Big rhetorical question: So why is this book called The Seven Daughters of Eve? The second-to-last chapter clearly reveals that there are thirty-three ancestral mothers in total. The "seven" refers to Europeans only... what's up with being so misleading, Sykes? He never addresses the distinction, either, just casually drops the information at the back of the book, behind the seven annoying subjective chapters like he hopes readers get turned off by those and drop the book before realizing he's been misleading you the whole time.

There is a lot about this book that I like. First, it's pleasantly readable. Second, he provides a lot of interesting anecdotes (and some really uninteresting ones, but I'll take the bad with the good). Finally, his research is really interesting! So I would totally recommend this book for the average person interested in the human history. I would also recommend it for the average person not interested in human history because it's still important to understand!

However (and this is a big however), I hate it when people perpetuate the notion that Watson and Crick literally "discovered" (yes, Sykes uses the word discovered) DNA's structure.

Sykes says several statements about Watson and Crick publishing their DNA structure that are either blatantly false or extremely misleading. That he mentions work done by other scientists, but only includes the names "Watson and Crick" heavily implies that Watson and Crick did work which it is common knowledge (and was common knowledge in 2001 when this book was published) that they did not do.

It's further confusing because he does a very thorough job describing the scientific chronology in blood group analysis (to name an example) by including the work of many teams of people around the world, even including a few very minor contributions. It makes me wonder why he was so thorough on that aspect, but not DNA.

Readers may be wondering, what's the big deal? That information is not fundamental to the story he's telling, it's just background knowledge! So Sykes got that part a little wrong, who cares?

The Big Deal is that in reading Sykes tell a story in a way that I know to be false, he discredits himself. I happen to be particularly knowledgable about the history around the discovery of DNA, but I know very little about most other discoveries/papers/scientists he talks about. Knowing he got one part wrong, what's the incentive to believe he got everything else right? How do I know he's telling the whole truth and doing justice to the correct people?

The answer is, I don't. Consequently I read the rest of the book with a totally different mindset - one of interest, but also suspicion. It didn't totally ruin the book for me, but it did make me less eager to read it.

With only the faint promise that at some point he will address the title, Sykes' narrative meanders through his explorations. He circles back on topics he addressed several chapters ago, sometimes providing new information that I wished he'd just included when it was brought up in the first place. This is especially apparent if you pay attention to where in the book he mentions his Polynesian research. He faithfully devotes a chapter to his history with their DNA, but then in subsequent chapters, when he makes a comparison back to his Polynesian research, he often includes a little bit of new Polynesian information, which I found annoying. On that note, he spends pages and pages explaining his reasoning process and I think he thinks he does a good job, but I found myself asking perfectly reasonable clarification questions that I kept waiting for him to address.

For example, I wasn't satisfied with his explanation for having seven as opposed to six or eight or even ten "clan mothers." For it being such a powerful result and the foundation for the book, he definitely skimps on the details and uses the idea of DNA "clusters", which I do understand, to back him up. I can infer that perhaps the pattern of mutations directs the timeline towards certain most probable break-points, but I wish he would have made it more explicit or gone into further detail on the method by which he grouped sequences.

Instead of concluding the book with seven dramatized (and in my opinion unnecessary) accounts of these seven women's lives, the pages would have been better served with a more thorough account of how he distinguished each woman from the others and precisely how his data revealed when and where they lived. For example, he brushes up on the idea that modern-day humans don't necessarily live where their direct ancestors lived, but he never addresses exactly how he factored that into his research at any point.

Finally, in the second to last chapter he introduces some awesome news: other researchers had discovered that, besides the seven women from whom the bulk of Europeans owe lineage, there are twenty-six additional clans that represent the rest of the world population! Wow! What blows my mind here is that the book title is clearly The Seven Daughters of Eve. 'Why the hell is that?' I ask, 'when Sykes clearly recognizes there to be thirty-three? Why, then, does Sykes title his book The Seven Daughters of Eve, and not The Thirty-Three Daughters of Eve?' There's a clear distinction here, in how he names the seven European ancestors to be Daughters of Eve, with the implication that the twenty-six other clans are not daughters of Eve. So in his view, Europeans are descended from Eve and the rest of the world is not? Yes, I get that there's a marketing element embedded in that decision, but again I question his ability to convey the full truth in a way that is not misleading. Titling the book The Seven Daughters of Eve is misleading and I hate that he did that. Consulting Figure 7 on page 275, we see no reason at all to suggest that anything sets the seven apart from the other twenty-six - their lineages are totally intermingling.

---
I know I didn't have to do this but I did so it's here and you can read it if you want.

"W+C felt sure [DNA] held the key to the chemical mechanism of heredity."
--Actually the American scientist Oswald Avery published that in 1944.

"There was a general lack of interest in this substance shown by most of their contemporaries."
--What he means is that most people were more interested in proteins than in DNA, but more interest in one thing does not imply lack of interest in another thing. There were tons of people working on DNA at the time, both in Europe and the US.

"They decided to have a crack at working out it's molecular structure, using...X-ray photography."
--Misleading - they dabbled in X-ray crystallography but weren't very good at it. They never created an X-ray photograph of DNA, ever.

"After many weeks... W+C suddenly found the [structure] that matched the X-ray."
--Again, misleading, they looked at Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 X-ray photograph and stole parameters from her unpublished paper. They also consulted her and she told them that they had their base groups and phosphates pointing in the wrong directions. They couldn't figure it out on their own because they had no chemistry background.

"W+C had discovered that each molecule of DNA is made up of... a 'double helix'."
--False, they recognized the helix apparent in Photo 51 but were not the first to do so.

"W+C realized that the only way two strands of the double helix could fit together properly was if every 'A' on one strand is interlocked with a 'T' directly opposite."
--Actually the scientist Erlwin Chargaff figured that out in 1949.

Sigh. If you're on the fence about this book please know that the negative reviews seem to be people who didn't actually read the book, or perhaps skimmed it or just merely did not understand or absorb what they read. All of the qualms I've come across so far in the negative comments are very clearly answered by the author in the book, so please do not let this hold you back (for example, that it focuses on European ancestry. Yes, that is the author's specialty. No author is under obligation to cover the entire world's population).

This book is fantastic. Especially in our day-and-age with sites like 23&Me and Ancestry.com, this information comes to life like never before. As I have done both of these services I found myself referencing them several times throughout reading which made it even more enjoyable.

I love learning about how we trace ancestry through the ages, and the author does a great job of translating the science into terms a layman can understand. However the part that really gripped me was the vignettes Dr. Sykes does on each "daughter of Eve". Like similar pieces in Carl Sagan's books, I think adding these touches of fiction in the middle of a very scientific work brings to light the message in a way that facts and figures never can. Responding to another negative review amazingly, the author makes it abundantly clear that this are (OBVIOUSLY) fictitious accounts that THE AUTHOR has made up to give us an impression of what life was like for these women. Frankly if you believe that Dr. Sykes was able to tell what people living 20,000+ years about were thinking about and doing at every point in their life I'm convinced the issues doesn't lie with the author, but with you and your reading ability.

Sad to see such a fantastic book get negative reviews from those who didn't take the time to actually read it, or who could not properly read for comprehension. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in human ancestry and the science behind it!

This is a very interesting book that does damage to any lingering ideas of racial superiority. By genetic testing of thousands of people, Sykes has show that everyone of European extraction can trace his or her ancestry to just seven women who lived between 10 and 45 thousand years ago. Not only that, but DNA testing and archeology have shown that we are all Africans at the core. All I could think of while reading this is that so much blood has been spilled because one man thinks he's superior to another when there is no scientific basis for it at all.

I think the book slowed a bit in the middle and his description of the lives of the seven women are the root of our ancestry was a bit speculative for a scientific work. But I enjoyed reading it. The actual science of DNA is unbelievably fascinating.

Although this book was written in 2001, it is still a useful introduction to the study of human genetic ancestry for the layperson like me. Sykes is unique for having been at the forefront of major discoveries in genetics, such as sequencing the Iceman (Otzi)'s genome and finding modern descendants, helping to identify the bodies of most of the members of the massacred Russian royal family, and tracing 95% of Europeans' female ancestors to just seven women who lived between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago. Sykes' writing style is engaging, especially considering his background as a scientific researcher. I would wonder if it was ghost-written, except for his background in journalism. Most of the book is not about the "Seven Daughters of Eve"; however, the background information is just as interesting. It takes a good portion of the book to build up to the fictionalized vignettes of these women at the end. Although the stories seem contrived, they do humanize these women and offer insight into the everyday challenges for people in prehistoric Europe, especially during the last ice ages. I wonder if one of my mitochondrial ancestors was one of these women. There's a 95% chance that this is the case.

I loved reading this book. Fascinating and written with humour and not too much jargon. Bryan Sykers does a brilliant job of bringing to life the thousands of ancestors that stand behind us and build up a picture of who we are. Favourite chaper is A sense of self. "DNA is the messanger which illuminates that connection, handed down from generation to generation, carried, literally, in the bodies of our ancestors. Each message traces a journey through time and space, a journey made by the long lines that spring from the ancestral mothers. We will never know all the details of these journeys over thousands of years and thousands of miles, but we can at least imagine them. I am on a stage. Before me, in the dim light, all the people who have ever lived are lined up, rank upon rank, stretching far into the distance. They make no sound that I can hear, but they are talking to each other. I have in my hand the end of the thread which connects me to my ancestral mother way at the back. I pull on the thread and one womans face in every generation, feeling the tug, looks up at me. Their faces stand out from the crowd and they are illuminated by a strange light. These are my ancestors."

I have done my DNA and ancestry testing with 23andme and discovered my maternal haplogrouping to be H1c, H is 20,000 years old. Reading this book has helped me to understand and think deeply of my roots.

A very worthwhile read.

An interesting but weak book. Published in 2001, most of the information presented is no longer new. I bought the book in 2013, but it sat in my book shelf unread all this time. With the high price of new books, I’ve decided to read the many unread books in my library, and this was one.

The author presents his scientific journey in studying mitochondrial DNA. It began for him when the ‘Iceman’ was discovered in 1991 in the Italian Alps. Iceman was dated to be between 5,000 and 5,300 years old. Professor Skyes was invited to join a scientific study team to see what could be learned from the Iceman. Professor Skyes was an expert on DNA, and he was able to extract and amplify some of the Iceman’s DNA.

From a DNA analysis of the mitochondrial DNA, Professor Skyes determined that Iceman was related to today’s modern man, and in fact, had some direct decedents living in Italy.

Professor Skyes explains how the mitochondria is a part of the animal cell. It exists not inside the nucleus, but in the cell. It also contains a single strand of DNA. Now the interesting thing about this DNA, is that from a genetic point-of-view, mitochondrial DNA is passed to the next generation only through the female. Only the female egg has mitochondria DNA; the male sperm has no mitochondria. This means the mitochondria in you comes unchanged from your mother.

Professor Skyes goes on to explain that mutations in mitochondrial DNA occur only very rarely, like once every 2,000 years. So by examining large samples of mitochondrial DNA, it is possible to group type this DNA, and determine families and clans.

Professor Skyes next studied large samples of Polynesian DNA and helped settle the question of the origin of the Polynesian people: they originated in Asia.

Professor Skyes next studied large samples of European DNA. His findings there indicate that the mitochondrial DNA European people can be grouped into seven different types, which are descended from a common ancestor.

It is here That Professor Skyes drifts into fiction. These seven types have been given letter names for scientific study. In the last chapters of his book, he gives these seven different types women’s names, and calls them the Seven Daughters of Eve. He devotes a chapter to each woman, explaining the age she lived in, and what type of life she led.

Professor Skyes explains that he is only gathering the known data known from the different sciences and constructing a fictional story so that we may identify with each daughter.

I say the book is weak because I think there is only enough good information here to fill a good multi-page article in a scientific magazine, but stretching it into a book seems like overreach.

This book has been written by a scientist whose story-telling qualities make scientific findings accessible to the lay reader. As an educator, I value this effort immensely.

What a read. Educational and entertaining at the same time. Took me some time to understand the science but once I did everything just followed. The only thing really familiar here is the hardships women faced because of their gender.

Audiobook. A very good overview of mitochondrial DNA and the scientific discoveries it caused and the havoc tose discoveries caused in the scientific community. The 7 main female ancestral lines are explored and a fictional account of what these women's lives were likely like based on the time that they lived.

Written for the popular audience rather than the scientific community, Sykes' "Seven Daughters of Eve" is an excellent book for getting one's feet wet in the study of mitochondrial DNA. The first half of the book details the journey that this form of genetic tracing has taken in gaining foothold as a reliable ancestral tracker, including both specific case studies of individual questions that have been answered using it and also the controversy that surrounded it as some of these questions were answered in unexpected ways. By including the arguments made by contemporaries against mitochondrial DNA and then responding to them in text as they had been in scientific publications defending mtDNA years earlier, Sykes also reassures the reader to its integrity.

The second half of the book is where things start to fall somewhat to the wayside. It includes exactly what Sykes said it would: accounts of the so-called "Seven Daughters" (the genetic heads of the seven distinct haplogroups or maternal lines found in the mitochondrial DNA.) The issue with these accounts lies not with the fact that the majority of them are based on assumption from the relative lifestyles that archaeologists have been able to infer of our ancestors living tens of thousands of years ago, but in their entirely fictitious nature. Although Sykes does leave the reader with a disclaimer that these women and their stories are essentially made up, you really feel that fabrication in the sudden narrative turn that the writing takes. The stories feel very Clan of the Cave Bear meets Coronation Street, and while that may be entertaining for some after the incredibly enjoyable foray I had taken into the cold hard science leading up to the reveal of these seven haplogroups, I would have preferred something a little more scientific and a lot less fictional. (Further research into my own mitochondrial haplogroup: J1b1a, or "Jasmine" in Sykes' novel, better explains the who, what, when, where and how of my family's history than a ten-page short story about a woman whose husband has a hard time hunting because he can only throw underhand, so instead he brings home a handful of nearly-inedible seeds and says "sorry, can't spear a gazelle underhanded, try chewing on these for a few hours.")

I still give the book four stars because the meat-and-potatoes that comes before the short stories makes for both an enjoyable and informative read. I commend Sykes for what he was trying to do which was make genetic ancestry accessible and interesting to the every-man on a personal level by creating a story for people to relate to emotionally. While this second act fell flat for me, the first was worth it.

This is the book that started a love affair with DNA! I've now read several books on tracing human orgins through DNA, but this was the first one and it's the one that really got me to thinking about who these women really were. I really had to stretch my mind back and realize that one of the seven daughters is my ancestor! It rekindled my desire to do genealogical/family history research, especially on my mother's side back through all the women. It's difficult, because women's identities become subsumed in with their husbands. The maiden names become difficult to track. I have moved my search to Belgium and found my great grandmother's parents. Of my four lines, this is the first to go back to Europe as they were the most recent immigrants to the States. The writing is clear and interesting and Sykes gets you so interested, you find yourself with a pencil in your hand to be sure to mark the really good stuff. I made a multiribbon book mark to place the passages that really intrigued me.

Were Polynesian islands peopled by Asians or American Indians? Are the skeletons found at Iekaterinburg the ones of the Romanov family? Is Neanderthal really extincted or, does he have any descendants? What about the Europeans? Do they have Croc-Magnon for ancestor or, farmers coming from the Middle-East? Bryan Sykes tells us the discoveries made by genetics thanks to mitochondrial DNA, a bacteria passing from generation to generation through the maternal line only.

Enthusiast, he is like a kid in a sweetshop. His writing style for instance reflects very well his fascination and excitement -it is actually so accessible that, we sometimes have the feeling of reading a novel! This will be a bit puzzling to whose used to science books but, the others will thus find him easier to understand.

I just think the last chapters (the reconstitutions of the seven Eves' lives) are completely useless. I understand they are a very easy way of describing nomadic life, the birth of agriculture, the first villages and so on but, are such fictions not ridiculous in a non-fiction book? Why not using an Appendix? Well, as it is targeted for a very wide audience...

Still a good read.