The Seven Daughters of Eve - Tapa dura

Many of the stories concerning DNA and genetics are about the future - they're about what we can do tomorrow, which animals we can clone, which diseases we will be able to eradicate. This book is also about DNA, except it looks the other way, back across the sweep of time to the seven original women whose mitochondrial DNA - or "maternal" DNA if you like - is handed down from generation to generation and is still carried by everyone of European descent today. Sykes, who is Professor of Genetics at Oxford University, describes how he made this discovery in a book that is moving and inspiring and a world away from dry science.

In 1994, Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in Northern Italy. The frozen man was put at over five thousand years old, and Professor Sykes managed to track down a genetic descendant of the Ice Man, a woman living in Britain today. In "The Seven Daughters of Eve", Professor Sykes provides a first-hand account of his research into a gene which passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line and shows how it is being used to track our genetic ancestors. Professor Sykes shows how almost anyone of European descent, wherever they live in the world, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women. This is a scientific journey that shows how we can learn exactly how our origins can be traced, where our anscestors lived and how we are all proof of the miraculous strength of DNA.