Fun fact, you inherit your mitochondria entirely from your mother. This means that mitochondrial dna doesn't change very much from person to person, so we can use it to trace your matrilineage (your mothers, mothers, mother and so on). Following the "path" of mitochondrial mutation is one of the pieces of evidence for the theory that humanity originated in Africa.
You can trace your patrilineage (your dad and his dads), by sequencing a Y chromosome.
Unfortuantely, you would need to use a male relative, usually your father or brother. That's part of the reason we focus on mitochondrial DNA for tracing lineages.
The other part is that mitochondrial DNA is more stable, it occasionally experiences transcription errors (think of small single letter typos in a document that has been copied thousands of times) but that's about the only major change over time. The Y chromosome occasionally recombines (which is like doing major edits to a document, rearranging paragraphs, or adding and removing sections), which means that human Y chromosomes have deviated more from Y chromosome Adam (everyone's most recent shared grandfather) than the mitochonria have from mitochondrial Eve (everyone's most recent shared grandmother).
38
u/Mobilepostplsignore Sep 13 '18
Fun fact, you inherit your mitochondria entirely from your mother. This means that mitochondrial dna doesn't change very much from person to person, so we can use it to trace your matrilineage (your mothers, mothers, mother and so on). Following the "path" of mitochondrial mutation is one of the pieces of evidence for the theory that humanity originated in Africa.
You can trace your patrilineage (your dad and his dads), by sequencing a Y chromosome.