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"There are a few qualifications you needed to be a clan mother. The first is that you needed to have daughters. ... A woman who had only sons could not be a clan mother because her children would never pass on the mitochondrial DNA they received from her, so that is the first rule. The second is that you had to have at least two daughters. ... The clan mother is the most recent maternal ancestor that all the members of a clan have n common. Imagine a clan with ten million living members and imagine that we knew perfectly from the registry of births, marriages, and deaths exactly how they are all related. As we went back in time, generation by generation, we would see the maternal lines slowly joining up. The lines in brothers and sisters would converge,. after just one generation, in their mother. After two generations, cousins would converge on their maternal grandmother, their mother's mother. Three generations ago it would be the second cousins whose lines coalesced in their maternal great -grandmothers. And so on. At each generation there would be fewer and fewer people in the clan who had maternal descendants living today. Eventually, hundreds or even thousands of generations ago, there would be only two women in the clan who could claim to have maternal descendants living in the twenty-first century. Further back still, the maternal lines of these two women would converge on a single woman - the true clan mother. And to be in that position she must have had not one but two daughters. ...
A clan mother did not have to be the only woman around at the time and she certainly wouldn't have been. But she is the only one who is connected through this unbroken maternal thread right through to the present day... lines died out..."
C 2001 Bryan Sykes Norton Publishers
I'm saving up to have my DNA done. I want to do the test that takes you back only 3 generations, just to see if a rumor about my heritage is true. The DNA test that takes you all the way back to the CLAN MOTHER is a different test. I sure hope that someday I can do that one too... DNA testing is going down in price (slowly) while the databases expand and increase our potential knowledge rapidly.
