incorrectly anyway (saying she's simply our most recent common ancestor, rather than matrilineal common ancestor; our most recent common ancestor probably lived only a few thousand years ago). So LORDS ONLY KNOW what RDM meant it to imply. :/
Yeah, trying to figure out what RDM meant to put in a script as opposed to what the viewers actually saw is an exercise in deep frustration. Generally speaking, I go for the simplest explanation (mostly because even in its heyday, subtlety was never this show's strongest point). Also, given all the other stuff that's happened over the past few years on the show, where fans desperately tried to find an alternate explanation to the obvious one, only to find out from a podcast that the obvious (though very stupid) explanation was exactly what RDM had intended.
Where was I? Given RDM's track record, I'm assuming that either he didn't realise that agriculture was a very recent invention, or he figured the fans wouldn't check up on it and would take it at face value.
being long-winded here
It doesn't mean no one else from that era has living descendants, just that at some point in the intervening 150,000 years, there was a male in the line of descent and so their unique mitochondrial DNA was lost because you always get that from your mom.
Just to be all nitpicky, that sentence should read "there was ONLY a male in the line of descent." i.e. A woman in a certain lineage either only had sons, or her daughters didn't survive to have female offspring of their own and pass on her mtDNA.
HOWEVER, the tag at the end of show explains Mitochondrial Eve incorrectly anyway (saying she's simply our most recent common ancestor, rather than matrilineal common ancestor; our most recent common ancestor probably lived only a few thousand years ago). So LORDS ONLY KNOW what RDM meant it to imply. :/
Yeah, trying to figure out what RDM meant to put in a script as opposed to what the viewers actually saw is an exercise in deep frustration. Generally speaking, I go for the simplest explanation (mostly because even in its heyday, subtlety was never this show's strongest point). Also, given all the other stuff that's happened over the past few years on the show, where fans desperately tried to find an alternate explanation to the obvious one, only to find out from a podcast that the obvious (though very stupid) explanation was exactly what RDM had intended.
Where was I? Given RDM's track record, I'm assuming that either he didn't realise that agriculture was a very recent invention, or he figured the fans wouldn't check up on it and would take it at face value.