After reading a few negative reviews, I was hesitant about this book and actually put it on the backburner until I ran out of books on my ereader and decided to pick it up again. I don't think the negative comments were warranted, the book gives exactly what it promises.

I'm a biology nerd, and I always liked teachers who told tales, which is exactly what the professor does. He starts off to recount how they got to the discovery that they did, and I really enjoyed all the science and the little adventures that happened. Basically, through tracing back the mitochondrial DNA, there's 7 "clans" in Europe who can be distinguished and traced back to a single mother. The book never claims there were only 7 women, but these were the 7 women who had daughters and have an unbroken line to modern day people - it's all explained inside how and why.

The last part of the book is a few-page fictional biography of each woman. While it's fictional, it aims to give form to and humanize the clan mothers so it's easier to relate to them, and also in each story's focus is a unique improvement or characteristic of the world. So while it's fictional, these stories are still great at educating people about what happened at that time these women lived, what were the features of that age. I admit it was hard to get into a more fictive storytelling after all the science, but it's possible to pick it up and actually enjoy it.

So yeah, can't say I'm not curious about my own DNA now and who might my ancient ancestors be, and the book gave me a lot to think about.

Wow! What a (true) story.

This book describes the author's research on mitochondrial DNA and maternal haplogroups. His big discovery was that the mutations in our cells' mitochondrial DNA show that all current humans can trace their ancestry back to one of a few specific women, whom he calls "clan mothers." We each get this mitochondrial DNA from our mother's egg cell, meaning that this aspect of our genetics comes entirely through our female ancestral line. A haplogroup is made up of everyone who shares the same "clan mother." Ironically, even though so many societies are patriarchal and we usually get our surnames from our father's side, our mitochondrial DNA does a better job at "remembering" our mother's side!

I thought this was a very interesting book, and it was pretty easy to read - there were just a few times where I felt it was getting a bit too bogged down into the scientific details to keep my attention. It actually feels like a memoir, because Sykes talks a lot about different places he visited, people whose DNA he sampled, and experiments he ran. However, his stories got perhaps a bit too personal - I especially didn't like how he made some vague insults towards a former colleague of his who, he claims, refused to share some DNA samples with him after she published a paper that disagreed with his research. (I was pleased to find that she had reviewed this book here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/erika-h... A choice quote: "Every hero’s story needs a villain, and that’s where I fit in.")

The book ends with fictionalized biographies of the "Seven Daughters of Eve" - the seven clan mothers of Europe. I actually read this part of this book first, because I had already taken the 23andme DNA test and I knew that I was part of the J haplogroup. Even though the real-life details could be very different - no one can say for sure what people's daily lives were like that far back - it was interesting to read Sykes's account of my ancestor "Jasmine" who may have lived about 10,000 years ago, around the time agriculture began, in what is now Syria.

I would like to see some updates to this story, considering the book is over 15 years old now. The Wikipedia article on maternal haplogroups debunks the "seven daughters" idea, saying that it is now believed that people of European descent come from perhaps 10+ maternal haplogroups. (It also provides a much different dating system than Sykes used, placing my J haplogroup origin at 45,000 years ago instead of 10,000 years ago.) I would also like to know more about non-European haplogroups - even though a significant portion of the book talks about Sykes's research in Polynesia, the book is named for the seven haplogroups Sykes discovered in Europe. I was surprised to read this, because I had assumed from the title that all humans belonged to one of the seven haplogroups, not just Europeans. Way to go for taking a major discovery about human genetics and ancestry and giving it a Eurocentric focus (insert eyeroll here). In fact, Sykes mentions near the end of the book, almost as an afterthought, that he had found 33 maternal haplogroups in total. (Again, I think this is probably an oudated number, and I would like to see an update.)

In summary, this book contains a lot of interesting scientific information, written in an accessible way. Just be aware that it's rather outdated by now.

Bryan Sykes is one of the world's leading genetic anthropologists, working with DNA identification and comparison to understand the biological history of the human race. He has been part of a growing worldwide coordinated effort in DNA gathering and comparison, and worked with various other specialists to reconstruct the migration and cultural portraits of humans.

Since 2000, our understanding has accelerated and skyrocketed into a burgeoning, exciting body of knowledge about human prehistory and the genetic character of modern populations. Sykes is a skilled storyteller and analyst, resulting in a well-crafted true tale of who we are and how we got to where we are in the world today, and how the innermost being of our every individual cell carries the story in our genes!

The ongoing DNA comparisons all over the world began to fill out a picture of the kinship of all modern humans and their migrations all over the world. In 2001, Brian Sykes reported on his DNA studies in Europe and the Polynesian Islands and related, with careful comparisons to the studies by others on Hawaii and the Americas.

In reporting his comprehensive and extensive DNA reconstruction for the people of Europe, Sykes detailed his DNA findings and presented a delightful historical and cultural history of Europe comparing the DNA reconstruction for Europe with related findings from Archaeology, paleoanthropology, and especially the lifestyle of each era. Important for this was the movement of agriculture across the world and its arrival in Europe.

As his comparisons for Europe progressed, collecting or comparing samples from all over the UK locales, Sykes actually found a modern Irish woman who had the exact same mtDNA sequence as Ötzi, the 5000-year-old Alps Ice Man. The Ice man, found in 1991, was a mummified man found in a melting Alps glacier. This ancient European had been preserved by a glacial freeze and was determined to be 5200 or 5300 years old, determined by DNA study of grains in his leather bag carrying his tools and other paraphernalia.

Similar information from pollen found in or on Ötzi providing additional insights into Ötzi's historical period. The viable DNA recovered from the Ice Man, with related findings from various disciplines of study and investigation reconstructed Ötzi's diet and likely family history. These insights into Ötzi's life and times shed additional light on Sykes' study of the origins and migrations of the streams of indigenous settlement and the much later movement of agriculture into Europe.

The exciting upshot of this particular part of Sykes' study and reconstruction was the discovery of a modern current Irish woman with the same exact mitochondrial DNA sequence as the Ice Man!

After analyzing the DNA patterns of thousands of subjects all across Europe, Sykes realized they all fell into a pattern of 7 groups, thus deriving from only 7 ancestral women for about 95% of the population of current Europe. These he dubs the Seven Daughters of Eve. After recounting the saga of the investigations, the puzzles, the disappointments and the breakthroughs that finally led to the final schema explaining the genetic relationship of thousand so Europeans, Sykes rounds out the story by providing a fictionalized account of the life of these seven women and their families.

Sykes constructs his portraits by weaving in the knowledge from multiple disciplines like archaeology, geology, animal and plant DNA comparisons, and the toolsets associated with various eras of prehistory and history, including the advent of agriculture and its move into Europe. He outlines the movement of the human race across the world millennia by millennia to people all the continents.

You will find this a fascinating novelesque saga that is our story, the human story, with particular attention to how all these factors came together in the population of the continent of Europe.

I don’t often read about science, but the field of human evolution fascinates me. I find it almost impossible to imagine the sheer expanse of time that has passed between the development of the first modern humans and the present day. It makes my head hurt. Things that seem so important in everyday life suddenly dwindle into nothingness when confronted with the epic story of humanity. But, if you turn the question on its head, you realise that humans really haven’t been around that long at all compared to other species with much longer innings – the dinosaurs, obviously, but even our extinct cousins the Neanderthals. Keep thinking, though, because the really staggering thought is actually the most obvious. Every single one of us alive today has direct ancestors who learned to make fire, who hunted mammoths, who made flint knives. It wasn’t just our general species that descended from these people. You did. I did. If there was a way to trace your family tree back far enough, through the Ice Age and beyond, into a world that looked completely different to the one we know today – if that was possible, you could find out who your ancestors were. Well, it is possible. Bryan Sykes and his fellow geneticists have done it. And this is the story of their work...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/12/14/t...

It would not be exactly right to consider this book a science book.  To be sure, the author discusses science, particularly as it relates to mitochondrial DNA, but this book is more imaginative than a straight science book would be.  The author has various agendas that he is wishing to promote in this work, and in doing so he ends up providing a compelling book but one that is certainly not strictly nonfictional.  And while this is not problematic, it would likely be better for the reader if one enters this book knowing that it is not only a book of reportage but a book with rhetorical aims and also a book with a fair amount of imagination.  These are not bad things, especially for anyone who has taken DNA tests and wondered what stories could be hidden in the various information that is provided by such tests.  This book gives imaginative discussions on that evidence, which may or may not have some basis in fact but which are highly speculative.  Whether or not the reader approves of this mix of fact and speculation, always aware that the author wants to demonstrate the usefulness and legitimacy of his approach, depends as always on the reader.

This book is about 300 pages and 23 chapters.  After acknowledgements and a prologue the author begins with a discussion of a story where an Italian iceman from thousands of years ago shared a close maternal connection with English people in Dorset (1).  After this the author discusses DNA and what it does (2) and looks at the historical shift from blood group to DNA analysis as a way of determining links (3) while spending special time on mtDNA as a special messenger (4).  The author discusses the mystery of the slain Russian Czar and his family (5) as well as the puzzle of the origin of the Polynesians (6, 7) as well as the first Europeans (8) and last Neanderthals (9) and the debate over whether Europeans are mainly descended from hunters or farmers (10).  Debates over genetic theories (11) and the DNA of the Cheddar man (12) allow the author to discuss yDNA a bit and how it talks about the ancestry of paternal lines (13).  The rest of the book is mostly spent on discussing the seven daughters of Eve (14) that correspond to the title, with imaginative stories about the lives of Ursula (15), Xenia (16), Helena (17), Velda (18), Tara (19), Katrine (20), and Jasmine (21), before looking briefly at the world (22) and how DNA can provide one with a sense of self (23), after which the book closes with an index.

I personally found this book amusing and enjoyable although I do not think that all of the speculations are necessarily true.  It is likely that this is a fairly common response to dealing with the book, a great deal of interest in what it has to say, a certain discount in knowing that the author has a definite agenda to promote in appealing to the veracity of mitochondrial DNA as a way of determining ancestral lineages on the maternal side in the face of some scientific debate and concerns about testing equipment that led to initial inconsistent results, and that the author's imaginations about how it was that a small number of Native American women ended up with European DNA may be very off-base.  The way that the author describes the importance of someone having more than one daughter as a way of demonstrating one's status as a founder of an mtDNA line, though, is worthwhile.  It is also always interesting to see people try to borrow clout by pointing how their research provides indication that humanity really does have a very narrow range when it comes to common origin while denying the implications of universal common human descent as well.

This was surprisingly well-written and informative. The science part was explained in a simple but meaningful way. The downside is the sensationalist and quite egocentric way of storytelling.

Notes

The Piltdown Man hoax.

Back in the day, a racial theory was built around the blood types. Races A & B were proposed.
Rhesus +/- mixture is mostly found in Europe, it gives no advantage but troubles during pregnancy. The author suggests that this would eventually be resolved into homogeneity. He brings an example from the Basques. Basques have a negative Rhesus factor since they were the old European population and had lived there for a long time.
He also tells an anecdotal account of blood transfusions carried out by the Inca. Supposedly, since the Amerindians had no ABO blood system (virtually everyone is O type) such transfusions should have been possible.

Apes have a +1 chromosome pair (24).
Mules cannot breed because of different chromosome counts from the horse and donkey parents.

Sykes claims that the Neolithic migration into Europe didn't displace the female population, European mtDNA is mostly pre-neolithic. He also provides a nice classification schema for the Paleolithic.

upper paleolithic - h. sapiens
middle paleolithic - h. neanderthalensis
lower paleolithic - h. erectus

Mitochondria have several mtDNA rings. Those inside the same organelle can recombine, but not between different mitochondria. Since the smallest/atomic unit of inheritance is the mitochondrion itself, this internal recombination does not affect the simple linear inheritance pattern.

Since there are multiple mitochondria in the cell, they can mutate independently and lead to mosaicism, it takes time for the mutation to get established or drifted out. This was used to calculate the myDNA mutation rate of 1SNP/10ky in the 500bp control region (an intrinsic proof).

“In 1970 a stone tool, a biface hand axe, which was later suggested by Stanford and Bailey to resemble Solutrean stone tools was dredged up by the trawler Cinmar off the east coast of Virginia in an area that would have been dry land prior to the rising sea levels of the Pleistocene Epoch. The tool was allegedly found in the same dredge load that contained a mastodon’s remains. The mastodon tusks were later dated at 22,000 years old. In addition several archaeological sites on the Delmarva peninsula with suggestive, but not definitive, dating between 16,000 and 18,000 years have been discovered by Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. These factors led Stanford and Bradley to reiterate in 2014 their academic advocacy of pre-Clovis peoples in North America and their possible link to paleolithic Europeans.”

This is the undeniable archeological evidence that Solutrean man is one of Native Americans founding fathers. This also shows the true agenda behind people like David Meltzer. You can try and spin reality any way you want to David, but when ache-logical evidence hits you RIGHT back in the face you can’t do nothing but backtrack. Kind of like a few of your peers.

Well if you are looking for a Science book this is NOT it. If are looking for a dramatic story like Romancing the Stone and The DaVinci Code keeping you listening just so long as you know the science stuff is not correct.

One minute he is doing everything to keep his funding and the next complaining about how those other scientists are only about funding. One topic I think need overhauling is the citations. The ideas that the more your paper is cited the more important or more funding you will get but what if your paper is wrong you are really leading everyone citing you down the wrong path, the path of broken rental cars on a holiday island that happens to hold the secrets of DNA…

Is fun and completely in the head of the “scientist” how that ancient one woman of seven..? Gave up her twin daughter.. Really too funny for science but very enjoyable tale. This really is the best story I have read in a while where someone actually had creative thoughts and was able to write them out bringing you along on the journey.

However, its not factual science so don’t get caught up in the details of what he is describing as historical facts, its perhaps rather his understanding or his way of thinking about it which is fun but again not true.

On another note if you want to understand mating and sexual relations and how women get pregnant you imagining old Neanderthal man did not bring Lillie’s or flowers and gentle loved her or maybe he did we don’t know but if you read the book about sexual facts you will need to read the book “Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating” David M. Buss.

Meanwhile enjoy the understanding of what I have been saying for many years now its all in the DNA and eventually science will learn more and more as we put down all the religious/ ethical “dilemmas” and search for actual truths.

Meanwhile go out and drive a little Jaguar XK - Convertible with the top down and enjoy the back roads and life that you have now and appreciate that your mother, grand mother and great grandmother decided to have that little baby.

Sykes traces the history of most Europeans back to 7 women through an examination of mitochondrial DNA. I love the science behind this book. An examination of the DNA shows how very related most people are. Would love to see this done for places like India where caste differences make people treat each other badly. Wouldn't it also be cool to take it even further and relate the Europeans back to say the Africans and show how related blacks and whites might be. Sykes shows how he may be related to the last Tsar through his mitochondrial DNA.

I did not give this book 5 stars because much of the book is not about the 7 women but rather about the science and Sykes' quest. The chapters about the 7 women are in some ways the least interesting as they are mainly conjecture about the kind of world they may have lived in and Sykes is not good at fiction as the women don't really come alive in these chapters. However, his scientific journey is extremely interesting and intriguing. There are times when personality clashes take up room and still seem to rankle to Sykes but I suppose that's his writing style. He is not as smooth or accomplished a pop science book as say Bryson but I'm glad he wrote this book for mass consumption because this story (about mitochondrial DNA and what it can tell us) certainly needed telling.

Really cool. Wasn't sure what to expect but I ended up really enjoying reading the back story of how they got to the thesis of the seven daughters. I even liked the speculation on the lifes of the seven women that the book is about. I found it informative and entertaining. Just what I usually look for.

Very interesting!

Very interesting theory about the evolution of mankind through the female line