Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

The Seven Daughters of Eve
by Bryan Sykes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)
"Every person alive in Europe today is related by an unbroken maternal link to one of only seven original female settlers who once populated and later farmed the great plains of ice-age Europe.

That is the extraordinary claim made by Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and Fellow of Wolfson College, in this popular introduction to, and story of, human evolutionary genetics. The book is based around various researches over the last decade or so as Sykes was called in to investigate high-profile and often controversial cases, and as genetic data from extant humans were accumulated by techniques originally pioneered to extract DNA surviving in ancient bones.
The science behind these discoveries is fairly simple, relying on a few facts about “mitochondrial DNA” that have aided its use as an evolutionary tool. Only five millionths of our DNA is mitochondrial (so called because of its residence in small sub-cellular organs called mitochondria), and since it lies outside the cell nucleus, it is not passed on by sperm into the egg at fertilisation. Thus, mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother. This is a boon from the evolutionary geneticist’s point of view: there is no mixing or “dilution” of the DNA during reproduction. This DNA is therefore an unaltered sequence of “bases” passed only along maternal lines and changing only by accident and mutation. Because the specific section of DNA used for this research does not actually do much of use in the cell, it can happily mutate without dire consequences for the organism. So, away it mutates, with about one base mutating (swapping with one of the other three kinds of base) in every 10,000 years. Regular DNA of a similar length would mutate only every quarter of a million years – distinctly pedestrian by comparison."
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf1096/me/seve ... review.htm

I had an uncle who was offered a job as a cantor at a shul in Maryland. He had to prove his mother was a Jewish. Don’t matter who his daddy was, he had to have a Jewish mama. What did they know about mitochondrial DNA four thousand years ago?

Fascinating

I guess, thinking about the seven clans,grand children of Eve I suppose? what interests me about it all is the mitochondrial dna, how woman pass it down to their daughters, how conservative it is, and how mutant men are. Geneology is so interesting. And now we map the genome, and figure the statistics for our medical destiny, just rambling cause I was really thinking of the seven rocks off the coast of California, the seven sisters. I was close to sister Morro once. Saw it from both sides. Motoring up the coast to Ilwaco Washington. I never understand why knip writes nothing about the sea. but maybe I got stoned and missed it.