Fig. 4

We used the following schema to obtain estimates for the time distance between real-world sequences: We first extracted \(\vec {X}_{mtDNA}\) from Phylotree. Then, we determined the binary vector \(\vec {Z}\) that denotes the differences between the RSRS and the sequence in consideration. We removed from both \(\vec {X}_{mtDNA}\) and \(\vec {Z}\) the phylogeny transversion sites and sequences transversion sites as explained in Fig. 1. We applied our estimation methods using \(\vec {X}_{mtDNA}\) and \(\vec {Z}\) as input to get uncalibrated p and calibrated p as explained in Calibration section. Finally, the TMRCA of the examined sequence and humans is given by \(TMRCA = \frac{1}{2}(T_{RSRS}+T_{Sequence}+p_{calibrated})\)