One of the most dramatic stories of genetic breakthrough since Wayne Watson’s The Double Helix-a function whose scientific and cultural reverberations can be discussed for years to come. In 1994 Teacher Bryan Sykes, a leading world specialist on DNA and individual evolution, was called directly into examine the frozen remains of a man caught in glacial glaciers in northern Italy. Information of both Snow Man’s finding and his age, which was put at over five thousand years, fascinated researchers and papers about The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Research That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry across the world. But what produced Sykes’s story particularly revelatory was his effective identification of the genetic descendant of the Glaciers Man, a woman living in Great Britain today. How was Sykes in a position to find a living relative of a man who died thousands of years ago?

In The Seven Daughters of Eve, he gives us a firsthand account of his research right into a exceptional gene, which passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line. After plotting thousands of DNA sequences from all around the globe, Sykes found that they clustered around a handful of distinct groups. Among Europeans and North American Caucasians, you can find, in fact, just seven.