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20,000 years, then Velda and Tara both at 17,000 years, Katrine slightly younger at 15,000 years
and finally Jasmine at 10,000 years ago.
Working out how long ago these women lived was a big step to discovering what their lives
were like. Now I knew when they lived, could I discover where? I used three tests to find out.
First, knowing the current whereabouts of the clan throughout Europe, I discovered where the clan
was concentrated, reasoning that even after so many thousands of years, this might still be close to
its origin. However, more important was to plot where the clan had accumulated the most
additional mutations. The reasoning here was that the clan would have had longest to ‘age’ close to
its origin, where the clan mother herself lived. To give you an example, the clan of Velda reaches
its highest frequency in two places – northern Spain and among the Saami of northern Scandinavia.
But it is far more varied, in the sense that it has accumulated far more extra mutations, in Spain than
in Lapland. So I placed Velda herself in northern Spain, rather than in the far north of Norway and
Sweden. Which brings me on to the third test. The location of the clan mother has to have been
habitable at the time. In Velda’s case, we know from the archaeological records that people were
living in northern Spain 17,000 years ago, the date estimated from the additional mutations in the
clan, but they were certainly not living in northern Scandinavia, which was under several
kilometres of ice. By the same process, the other clan mothers were located to Greece (Ursula), the
Caucasus mountains (Xenia), southern France (Helena), northern Italy (Katrine and Tara) and
finally Syria in the Middle East (Jasmine).
With information from climate records and the archaeological evidence, I was able to find out
what conditions must have been like for these women living at these locations at those times in the
past. I discovered what their landscape was like, what sort of diet they had, what age they reached
and, armed with this information, I wrote imagined lives for them.
Since they were published, the response has been both surprising and intriguing. My laboratory
was overwhelmed by requests from all over the world from people who wanted to know from
which of these women they were themselves descended. We had already repeated the process
worldwide and found a total of thirty-six equivalent clans, so we could deal with requests from
anywhere. We could not possibly handle this demand in the lab, if only because we were prevented
from carrying on any commercial activities by the rules of our principal sponsors, the Wellcome
Trust. So the University rapidly formed a spinoff company, Oxford Ancestors, to perform this
service. But that is of only passing interest compared to the quite extraordinary underlying emotion
that the concept clearly aroused. It proved to me that to many people, of which I am one, the idea
that within each of our body cells we carry a tangible fragment from an ancestor from thousands of
years ago is both astonishing and profound. That these pieces of DNA have travelled over
thousands of miles and thousands of years to get to us, virtually unchanged, from our remote
ancestors still fills me with awe, and I am not alone. One unexpected effect is that when two
people discover that they are both in the same clan, they really do feel like close relatives, like
cousins or siblings. I have seen this happen time and again, and indeed on the Oxford Ancestors
website one of the most popular activities is discovering genetic relatives and then swapping
personal information and often finding uncanny similarities of personality and circumstance. Even
if this is all retrospective wisdom, after the test rather than before, the strength of feeling is very
strong. There are even Jasmine parties organized by members of the clan.
I recently tested the DNA of our Vice-Chancellor, the executive head of Oxford University – I