9 Extraordinary Superpowers That Literally Everybody Has
6. What Doesnt Kill You Has Made You Stronger
There are these things in your eukaryote cells called mitochondria that are incredibly important for cellular respiration and energy production. They're little string-like structures that are basically the little powerhouses of each cell. The thing is, they don't really belong there. Mitochondria have a completely different genome to the rest of you, which has lead scientists to believe that they were actually once a type of bacteria that formed an ancient symbiotic relationship with our cells early on in the evolution of life. After some time, the bacteria were assimilated into the cels themselves and became an essential part of their structure. It is thought that your mitochondria began life as archaea, a single celled organism without a nucleus that is nearly, but not quite, a type of bacteria. Once they got into our systems, (and when I say "our" I mean some dim distant creature in our evolutionary past), they turned out to be pretty useful, so we grabbed 'em and never let go. The DNA in mitochondria can be used to trace the evolutionary history of humans, allowing scientists to trace the origin of every single human on Earth back to a single common ancestor, known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived as recently as 100,000-200,000 years ago. Not bad for a freeloader.
