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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (59329)	12/2/2002 5:24:56 AM
From: zonder	Respond to of 281500

Yes, last month's Wired had an article that mentioned the "seven original mothers": Sykes explains to me that a bit of DNA called mtDNA is key to his investigations. A circular band of genes residing separately from the 23 chromosomes of the double helix, mtDNA is passed down solely through the maternal line. Sykes used mtDNA to discover something astounding: Nearly every European can be traced back to just seven women living 10,000 to 45,000 years ago. In his book, Sykes gives these seven ancestors hokey names and tells us where they most likely lived: Ursula, in Greece (circa 43,000 BC), and Velda, in northern Spain (circa 15,000 BC), to name two of the "seven daughters of Eve." (Eve was the ur-mother who lived 150,000 years ago in Africa.) Sykes has taken swab samples from the cheeks of more than 10,000 people, charging $220 to individually determine a person's mtDNA type. "It's not serious genetics," Sykes admits, "but people like to know their roots. It makes genetics less scary and shows us that, through our genes, we are all very closely related." He recently expanded his tests to include non-Europeans. The Asian daughters of Eve are named Emiko, Nene, and Yumio, and their African sisters are Lamia, Latifa, and Ulla, among others. wired.com