"The Seven Daughters of Eve" by Bryan Sykes

From Wales to the South Pacific, we're all descended from seven prehistoric women, according to revolutionary new genetic discoveries.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Aug 6, 2001 | Teri Tupuaki and Gwyneth Roberts are related, according to Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford University's Institute of Molecular Medicine. Initially, this may not sound noteworthy, but Tupuaki is a fisherman in the Cook Islands of the South Pacific, while Roberts serves the school lunches in a small town in Wales. Also, Sykes says their common ancestor was a woman who lived about 140,000 years ago somewhere in Africa. Even that is not so startling, in scientific terms; what is startling is that the distant but detectable genetic relationship between Tupuaki and Roberts is the most distant one that Sykes' research into mitochondrial DNA has yet uncovered between any two living human beings. In other words, the rest of us are related too -- and most of us much more closely than Tupuaki and Roberts.

Indeed, if Sykes' findings are correct -- and so far they have withstood a great deal of hostile scrutiny -- among all of us who are of European descent, the relationship is, in planetary terms, pretty much that of kissin' cousins. Sykes believes that about 90 percent of Europeans can trace their maternal ancestry back to one of seven specific women, the most recent of whom lived about 10,000 years ago and the eldest about 45,000 years ago.

Of course these proto-European women had ancestors too, who at some point traveled out of Africa and into the Middle East before splitting up and beginning to colonize the globe. Go backward only a few thousand years before the ancestor shared by Tupuaki-Roberts and you reach the individual woman geneticists have dubbed the "mitochondrial Eve," who belonged to what was probably a very small human society in Africa. The only thing we know for sure about the mitochondrial Eve is that she had at least two daughters who themselves had children. And that she is the direct ancestor -- the 10,000th or so great-grandmother -- of you and me and everybody else on Earth.

Sykes has become a superstar in the red-hot field of genetics since he began publicizing his research into mitochondrial DNA, a peculiar form of the famous double-helix chromosome that is passed intact from mother to child, so that in any given individual it can be used to establish a chain of female ancestry. He did not himself discover the importance of mitochondrial DNA in tracing ancient human evolution, and gives full credit to American biochemist Allan Wilson, who did (with two of his students), but Sykes has surely done more to advance the field than any scientist.

Sykes has identified living relatives of the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old frozen corpse found in the Italian Alps, and of Cheddar Man, who is not a statue made of cheese but a 9,000-year-old skeleton found in England's Cheddar Gorge. He has established to a near 100 percent certainty that the bones found in 1991 in a birch forest outside the Russian village of Ekaterinburg were indeed those of Czar Nicholas II and his family, and that Anna Anderson, the woman who long claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, indeed was not.

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