I recently attended a short but intense lecture on the state of the art in DNA genealogy. One of the books mentioned was Bryan Sykes "The Seven Daughters of Eve."
The lecturer said that all women in Europe (actually about 98%) can be traced to one of seven great mothers who have given them a distinctive DNA identity. I was fascinated, so I read the book ASAP. The book was first published in 2001, and the author has another book coming out called "DNA USA."
First "The Seven Daughters of Eve" is exciting enough and novelesque enough to be a page turner. Without getting heavily into technology Sykes takes you where he went, to getting ancient DNA out of the skeletons of Cheddar Man and other archaeological discoveries and then to the discoveries that he is genetically related to the Russian Tsar's family that was assassinated back in 1918, and that the butler of a friend of his was a direct descendant of Cheddar Man.
Let me explain that Sykes is not saying there were never more than these 7 women. What he is saying is that these 7 women are the ones whose DNA has survived thousands of years to today, as traceable from mother to mother. The other women's DNA does not appear because they had no children, had only one daughter, had only sons, or possibly because over those thousands of years only descendants of women with the best DNA for survival won out. The focus here is on European DNA.
I'm linking to information on Sykes USA DNA.
Here's some of the inforation within it:
• Of Americans whose ancestors came as slaves, virtually all have some European DNA.
• Racial intermixing appears least common among descendants of early New England colonists.
• There is clear evidence of Jewish genes among descendants of southwestern Spanish Catholics.
• Among white Americans, evidence of African DNA is most common in the South.
• European genes appeared among Native Americans as early as ten thousand years ago.
