Reprints and Permissions. Hagelberg, E. The Seven Daughters of Eve. Heredity 89, 77 Download citation. Published : 19 June Issue Date : 01 July Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions.
About this article Cite this article Hagelberg, E. They are from our collection of DNA samples from all over Europe. We keep the identities of the donors on a separate file, and anyway, samples are always given on the basis of a strict undertaking of confidentiality. After Lois rang off, I switched on my computer just to see which samples matched up with the Iceman. When I checked the number against the database containing the names of the volunteers, I could scarcely believe my luck.
This could only mean one thing. Marie was a relative of the Iceman himself. For reasons which I shall explain in detail in later chapters, there had to be an unbroken genetic link between Marie and the Iceman's mother, stretching back over five thousand years and faithfully recorded in the DNA.
Marie is an Irish friend, a management consultant from just outside Bournemouth in Dorset in southern England. Though not a scientist herself, she has an insatiable curiosity about genetics and had donated a couple of strands of her long red hair in the cause of science two years earlier.
She is articulate, outgoing and very witty, and I was sure she could handle any publicity. For a few weeks after that, Marie became an international celebrity. Of all the headlines that followed, I liked the one from the Irish Times best of all. Their reporter had asked Marie if she had been left anything by her celebrated predecessor.
One of the strangest and, at first, surprising things about this story, and the reason I tell it here, is that Marie began to feel something for the Iceman. She had seen pictures of him being shunted around from glacier to freezer to post-mortem room, poked and prodded, opened up, bits cut off. To her, he was no longer just the anonymous curiosity whose picture had appeared in the papers and on television.
I became fascinated by the sense of connection that Marie had felt between herself and the Iceman. It began to dawn on me that if Marie could be genetically linked to someone long dead, thousands of years before any records were kept, then so could everyone else. Perhaps we only needed to look around us, at people alive today, to unravel the mysteries of the past.
Most of my archaeologist friends found this proposition completely foreign to them. They had been brought up to believe that one could understand the past only by studying the past; modern people were of no interest.
Yet I was sure that if DNA was inherited intact for hundreds of generations over thousands of years, as I had shown by connecting Marie and the Iceman, then individuals alive today were as reliable a witness to past events as any bronze dagger or fragment of pottery. It seemed to me absolutely essential to widen my research to cover modern people. Only when much more was known about the DNA of living people could I hope to put the results from human fossils into any sort of context.
So I set out to discover as much as possible about the DNA in present-day Europeans and people from many other parts of the world, knowing that whatever I found would have been delivered to us direct from their ancestors. The past is within us all. My research over the intervening decade has shown that almost everyone living in Europe can trace an unbroken genetic link, of the same kind that connects Marie to the Iceman, way back into the remote past, to one of only seven women.
These seven women are the direct maternal ancestors of virtually all million modern Europeans. This book tells how I came to such an incredible conclusion and what is known about the lives of these seven women. I know that I am a descendant of Tara, and I want to know about her and her life. I feel I have something in common with her, more so than I do with the others. By ways which I will explain, I was able to estimate how long ago, and approximately where, all seven women had lived.
I reckoned that Tara lived in northern Italy about 17, years ago. Europe was in the grip of the last Ice Age, and the only parts of the continent where human life was possible were in the far south. Then, the Tuscan hills were a very different place. No vines grew; no bougainvillaea decorated the farmhouses. The hillsides were thickly forested with pine and birch. The streams held small trout and crayfish, which helped Tara to raise her family and held the pangs of hunger at bay when the menfolk failed to kill a deer or wild boar.
As the Ice Age loosened its grip, Tara's children moved round the coast into France and joined the great band of hunters who followed the big game across the tundra that was northern Europe. Eventually, Tara's children walked across the dry land that was to become the English Channel and moved right across to Ireland, from whose ancient Celtic kingdom the clan of Tara takes its name.
Soon after the conclusions of my research were published, news of these seven ancestral mothers began to appear in newspapers and on television all round the world. Writers and picture editors used their imagination in finding contemporary analogues: Brigitte Bardot became the reincarnation of Helena; Maria Callas was Ursula; the model Yasmin le Bon was linked, naturally, with Jasmine; Jennifer Lopez became Velda.
So many people rang us to find out which one they were related to that we had to set up a website to handle the hundreds of enquiries. We had stumbled across something very fundamental; something we were only just beginning to understand. This book tells the story behind these discoveries and their implications for us all, not just in Europe but all over the world. It is a story of our common heritage and our shared forebears.
It takes us from the present time back to the beginnings of agriculture and beyond, to our ancestors who hunted with the Neanderthals. Our genes were there. They have come down to us over the millennia. They have travelled over land and sea, through mountain and forest. Quotes 0. Close Ad. Browse without ads. Seven daughters of Eve. The two sides of Eve. Eve; Just ; Women's Cultural Group major: competitions - Knowledge and Varieties - more than characters question and paragraph.
Tips for Eve in the health and food. Ideas for Eve in the health and food. Brian Herbat and Rmenktn - the history of the states of North Africa to Romania from Diocletian occupation Alondaly- transferred and translated into Arabic by the Latin inscriptions and achieved by Dr.
Abdul Hafiz Fadil Mayar.
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