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.

The title of the book comes
from the statement that all Americans with a European ancestor all come from one of seven clans,
thus the seven daughters of Eve. The seven daughters names are Tara, Helena, Katrine, Xenia,
Jasmine, Velda, and Ursula. Ursula is the oldest of the clans, some 45,000 years old, Helena clan
is the most prodigious, and Katrine Clan is the youngest of the daughters at 15,000.

mDNA or
mitochondrial DNA only changes about once in 10,000 years therefore, you can trace where your
daughter clan comes from via this testing of DNA samples. This makes for a very compelling and
engaging story about human evolution.

What I found to be most exciting was how the author found
out whether the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ever could have interbred. In that case, mDNA would be an
excellent reporter of these encounters, since while the offspring would have an equal mixture of
nuclear DNA from both parents, their mDNA would come from their mother. The problem with this is
that we don't know how many chromosomes the Neanderthal had, if they had forty-eight and Cro-Magnon
forty-six, same as Homo Sapiens. You'd get via the mating only forty-seven chromosomes, healthy
offspring but sterile.

This makes me wonder if we keep doing genetic engineering on the human
genome could we make a generation that could be as different as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon and could
no cross breed with Homo sapiens. Only time will ber witness to what man will do in the
future.

Another interesting story within this book is how the author proved that the population of
the Pacific Ocean islands started from China and the population worked its way away from China...
this counters Thor Heyerdahl's claim the the population came from South America. I remember reading
about Heyerdahl's adventure on Kon-Tiki and he almost lost Kon-Tiki to an over friendly Whale
Shark.

This is an easily readable book that makes good logical scientific sense. I found this
book to be interestingly engaging making yu want to read till the end.

However, there is one gene, the
mitochondrial DNA, which is preserved almost untouched through countless generations for many
thousand years. And it is transferred exclusively along the maternal lines.

Dr. Sykes's book
traces the ancient ancestry of all Europeans, reducing their multiple lineages to just seven women
who lived scores of thousands years ago. They are our genetic proto-mothers. If you are curious
enough, you can even try to find out whose descendant you are.

These seven women, in their turn,
are remotely connected to a woman who lived long, long before them somewhere in Africa, and who was
the possible direct ancestor of all now living human beings. So, in a sense, we are all indeed
brothers and sisters. And our common relatives lived much more recently than previously
thought.

"The Seven Daughters of Eve" destroys any biological notions of race or nationality,
demoting them to pure statistical abstractions. The mitochondrial trace is, of course, just one of
numerous other possible lineages - remember, there had to be an unbroken sequence of daughters all
until your mother for this gene to end up in your body. But it only makes the point stronger: should
we try other routes, the number of our inter-relations will only increase. We are even more closely
related than the mitochondrial story suggests.

Dr. Sykes did not invent either mitochondrial DNA
analysis or population genetics; he just combined the two, and, using these powerful tools, made
several important discoveries. For example, his findings confirmed the Asian provenance of
Polynesians, as opposed to American origin (which was a controversial but vocal hypothesis,
advocated, among others, by Thor Heyerdal); disproved the well-established view that the original
population of Europe was overwhelmed and supplanted by intruders from Near East; and showed that all
modern Europeans - actually, all modern people - come from a common (and recent) African source, and
did not develop independently in Asia, Europe and on other continents from apelike ancestors. The
Neanderthals, who lived in Europe side by side with humans of modern built, and even had slightly
bigger brains than we do, did not leave any progeny; they died out completely. We are not their
descendants. We come from Africa.

There are other amazing stories, and each of them made
front-page headlines at one point or the other; the Oxford-based team of Dr. Sykes discovered living
descendants of the Iceman, found in the Alps, and of the Cheddar Man, found in English caves; and
they contributed to the identification of the remains of the Russian royal family, executed by
Bolsheviks in 1918.

It is evident that Dr. Sykes is a brilliant person with a thing for the
limelight. His narrative skills are beyond praise. He manages to make genetic experiments
understandable and clear to anyone with just the vaguest recollections of school chemistry. He
recounts stories from his own life without irritating the reader. He even manages to weave in a hint
of dark secrets without revealing them - what had happened between him and his assistant Erika, who
later emerged as his bitter enemy? The subject matter of the book is, after all, a detective story -
a story of lost ancestors and rivalling schools of anthropologists; but it was so easy to make it
dull and tedious. Sykes avoids this trap completely. Brilliant.

His only serious flop is when he
starts describing hypothetical lives of the seven women who lived eons ago. It's not very good
fiction; and - it's fiction, which is completely out of place in a book like this. And he says so
little about modern descendants of each of these women - which for me was the most interesting part
of the story - that it is remarkably anticlimactic.

Apart from this minor nuisance, the book is a
gem. I would love to see any kind of follow-up, because it is very hard for anyone outside the
genetics to understand whether the methods Dr. Sykes used were foolproof. But if the story of Eve's
daughters is made of scientific facts, it heralds a dawn of a new history for us - which would not
destroy or refute existing history, but serve as a counterpoint and a different outlook on eternal
questions: where are we from, who are we, where are we going.