Eve ‘n’ Steve: recombination of human mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the established molecular tool for reconstructing evolutionary events. The power of mtDNA analyses derives from the apparent simplicity of its inheritance: maternal and without recombination. Recent indirect evidence for mtDNA recombination has challenged this paradigm, causing considerable (and sometimes acrimonious) debate among population geneticists. A new paper by Kraytsberg and colleagues appears to provide the first direct evidence of human mtDNA recombination. Population geneticists will now need to establish whether evolutionary inferences that ignore undetected recombination are robust.