Genetics and geography

The continuing debate among geneticists about using analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to investigate human origins has demonstrated that statistically reliable techniques for deducing genealogies are imperative. In 1987 researcher Allan Wilson and colleagues announced that mtDNA variation indicated that humanity's ancestor was probably an African woman who lived about 200,000 years ago. Wilson's group reached this conclusion by choosing the genealogical tree with the fewest changes as the parsimony criterion requires. However, other researchers dispute this result.