In 1994 Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in northern Italy five thousand years ago. Remarkably, Professor Sykes was able to track down a living relative of the Ice Man in Britain. How did he do this? The Seven Daughters of Eve is a first hand account of his research into an extraordinary gene which passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line, allowing us to track our genetic ancestors through time and space. Professor Sykes has found that almost all Europeans can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women, whom he has named Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine.
In this amazing scientific adventure story, we learn where our ancient genetic ancestors lived, what their lives were like and how every one of us is a testimony to the almost miraculous strength of our DNA. It is a book that not only re-examines the way we have evolved, but also addresses our sense of individuality and identity.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ICEMANS RELATIVE FOUND
IN DORSET
On Thursday 19 September 1991 Erika and Helmut Simon, two experienced climbers from Nuremberg in Germany, were nearing the end of their walking holiday in the Italian Alps. The previous night they had made an unscheduled stop in a mountain hut, planning to walk down to their car the next morning. But it was such a brilliantly sunny day that they decided instead to spend the morning climbing the 3,516 metre Finailspitze. On their way back down to the hut to pick up their rucksacks they strayed from the marked path into a gully partly filled with melting ice. Sticking out of the ice was the naked body of a man.
Though macabre, such finds are not so unusual in the high Alps, and the Simons assumed that this wasthe body of a mountaineer who had fallen into a crevasse perhaps ten or twenty years previously. The following day the site was revisited by two other climbers, who were puzzled by the old-fashioned design of the ice-pick that was lying nearby. Judging by the equipment, this alpine accident went back a good many years. The police were contacted and, after checking the records of missing climbers, their first thought was that the body was probably that of Carlo Capsoni, a music professor from Verona who had disappeared in the area in 1941. Only days later did it begin to dawn on everybody that this was not a modern death at all. The tool found beside the body was nothing like a modern ice-pick. It was much more like a prehistoric axe. Also nearby was a container made from the bark of a birch tree. Slowly the realization sank in that this body was not tens or even hundreds but thousands of years old. This was now an archaeological find of international importance.
The withered and desiccated remains of the Iceman, as he soon came to be known, were taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria, where he was stored, frozen, while an international team of scientists was assembled to carry out a minute examination of this unique find. Since my research team in Oxford had been the first in the world to recover traces of DNA from ancient human bones, I was called in to see whether we could find any DNA in the Iceman. It was the irresistible opportunity to become involved in such thrilling discoveries that had persuaded me to veer away from my career as a regular medical geneticist into this completely new field of science, which some of my colleagues regarded as a bizarre and eccentric diversion of no conceivable use or consequence.
By now, carbon-dating measuring the decay of minute traces of naturally radioactive carbon atoms within the remains had confirmed the great antiquity of the Iceman, placing him between 5,000 and 5,350 years old. Even though this was much older than any human remains I had worked with before, I was very optimistic that there was a good chance of success, because the body had been deep frozen in ice away from the destructive forces of water and oxygen which, slowly but surely, destroy DNA. The material we had to work with had been put in a small screw-capped jar of the sort used for pathology specimens. It looked awfully unremarkable: a sort of grey mush. When Martin Richards, my research assistant at the time, and I opened the jar and started to pick through the contents with a pair of forceps, it seemed to be a mixture of skin and fragments of bone. Still, though it might not have been much to look at, there was no obvious sign that it had begun to decompose, and so we set to work with enthusiasm and optimism. Sure enough, back in the lab in Oxford, when we put the small fragments of bone through the extraction process that had succeeded with other ancient samples, we did find DNA, and plenty of it.
In due course we published our findings in Science, the leading US scientific journal. To be perfectly honest, the most remarkable thing about our results was not that we had got DNA out of the body by then this was a routine process but that we had got exactly the same DNA sequence from the Iceman as an independent team from Munich. We had both shown that the DNA was clearly European by finding precisely the same sequence in DNA samples taken from living Europeans. You might think this was not much of a surprise, but there was a real possibility that the whole episode could have been a gigantic hoax, with a South American mummy helicoptered in and planted in the ice. The cold and intensely dry air of the Atacama desert of southern Peru and northern Chile has preserved hundreds of complete bodies buried in shallow graves, and it would not have been hard for a determined hoaxer to get hold of one of them. The much damper conditions in Europe reduce a corpse to a skeleton very quickly, so if this was a hoax the body had to have come from somewhere else, probably South America. It may sound far-fetched; but elaborate tricks have been played before. Remember Piltdown Man. This infamous fossil had been discovered in a gravel pit in Sussex, England, in 1912. It had an ape-like lower jaw attached to a much more human-looking skull, and was heralded as the long sought-after missing link between humans and the great apes gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans. Only in 1953 was it revealed to be a hoax, when radiocarbon analysis, the same technique that was later used to date the Iceman, proved beyond any doubt that the Piltdown skull was modern.
