One woman is the ancestress of all living people. They call her Eve. Is she the Eve of the Bible? How long ago did she live? Join Dr Carter as he explains how scientists struggle to assign a date to Eve. It may come as a surprise, but the ‘date’ is based on questionable assumptions and debatable philosophy. All we can know is that the mutation rate is quite high and the mutation removal rate is quite low. Thus, science tells us that Eve lived not many thousands of years ago.

Note and links:

• Carter, 2025, When did Eve live? creation.com, 18 Sep 2025.
• Carter, 2025, The continuing saga of Mitochondrial Eve, bibicalgenetics.com.
• Stern-Cardinale, 2025, I BLUNDERED! A Response to Dr. Rob Carter (he agrees with me), youtube.com.
• Cann et al., 1987, Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution, Nature 325:31–36. [I accidentally said “1981”]
• Carter, 2007, Mitochondrial diversity within the modern human population, Nucleic Acids Res 35(9):3039–45.
• Carter et al., 2008, The “Eve” mitochondrial consensus sequence, Proc 6th ICC, pp. 111–116.
• Bandelt et al., 2014, The case for the continuing use of the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence (rCRS) and the standardization of notation in human mitochondrial DNA studies, J Hum Genet 59(2):66–77.
• Gibbons, 1998, Calibrating the mitochondrial clock, Science 279(5347):28–29.
• Wieland, 1998, A shrinking date for Eve, J Creation 12(1):1–3.
• Árnadóttir et al., 2014, The rate and nature of mitochondrial DNA mutations in human pedigrees, Cell 187(15):3904-3918.e8.
• Carter, 2019, Patriarchal drive in the early post-Flood population, J Creation 33(1):110–118.
• Carter, R., Genealogical vs phylogenetic mutation rates: answering a challenge, 9th ICC:68–180.
• More references can be found in the original article on creation.com.