The Seven Daughters of Eve Read Free

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 17,000 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 Balkans in the First World War to the far islands of the South Pacific. It takes us from the present time back to the beginnings of agriculture and beyond, to our ancestors who hunted with the Neanderthals. Amazingly, we all carry this history in our genes, patterns of DNA that have come down to us virtually unchanged from our distant ancestors – ancestors who are no longer just an abstract entity but real people who lived in conditions very different from those we enjoy today, who survived them and brought up their children. Our genes were there. They have come down to us over the millennia. They have travelled over land and sea, through mountain and forest. All of us, from the most powerful to the weakest, from the fabulously wealthy to the miserably poor, carry in our cells the survivors of these fantastic journeys – our genes. We should be very proud of them.
    My part in this story begins at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, where I am a professor of genetics. The Institute is part of Oxford University, though geographically and temperamentally removed from the arcane world of the college cloisters. It is full of doctors and scientists who are working away applying the new technologies of genetics and molecular biology to the field of medicine. There are immunologists trying to make a vaccine against AIDS, oncologists working out how to kill tumours by cutting off their blood supply, haematologists striving to cure the inherited anaemias which disable or kill millions each year in the developing world, microbiologists unravelling the secrets of meningitis and many others. It is an exciting place to work. I am based at the Institute because I used to work on inherited diseases of the skeleton, in particular on a horrible condition called osteogenesis imperfecta , better known as brittle bone disease. Babies born with the most severe form of this disease sometimes have bones so weak that when they take their first breath, all the ribs fracture and they suffocate and die. We were researching