How to trace your Ice Age ancestors by DNA testing

Mar 1 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Everyone with European roots is directly related to one of seven women living thousands of years ago. On the eve of Mothering Sunday, Laura Davis searches for the leader of her Ice Age clan

THERE are many things my mum has given me – a happy home life, a love of books, lifts to music lessons, brown hair, a beautiful art deco lamp – but neither of us were aware until just recently that she had given me a link to my distant ancestors.

A tiny piece of genetic material, know as mitochrondrial DNA, that is contained in each one of her cells can also be found in each of mine. It is also inside each of the cells that make up my sister’s body, and those of my aunts and female cousins on my maternal family tree.

It has been passed down the chain from mother to daughter for hundreds of generations, and if I have female children then they will have it, too.

By analysing this mDNA, scientists at Oxford University are able to determine which of seven women, living tens of thousands of years ago on the landmass we now call Europe, each of us is related to.

There are many areas of this research that are hard to get your head around, but perhaps the most astonishing of all is the simplest – people living today who have European roots are descended from one of just seven women. So, if you are reading this feature in the office, it is very likely that you are distantly related to the person sitting at the desk next to yours, or the one opposite, or the person wandering towards the photocopier with a glazed look in their eyes, or even the boss.

These seven women – or “clan mothers” as Prof Bryan Sykes, professor of genetics at Oxford University, calls them – lived between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, everywhere from the Syrian savannah to the Tuscan hills.

Their lives were probably unremarkable to other members of their clan but, unlike their peers, they each gave birth to at least one daughter, who then gave birth to at least one daughter of their own and so on until the present day.

There will, of course, have been other women living at the same time, but their descendants either died out or only had sons, thus breaking the maternal line.

“It emphasises the extremely amazing thing that, in every cell of your body, you’ve got that little piece of DNA that has come from a woman living in the depths of the last Ice Age and that it survived in the bodies of your ancestors right through to the present day,” says Prof Sykes, who has set up the company Oxford Ancestors to test people’s DNA and find out which clan they belong to.

“As we were studying people in Europe, we discovered that everyone more or less fitted into seven groups and within each one everyone was related through their maternal line, so if you track that back far enough, by irresistible logic it would converge on just one woman.“

The research began some two decades ago, when Prof Sykes became the first person to successfully extract DNA from bone.

Several high-profile cases followed, such as his analysis of the “Iceman”, a 5,000-year-old skeleton found in the Alps in 1991, which uncovered some of his descendants living today, and the extraction of DNA from bones believed to have belonged to members of the Russian royal family.

Without knowing more about the DNA of those alive today, such finds could not be put into context, so Prof Sykes and his colleagues set about creating a database of 10,000 people.

“What amazes me constantly is that people do find it fascinating. It wasn’t done as a piece of commercial research to try and make money, it was a piece of scientific, academic research,” he explains.

“Oxford Ancestors started because people rang up all the time and we couldn’t cope.

“When I published a book on the Seven Daughters of Eve, the lab had about 900 emails on the first day.

“We used to do it for nothing and then we thought we’d better start charging and hopefully they’ll give up.”

Now anyone can have their DNA analysed for a £180 fee, for which you get an information pack, two certificates stating your clan mother and access to the Oxford Ancestors database, which allows you to trace people within your clan, or those who have the same mDNA as you.

A few weeks after posting off my two cheek swabs, I received a letter informing me I am of the clan of Helena.

In other words, I – and my mother and sister – am descended from a woman who lived some 20,000 years ago in the region of France where the town of Perpignan now stands.

My clan (that of Helena) arrived in Europe from the Middle East, moving across to the Mediterranean where they lived on meat and oysters.

This is very intriguing, although I am a little disappointed to learn that my clan is the largest in Europe, which makes me far from unusual.

It’s logical that, to exist at all, you must have had a line going back thousands of generations, but to have conclusive DNA proof of that still seems mind-boggling.

Yet finding out something about where your distant ancestors came from makes you feel a little bit special – in actual fact, it only confirms how similar you are to other human beings.

There is a bit of hope, however. As well as telling you which clan you are in, Oxford Ancestors provides details of the mutations your mDNA has undergone since the time of your clan mother.

Just one of the 400 nodes that makes up the mDNA tends to change each 10,000 years. As Helena was alive 20,000 years ago, most people in her clan have two mutations.

I have four, which a colleague cruelly suggestions means I am double the mutant of other Helena descendants. But Prof Sykes has a much better suggestion, even if it isn’t serious.

“Maybe you could say you’re more highly evolved,” he says.

More interestingly, out of the 10,000 samples analysed, the genetics expert has only seen one with the same mutations as mine. He or she lives in the South East – a close relative I had no idea of, whose family tree must link to mine somewhere in the last few generations.

Another descendant of Helena’s is 66-year-old John Holden, who will also have inherited his mDNA from his mother.

It’s strange to be talking to a complete stranger while knowing that we both share a direct ancestor.

Mr Holden, who is now retired but used to work for Girobank, received an Oxford Ancestors testing kit from his daughter Caroline for Christmas in 2006.

“I’ve been tracing my wife’s ancestors and mine for some years now, and it’s been an interesting diversion.

“I had shingles and I was in the process of recovering and not at work, and there was a course at the local library on researching your family history.

”My own family I traced back to about 1820, but my wife’s been more successful and could go back to about 1700.”

This, of course, is nothing compared to 20,000 years ago, or even 10,000 years, as in the case of his wife Susan’s clan mother, Jasmine.

“I think it’s fitted in very nicely with all the other information we had about our families. I think it can throw up some surprises, that we didn’t come from where we expected to – Jasmine’s roots are in Iraq,” she explains.

“Another interesting link for me was that my family had very much been in farming and still are, in Lincolnshire.

“It’s quite interesting that my clan was one of the first groups that cultivated and settled, whereas my husband was a hunter gatherer.

“I’m interested in the maternal link. I’ve got two daughters and it was good for them to know about our origins and I could pass it on to my cousins and obviously to my sisters as well.”

Sadly, there is no proof that Helena’s diet of oysters has led to her descendants owning a refined palate, but there is one thing we could have inherited from her.

“Because of the age we live in, people often ask if those in the same clan look the same. There isn’t any reason to think so,” says Prof Sykes, who traced his own ancestry to the clan of Tara.

“mDNA is a very important gene because it controls our metabolism, which is what we use to burn off food to create energy.”

He is now carrying out research to see if there is any correlation between clan and metabolic rate, and is also testing the DNA of people living today to discover whether they are related to Neanderthals.

“There is an intriguing question of whether Neanderthals really died out or whether they still exist or were they interbred with our own homo sapien ancestors,” he explains, before joking: “I’m travelling around Europe at the moment, keeping my eyes open, hanging around airports and jumping on people with prominent eyebrows and sloping foreheads.”

DAILY Post readers can gain a £30 reduction on the usual £180 cost of an Oxford Ancestors Matriline DNA test. To claim your discount, please call 01865 374425 (or visit www. oxfordancestors.com) and quote the promotional code “LDP08”. This offer is valid until June 1, 2008.

lauradavis