>>20358356I don't mean half as large, I mean across different individuals maternal DNA has more variation. Y DNA has (?) half the lineages maternal DNA has, meaning humans have twice as many female ancestors as they do males, the only way to achieve that is to have multiple females bred by the same male.
Replace all mentions of "maternal DNA" with "mtDNA" btw.
It makes sense evolutionarily also because females are the reproductive bottleneck, a man can have hundreds of children in a single year whereas women can only give birth a little over once a year, trying to improve the genepool by selecting for women would reduce the population size of the next generation for every women left out, while men can be left out without necessarily making an impact on population size. Inbreeding wasn't a huge issue because related offspring would usually belong to the same tribe, even if only half related. A man had to take care of his females. Marriages were usually arranged between tribes and not within, hence the bride taking on a different tribename and such traditions.
