Can all people be genetically traced back to one woman ancestor, as the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ hypothesis claims? How

Question: Can all people be genetically traced back to one woman ancestor, as the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ hypothesis claims? How about tracing all people back to one common male ancestor?
- Keywords:
  claims,
  eve,
  female,
  hypothesis,
  male,
  mitochondria,
  past,
  tracing,
  woman
Asked by hannaah to Amelia on 22 Jun 2011.
- Amelia Markey answered on 22 Jun 2011:
  
  Hopefully the other question I answered for you about genealogical DNA testing will answer part of this.
  
  This can get a bit complicated because it depends on the model of the evolution of humans that you look at.
  
  Some people believe there was one event when a human (homo sapiens) evolved, this is usually called the “out of Africa model”…so we would all have a common ancestor. However there is another model (“multi-regional”) that suggests several evolutionary events like this happened all over the world so there would be several common ancestors depending on which part of the world your lineage traces back to.
  
  Here’s another wiki link is you want to learn more:
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Out_of_Africa

Question: Can all people be genetically traced back to one woman ancestor, as the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ hypothesis claims? How about tracing all people back to one common male ancestor?