such as Taiwan or Japan that is more intermediate to Australia and the Americas. European colonization of the Americas and Australia was found by Chang to be too recent to have had a substantial impact on the age of the MRCA. In fact, if the Americas and Australia had never been discovered by Europeans, the MRCA would only be about 2.3% further back in the past than it is. Note that the age of the MRCA of a population does not correspond to a population bottleneck, let alone a "first couple". It rather reflects the presence of a single individual with high reproductive success in the past, whose genetic contribution has become pervasive throughout the population over time. It is also incorrect to assume that the MRCA passed all, or indeed any, genetic information to every living person. Through sexual reproduction, an ancestor passes half of his or her genes to each descendant in the next generation; in the absence of pedigree collapse, after just 32 generations the contribution of a single ancestor would be on the order of 2−32, a number proportional to less than a single basepair within the human genome. Identical ancestors point The MRCA is the most recent common ancestor shared by all individuals in the population under consideration. This MRCA may well have contemporaries who are also ancestral to some but not all of the extant population. The identical ancestors point is a point in the past more remote than the MRCA at which time there are no longer organisms which are ancestral to some but not all of the modern population. Due to pedigree collapse, modern individuals may still exhibit clustering, due to vastly different contributions from each of ancestral population. See also Cladistics Common descent Coalescent theory, a retrospective model of population genetics Genealogy, the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history Genetic distance, the genetic divergence between species or between populations within a species Lowest common ancestor, an analogous concept in graph theory and computer science Phylogenetic tree, a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species Timeline of evolution, outlines the major events in the development of life on the planet Earth Timeline of human evolution, outlines the major events in the development of the human species Last universal common ancestor, the most recent common ancestor of all life Notes References Further