The Seven Daughters of Eve is a thrilling work of science that reveals how biological research can enrich our tangled lives. It is a book that chronicles many of the most exciting developments in genetics over the past decade by a man who is not only a brilliant scientist but also a gifted and thoroughly engaging writer. It ultimately demonstrates how much more we still have to discover about the absorbing story of human evolution.

One of the most dramatic stories of genetic discovery since James Watson's The Double Helix—a work whose scientific and cultural reverberations will be discussed for years to come. 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. News of both the Ice Man's discovery and his age, which was put at over five thousand years, fascinated scientists and newspapers throughout the world. But what made Sykes's story particularly revelatory was his successful identification of a genetic descendant of the Ice Man, a woman living in Great Britain today. How was Sykes able to locate 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 into a remarkable gene, which passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line. After plotting thousands of DNA sequences from all over the world, Sykes found that they clustered around a handful of distinct groups. Among Europeans and North American Caucasians, there are, in fact, only seven. This conclusion was staggering: almost everyone of native European descent, wherever they may live throughout the world, can trace their ancestry back to one of seven women, the Seven Daughters of Eve. Naming them Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine, and Jasmine, Sykes has created portraits of their disparate worlds by mapping the migratory patterns followed by millions of their ancestors. In reading the stories of these seven women, we learn exactly how our origins can be traced, how and where our ancient genetic ancestors lived, and how we are each living proof of the almost indestructible strands of DNA, which have survived over so many thousands of years. Indeed, The Seven Daughters of Eve is filled with dramatic stories: from Sykes's identification, using DNA samples from two living relatives, of the remains of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaress Alexandra, to the Caribbean woman whose family had been sold into slavery centuries before and whose ancestry Sykes was able to trace back to the Eastern coast of central Africa. Ultimately, Sykes's investigation reveals that, as a race, what humans have in common is more deeply embedded than what separates us.

This work is a remarkably well written narrative of Sykes' cutting edge research into the ancestry of modern humans using mitochondrial DNA. Unlike the DNA in the chromosomes of cell nuclei, which we inherit from both of our parents, mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from our mothers. It is also highly stable over time, which permits geneticists to determine with almost mathematical certainty the matrilineal genealogy of any human being on earth.

To students of history, prehistory, archaeology and linguistics the conclusions he draws from his research are absolutely stunning. First, he concludes that all modern humans (beyond reasonable mathematical certainty) are descended from a single woman - Sykes calls her, perhaps tongue in cheek, "Mitochondrial Eve." Second, every person on earth is, in turn, the descendant of one of only 33 women, who were the matrilineal descendants of "Eve." The book focuses on seven of these women who are the matrilineal ancestors of virtually every native European. These seven he calls, again perhaps tongue in cheek, "The Daughters of Eve." Third, the oldest of the "daughters of Eve" lived only about 45,000 years ago, the youngest within the past 10,000 years.

Some additional thoughts:

1. As with all knowledge, take this with a little grain of salt. Today's axioms in science may be disproved or reevaluated in a month, a year or a century. This is cutting edge stuff, and there are likely many surprises to come.

2. Sykes is at his descriptive best when dealing with the fascinating details of his own research and field work. His writing style breaks down somewhat when he attempts to write imaginative Clan of the Cave Bear-like chapters on the lives of the seven "daughters of Eve." I skipped heavily in this section.

3. I am a little surprised to sense a commercial-like ambience on Sykes' website, oxfordancestors.com. For a fee his organization will test your DNA and tell you which "daughter of Eve" you are descended from. This doesn't exactly lead me to doubt his research, but confirms my suspicions that Sykes has many more skills as a writer and pitchman than most of his colleagues.

4. Don't be misled by the title - this is not your standard Sunday School or Bible Class religious tract. Those who believe that every word of the Bible - through all of the twists and turns of 3,000 years of copying, editing, compiling and translation - is infallible, will perhaps find their faith challenged. On the other hand, those who are not Bible literalists may find some edification here, as well.

88 of 90 found the following review helpful:


Top-notch scientific survey, with bizarre fictional chapters  Nov 14, 2002 By D. Cloyce Smith
The first 200 pages of this book exemplify the best of scientific journalism: the author describes a difficult subject matter clearly and succinctly for those who don`t know much about genetics, he presents each scientific investigation as if it were a detective story, and he conveys his excitement and enthusiasm for his work. Anyone who reads this book will come away with enough knowledge about mitochondrial DNA and prehistoric humans to understand today's headlines. Sykes explains how DNA testing identified the bodies of the Romanovs (laying to rest fanciful stories about how they survived the Russian Revolution), he rebuts Thor Heyerdahl's theories of migration, and he presents a convincing case that all humans of European ancestry are descended from seven women. (He also discusses the possible ancestries of non-Europeans, for which--so far--there is far less evidence.)

Given how compelling and fun the majority of the book is, nothing prepares the reader for what comes next: seven chapters containing fanciful and completely fictional reconstructions of each of the "daughters of Eve." Sykes admits he cannot even be sure of where or when each of these women may have lived, but he reconstructs little soap operas out of the nonexistent facts of their lives; these New Age-inspired outtakes from "Clan of the Cave Bear" do not succeed even as good fiction. "Xenia was born in the wind and snow of late spring." "This year Helena's father was going to try a spear-thrower and detachable point for the first time." "Velda had a strong artistic streak." "Tara had always been a fast runner and her father, fit though he was, was gaining on her slowly." (Tara even "invents" a boat.) He fabricates entire families and children, births and deaths, relationships and tragedies for each of these women, even though he knows for certain only that they each had two daughters. For the most part, I found these chapters embarrassing and unreadable.

If Sykes wanted to speculate for the reader where, when, and how each of these women lived, he certainly could have done so in a scientific framework and made it interesting. For example, he could have presented what we know from the archaeological record about their approximate eras and possible environs. (I would in particular like to know what evidence, if any, scientists have uncovered to imagine that prehistoric societies featured mostly monogamous relationships, which figure prominently in Sykes`s stories.)

Fortunately, Sykes turns his attention back to the science in the last two chapters. Overall, except for the fictional chapters, this is a first-rate survey. I do wish, however, that the author had added a bibliographical essay or general notes, both to support his arguments and to suggest where readers might turn, now that he's managed to enlighten us on the subject.

147 of 165 found the following review helpful:


Sykes' secret  Apr 22, 2002 By Steve Sailer
Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters Of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry just might have what it takes to become another Carl Sagan or Louis Leakey - that rare scientist with both the scientific skills and genius for self-promotion needed to make himself a household name.

Sykes has many talents, as well as some useful vices. As this book shows, he's a fine popular science writer. He also has a sizable ego and a flair for self-dramatization that annoys other scientists but appeals to the public. He often tends to portray himself in The Seven Daughters as a Galileo single-handedly doing battle with the benighted masses of anthropologists and geneticists like Stanford's distinguished L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, who, according to Sykes' not exactly neutral account, just didn't want to admit the importance of his mitochondrial DNA research.

Most importantly, though, Sykes has grasped a simple fact about population genetics that resounds emotionally with the average person, yet has largely eluded most learned commentators. Namely, genes are the stuff of genealogy. Each individual's genes are descended from some people, but not from some other people. Thus, Sykes discovered, people often feel a sense of family pride and loyalty to others, living and dead, with whom they share some DNA.

Further, if you read between his lines, you can readily understand why - despite all the propaganda that "race does not exist" - humanity will never get over its obsession with race: Race is Family. A racial group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree.

In fact, people are so interested in tracing their family connections that Sykes has gone into business for himself. He started a for-profit firm OxfordAncestors.com. "Discover your ancestral mother," he advertises. For [money] he'll trace your DNA (actually, a particular set of your specialized mitochondrial DNA) back to one of the seven Stone Age women who are the ancestors in the all-female line of 95% of all white Europeans.

Sykes calls these "the Seven Daughters of Eve." (He's piggybacking on the much-publicized concept of the primordial "Mitochondrial Eve" from whom all women are supposedly descended.) One of his sales slogans: "Which daughter was your ancestor?"

(If you happen to be from a non-European race, well, Sykes has got 27 other matrilineal clans sketchily worked out for you. Still, the Eurocentric, cashocentric Sykes tends to treat those non-Caucasian ancient mothers as if they were The Twenty-Seven Stepdaughters of Eve.)

Some scientists are appalled by Sykes' shameless entrepreneurialism. Myself, I think that the self-effacing saints like the late William D. Hamilton (the greatest theoretical biologist of the 20th Century and the genius behind more famous biologists like Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins) and the attention-seekers like Sykes both serve useful purposes in advancing science.

The key to Sykes' business is that within a particular set of stable "junk DNA" in the mitochondrial code, mutations happen every 10,000 years on average. Last spring, in "Darwinophobia I," I explained why junk genes are so useful to geneticists studying individual or racial genealogies, yet so useless to the bodies they inhabit since they don't do anything. But these genes' uselessness means they aren't subject to Darwinian selection. So they are passed on unchanged, except by random mutations.

Of course, precisely because population geneticists like Sykes and Cavalli-Sforza study only useless genes that don't do anything, they don't have anything credible to say about useful genes, like the ones that influence IQ. To learn about nonjunk genes, you need to read behavior geneticists like twin expert Nancy Segal or intelligence gene finder Robert Plomin.

Without going into the technical details, a study of mitochondrial DNA allows you to track the line of purely female descent in your genealogy. This is the opposite of the "paternal line of descent" by which your surname came down to you. (The male line can be tracked through tests of the Y chromosome.) The maternal line is your mother's mother's mother's etc. - all female, all the way back.

You can visualize your maternal line this way. Mentally lay out your family tree, with you at the bottom. Place your father above you to the left and your mother above you to the right. Fill in all your grandparents, great-grandparents, and so forth, always keeping the males to the left in each pair. Then, the matrilineal line of descent is the extreme right edge of your family tree (just as your last name comes from the extreme left edge).

Sykes has put together a chart of these functionally trivial but genealogically interesting mutations that allow him to state, for example, that the woman who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov (who was portrayed by Ingrid Bergman in her Oscar-winning performance in Anastasia) could not have been the daughter of the Czarina murdered by Lenin.

(Of course, considering how many surviving members of the Romanov extended family she fooled into thinking she was Anastasia, the possibility remains that she might still have been some kind of biological relative of the Romanovs. Perhaps she was fathered illegitimately by a member of the Czar's side of the family. Neither Sykes' matrilineal test, nor a Y chromosome patrilineal test can rule that out.)

Sykes has identified seven mitochondrial mutations of particular genealogical importance. Logically, for each mutation there existed an individual woman.

Who were these seven women? They weren't the only women alive at the time. They probably weren't even the first ones to be born with their distinctive mutant junk gene. Each of the seven daughters is simply the first after the appearance of their mutation to have a daughter who had a daughter who had a daughter and on and on in an unbroken line of female descent down to the present day. They are special only in the rather arbitrary genealogical sense of each being on the extreme right edge of the family tree of tens of millions of modern Europeans.

19 of 19 found the following review helpful:


Highly readable account of the flow of population, not always scientific, but excellent overall  Sep 25, 2005 By A. Woodley "Patroness, Janeites, the Austen list"
I can see why some people object to Sykes' book, "Seven Daughters of Eve". Towards the end he flows into what can only be described as a mini 'clan of the cave bear' - with 7 novellettes being written. Yet this is a small part of what is overall an enormously readable and fascinating book.

This book is a dual journey - the story of his research into Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) , which starts with the discovery of the iceman in the alps in 1991 and the parallel journey in which he traces some of the genetic lines of various peoples through the world, proving - and at times disproving - prevailing theories.

Essentially the discovery that mtDNA was passed down directly from mother to her children through history meant that it was relatively straightforward issue to trace back genetic lines to the dawn of civillisation, and indeed as Sykes does at the end of the book, to the dawn of man - or in this case woman. It was this item of our genetic make-up which his research has helped to pinpoint mysteries such as the identity of the last Tsar of Russia and the mysterious woman, Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the youngest of his daugthers, Anastacia.

MtDNA is unique - it is not actually part of the genetic building blocks of the human,therefore is not part of the exchange of genetic material at fertillization. however it is subject to mutation - the approximate rate of one mutation every 1000 years. His research into this matter allowed him to first trace the polynesian migration from its source in China through various islands finally to New Zealand, Easter Island and even Hawaii. This proof helped back up a plethora of physical resarch on these migrations, but disproved Thor Heyerdahl's theorys.

Sykes research of what happened in genetic migration in Europe is a bit more confusing. It was also more controversial as it went against the established theorys. Sykes mtDNA research indicated that the hunter/gatherers of Europe had not been overwhelmed by the Eastern Farmers who had been thought to have 'flooded' Europe. MtDNA indicated that some 80% of Europeans were descended from those original hunter/gatherers. The invasion, had been more of a gentle mixing of cultures and ways. However, simply because his research showed this didn't mean it was universally accepted, and for some time he had to provide enormous extra effort to back up his claims. His relentless pursuit of different means to do this is inspiring.

The book is generally in layman's terms and is easy to follow - there were occassions when it completely lost me (the model they used to analyse the spread of mtDNA in modern day europe was completely over my head - a square - apparently, but I couldn't see how it worked). Also the magnifying factor for making DNA replicate faster was not easy to understand. Luckily, neither is necessary to understand in detail, so much as in theory. However mostly the process' and the paths he followed were easy to comprehend.

Sykes writes well, which makes this a good read. The highs and the lows of his research, how he and his team thought up new processes, supported their research and finally became the accepted norm.

I also really enjoyed the last part which went into fiction of what these first 7 clan mothers lived like. He clearly has used archaeological research into these periods and probably finds, to colour these accounts. I felt they brought out just how life was in their time. What they ate, how they lived, the dangers, the possible culture, their life and their deaths. These 7 women did not all live at the same time, and all 7 represent a differnt region. They were spread from 45,000 to 20,000 years ago and from 7 different places in Europe. However it is there mtDNA which now dominates Europe - almost all the population is descended through their mother from one of these 7 women.

Highly recommended reading, an approachable, lively scientific read for the non-scientist

19 of 19 found the following review helpful:


Some Interesting Parts, Some Ego, & Some Ridiculousness  Apr 20, 2005 By Daniel R. Sanderman
Bryan Sykes's book, THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE, seems to strike nothing but controversy. Both his defenders and his detractors accuse him of a variety of things and, for the most part, they are all true. Is his book well written? Yes, it is. I was extremely entertained while reading this book and I do not think, as some have argued, that he fails to explain the science correctly. There is nothing that is particularly challenging in this book and I believe that you can finish it in a couple of sittings if you wanted. However, on the flip side, the book was a little too "pop-science" for my tastes. I would have enjoyed more science and I think, if nothing else, we deserve to have his opponents' views fleshed out in more detail. Sykes paints his opponents as if they were ridiculous individuals, holding ridiculously unfounded views. As it stands now, Sykes pulls you along under his lab coat, making you his very special cohort as he battles the ignorant world of unbelievers (also known as the rest of the scientific community). The truth is, having read some of the secondary literature on this relatively new science, that there is still quite a controversy surrounding the issue of whether mitochondrial DNA can provide us the kind of "rough and ready" answers that Sykes claims it does. However, you would never know there was any remaining controversy after reading this book.

Like many readers, I too got tired of hearing about Sykes's exploits. In his own mind, he simply cannot be wrong and he views the rest of the scientific community as an unethical body lying in wait to tear down his theories. THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE also lacks a really coherent storyline tying the work together. Sykes's essentially provides us with a chronological story about his journey into this new field of research, but his storyline jumps around and flashes from event to event. Moreover, the final seven chapters on each of the "seven daughters" are horrendous. These chapters are simply awful and give a false impression of realism. In these chapters, Sykes imagines what the lives must have been like for each of our genetic parents. Of course, Sykes was not there and no one has any sense of what this ancient, pre-recorded history must have been like. But that does not seem to stop Sykes from sewing a line of bull for each one. Finally, if you visit his website, you might be turned off (as I was) by the moneymaking machine that he has created around his work. I guess you can't really fault a guy for making a buck off of his research, but it still seems a bit tacky.

In the end, I would recommend reading THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE because it is an interesting premise: What if we can trace our genetic roots back thousands of years in order to better understand our roots? Sykes will keep you engaged throughout his solo journey and you will learn a lot in the process. Just skip the seven chapters near the end in which Sykes imagines the lives of each of the "seven daughters."

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