Are You A Clan Mother ?

Sherlock Holmes’ advice to Dr. Watson in THE SIGN OF FOUR:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the TRUTH.”

A couple of weeks ago I completed the reading of The Seven Daughters of Eve (The Science that reveals our genetic ancestry) by Bryan Sykes. I would strongly recommend the book for any of you with any interest in reconnecting with the mysteries of our deep past in order to enhance your 'sense of self'. You may buy a used copy at Amazon for about six US dollars:
www.amazon.com/Seven-Daughters-Eve-Bryan-Sykes/dp/0393323145/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232826514&sr=8-1
Or...you may just want to read the lines that captured me while I was reading it (below).

The question of a clan mother has stirred my mind in the last few weeks. My mother was NOT a clan mother because she had three sons. A modern day CLAN MOTHER is a ANY WOMAN alive today with two daughters. These women have the potential to be the founder of a CLAN.

My grandmother, Mary Genevieve Leyba-Lucero is a clan mother. She has six sons and three daughters. Her three daughters (Virginia, Betty and Lillian) all carried the mtDNA they received from their clan mother. Virginia only had 3 sons. Betty had one daughter and Lillian had a daughter and son. Only Lillian's daughter, Shonette West-Freestone has had a daughter, Tori Michele Freestone (b. 1992). Tori is the only great granddaughter that carries the same mtDNA. It is hopeful that Tori will have a daughter some day.

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. That is the first RULE.
The mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) can only be passed on by a woman. The mtDNA is the prime molecular interpreter of our human past.

My paternal grandmother, Matilde Garcia had five daughters (Esther, Julia, Nellie, Jennie and Josie). Only three of her daughters gave her granddaughters. Esther had Cecilia and Judy; Cecelia had a daughter (Jessica Markus b.1984) & Judy had two daughters, Leandra (b. 1991 & Alicia b. 1992). Nellie had five daughters but only three of her daughters had girls: Mary had Alisha Cordova; Rebecca had Jessica Banks (b. 1985) and Yolanda had Michelle (b. 1982) and Gabrielle (b.1990). Josie had only one daughter, Gloria, who had a daughter named Jennifer (b.1977). It is up to these great granddaughters to have more daughters to determine if Matilde really was a clan mother. The likelihood that the great-granddaughters Jessica Markus, Leandra, Alicia, Alisha, Jessica Banks, Michelle, Gabrielle and Jennifer will have more daughters is very likely; whereby, Matilde's mtDNA will continue to be passed on.

My sister-in-law, Sherri Lewis-Armijo, had three daughters. She is a modern day clan mother. My sister-in-law, Helen Wong-Armijo, had two daughters. She is a modern day clan mother. Are you a clan mother?

Of the 'Seven Daughters of Eve' I believe I descend from the JASMINE clan based on what I know and have read, but I cannot be 100% proof positive.

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The Seven Daughters of Eve
by Bryan Sykes

Where do I come from?
How often have you asked yourself that question? We may know our parents, even our grandparents; not far beyond that, for most of us the trail begins to disappear into the mist.

I have discovered that…we are all connected through our mothers to only a handful of women living tens of thousands of years ago.

Like any walk of life, science has its ups and downs, its heroes and its villains.

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.

The ICEMAN…was placed between 5,000 and 5,350 years old.

The past is within us all. Every one living in Europe can trace an unbroken genetic link to one of only seven women.

All of us…carry in our cells the survivors of these fantastic journeys—our genes.

Collagen is the main protein not only in living bones but also in the dead ones.

Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993. It mean that you could now get an unlimited amount of DNA to work on from even the tiniest piece of tissue.

Enzymes are the catalysts of biology, making things happen much more quickly than they otherwise would.

DNA resurrected, literally, from the grave.

What counts in science is not being the first to do an experiment but being the first to publish the results.

The father of genetics is Gregor Mendel, a monk in the town of Brno in the Czech Republic who laid the foundation for the whole of genetics from his experimental breeding of peas in the monastery garden in the 1860s.

In 1953 two young scientists working in Cambridge, England (James D Watson and Francis Clark) solved the molecular structure of a substance: DNA: “deoxyribonucleic acid”.

Watson and Clark were rewarded by the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1962.

DNA has just four key components:
A, adenine
C, cytosine
G, guanine
T, thymine.
There are twenty amino acids in all.

The first blood transfusions were recorded in Italy in 1628,but so many people died from the severe reactions that the practice was banned there, as well as in France and England.

It was 1900 before the biologist, Karl Landsteiner, worked out what was happening and discovered the first human blood group system: Groups A, B, AB and O.

The Rhesus blood group (derived from the Rhesus monkey)…

The continent’s (Europe) most influential genetic population were the fiercely independent Basques of northwest SPAIN and SouthWest France. The Basques are unified by their common language, Euskara, which is unique in Europe in that it has no linguistic connection with any other living language.

The Basques provided us with an invaluable clue to genetic history of the whole of Europe (which only began when Arthur Mourant started to look closely at the Rhesus blood groups).

French anthropologist, H.V. Vallois described features of the skeletons of contemporary Basques as having more in common with fossil humans from about 20,000 years ago than with modern people from other parts of Europe.

Basques had by far the lowest frequency of blood group B of all the population groups in Europe.

Basques were descended from the original inhabitants of Europe.

Populations with similar gene frequencies were more likely to be closely related to each other.

In NATURE, a scientific paper, a breakout came in January 1987 with mtDNA (Mitrochondrial DNA and human evolution).

If two people have very similar mtDNA then they are more closely related…than two people with very different mtDNA. They have a common ancestor who lived more recently in the past.

As time passes, more random changes are added to the DNA.

It is ‘the mixing that marks the history of every living species’.

150,000 years ago…the whole of the human species was much younger and more closely related than many people thought.

Modern homosapiens, the species to which we all belong, originated in AFRICA. An earlier type of human (home erectus) was an evolutionary intermediate between ourselves and much older and more ape-like fossils.

The common mtDNA ancestor of all monder humans lived only about 150,000 years ago.

mtDNA…is the prime molecular interpreter of the human past.

The genetic code in mtDNA is slightly different from the one that is used in the nuclear chromosomes.

Every one gets their mtDNA from only one parent…their MOTHER.

150,000 years of human evolution…say 6,000 generations at 25 years per generation

On my way back home that night, while I was thinking about something else, I experienced one of those rare moments when an idea suddenly arrives from the recesses of the mind, goodness knows how, and you know within a millisecond that it is the answer to your problem, even though you haven’t had time to work out why.

All the pet hamsters in the world really do come from a single female.

On July 16, 1918 The Romanov’s were condemned to death.
It had taken less than three minutes to put an end to a dynasty that had ruled Russia for 300 years.
The house is no longer there. It was demolished in 1977 on the orders of the young Boris Yeltsin.

It was concluded from the skeletons that the nine bodies were those of the Tsar and Tsarina; three of their five children: Maria, Tatiana and Olga; their physician, Dr. Eugeny Botkin; and three servants, Alexei Trupp the valet, Ivan Kharitonov the cook and Anna Demidova, the Tsarina’s maid.

They didn’t have to be especially close relatives; the real power of mtDNA is that it is not diluted by distance.

The Tsar had an unbroken maternal connection through his grandmother Louise of Hesse-Cassel, the Queen of Denmark, to a Count Nicolai Trubetskoy (70 years old and living a peaceful retirement on the Cote d’Azur after a lifetime as a merchant banker).

Proof can never be absolute. It is always relative.

Evidence climbs higher towards 100 percent proof.

The Tsar’s mother, Empress Marie Fedorovna, exiled in Copenhagen, did more than anyone to keep alive the myth that her family had survived.

If any two people trace their maternal line back…eventually the two lines will converge on ONE WOMAN. The only difference between any two people is this: How long ago did this woman live?

To put dates on to this we need to know the mutation rate for mtDNA.

If two people have exactly the same control region sequence, their common ancestor will have lived, on average, some time in the last 10,000 years.

If any two people can trace a common maternal ancestor, it follows that any GROUP of people can do the same.

The greatest maritime explorers the world has ever seen is the Polynesians.
While there are only 4 blood groups (A, B, AB and O) there are scores of different tissue types.

Curacao mixed with champagne makes the cocktail BLUE LAGOON. Whatever it is they use to colour Curacaos is not destroyed in the human stomach.

I had to be sure that 247, the defining variant of Polynesian mtDNA was not abundant in the Americas.

The Polynesians had come from Asia.

The ancestors of the Polynesians began their epic journey in either coastal China or Taiwan.

For archaeologists, potter with an identifiable style is a real BONUS.

Polynesians sailed off into a void, not only unable to see land but not knowing if there was any.

Fossil evidence in Europe about 45,000 years ago of humans with much lighter skeletons and skulls which are virtually indistinguishable from those of modern Europeans are known as the CRO-MAGNONS.

All modern Europeans trace their ancestry back to the Cro-Magnons.

Neanderthals were NOT our ancestors.

The mule is the fruit of accidental or intentional mating between a male donkey and a female horse.

Mules cannot produce offspring.

The Neanderthals are extinct: completely replaced in Europe by the Cro-Magnons.

When the last Neanderthal died, 28,000 years ago, there was only one human species left to rule the planet (ours).

The Basques have long been considered the last survivors of the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe. The Basques are proud of their distinctiveness. The Basques, the last survivors of the age of the hunter-gatherers, should have a ver different spectrum of mtDNA sequences. The Basques had none of the 7th DNA cluster with the much younger date.

What about the young cluster that was absent from The Basques?
The young cluster split into two branches: from the Balkans across the Hungarian plain AND
The other was confined to the Mediterranean coast as far as Spain, then could be traced around the coast of Portugal and up the Atlantic coast to Western Britain.

The young cluster makes up only 20 percent of Modern Europeans.

The languages spoken in Europe today all stem from a common root called Indo-European. The exceptions are the Basques’ Euskara and the Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian, Lapp and Hungarian.

Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew deduced that the original Indo-European language was spoken in Anatolia (central Turkey) and was then spread to Europe by the first farmers.
The very first estimate of the mutation rate was made by comparing the differences between humans and their closest relative, chimpanzees, and combining this with the time since they last shared a common ancestor, estimated at between four and six million years ago.

Native Americans arrived on the continent about 12,000 years ago.

When tracking back to a common ancestor between two modern people, as Bryan Sykes did when estimating the date of the common ancestor between himself and the Tsar, THERE ARE TWO LINEAGES.

The Y-chromosome has only one purpose in life: TO CREATE MEN.

The world record holder is Moulay Ismail, Emperor of Morocco, who is alleged to have had 700 sons (so presumably as many daughters) by the time he was 49 in 1721. He died in 1727…so there was another 6 years to have some more.
The most prolific woman comes way behind this. She is Fedora Vassilyev, a Russian woman who produced 69 children between 1725 and 1765.

Seven women (The CLAN mothers): Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine.

It is likely that Taiwan is an even earlier origin of the Polynesian clan.

The main occupation of the Ursula clan was ‘finding food to live on’.

Velda (Western Europe)…many of Velda’s children have travelled a long way from Velda’s home in the hills of Cantabria.

Judging from the signs of disease, retained in their bones, the health of the early farmers suffered a sharp decline compared to their hunter-gatherer antecedents.

The descendants of six of the daughters (Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara and Katrine) moved north to reclaim the great European plain.

New evidence from Europe favors our genetic roots being embedded firmly in the Upper Palaeolithic.

Jasmine…one distinctive branch follows the Mediterranean coast to Spain & Portugal, whence it has found its way to the west of Britain (particularly Cornwall, Wales and the west of Scotland).

This book is about EUROPE. Sykes has analyzed and published mtDNA sequences from several thousand people from all corners of the globe. The end result of this analysis is that we have discovered 26 OTHER clans of equivalent status in the rest of the world (26 more women other than the 7 Daughters of Eve).

The clans converge until there is only one ancestor.
She was dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve’.
We are ALL her direct maternal descendants.
Estimates of the size of the human population (150,000 years ago) are bound to be not much more than guesswork, but it may have been in the order of 1 or 2 thousand individuals.

The genetics tells us very clearly that modern humans had their origins in AFRICA within the last 150,000 years.

Four mtDNA clans dominate the genetics of Native Americans.
All four clans have easily reconstructed and have obvious genetic links with people living in SIBERIA or North/Central Asia today.

We will never know all the details of these journeys over thousands of years and thousands of miles, but we can at least imagine them.

The family trees of more modest households are built up around a scaffold of paternal inheritance. The immediate cause of this male monopoly on the past is simply that the written records o which ALL GENEALOGY depends rely heavily on the use of SURNAMES.

We are all a complete mixture; yet at the same time, we are all related.

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Twenty-five years ago today:

January 24, 1984, Tuesday

Today I sold eleven custom-calling features. Hooray for me! Helen called in sick again. Ouch.

I called Paloma but she couldn't meet me for lunch today.
"I have a lot of errands to do," she explained.
Oh well, I ate lunch alone at the Souper Express. The sun was coming through the window and it gave me a nice summer feeling.

Every one at work is looking forward to the conference this Thursday. It could be rewarding. Who knows when it comes to those things? As I browsed the newspapers today the VISA and ITEL companies looked interesting to me.

After a little roast beef dinner at mom's house I returned to my pad. I was pleased to receive a phone call from Paloma.
"Hi Michael, where is the 916 area code?" she asked.
"Oh, that's the Sacramento area," I answered.
She also called to find out what I was doing, so we talked a bit more.
"I am reading my new magazine called CONNOSSIEUR," I told her, hoping she might be impressed with the French word.
We made tentative plans for a dancing date on Thursday night.

After I hung up with Paloma I decided to try calling Nancy DeSilva one more time. Again, she was not at home.

I showered.

Paloma called me again.
"Oh, I just wanted to tell you about that new song by Christopher Cross called 'LAURA'," Paloma continued, "it sounds good."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYEWeBarLww

John and I tried to nap when Barbara Reynolds called me to discuss the possible idea of Art Classes that I might be interested in taking. That was thoughtful of her to think of me that way.

Since I was awake I decided to give Paige LeBris a call. We were open with one another and spoke of our current relationships. She refreshed my memory.
"You know, when you lived in Sacramento you once said 'most girls don't want to get serious'," Paige said.
When she uttered those words I suddenly realized it is 'me' who is not so sure whether to get serious. I began to think to myself as Paige kept talking. There is Tammy. There is Paloma. What do I really want from them? A wife? Not yet. Kids? Not yet.
Paige continued, "I may come up to visit in mid-February. I don't know for sure."

I received another phone call from Bill Snyder. Bill works for the San Francisco Placement Center. He offered me a job at $16,000 annually with some pharmaceutical firm, selling to doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. He said it would entail the sale of some antibiotic type medications.
"Would you like me to pursue this position for you," Bill asked.
"Yes," I said even though I thought the salary was not high enough. I wondered if it included a car and expenses? Bill said he would call me tomorrow at my office. I am too nice. I hate to let him down. Then again, who knows. Time will tell.

Oh yeah, I just remembered how funny I thought it was when Paige told me she thought 'George Jones' was gay during that weekend she had met him. That made me laugh. She is much more connected than I thought.

The end of my evening was shared with my brother, John, and his girlfriend, Sherri. We watched one of my all-time favorite movies (Three Days of the Condor).
It was good to view once again. I love that film.