by Bryan Sykes
While she was nursing their first baby, he followed the other men into the hills after the gazelle and wild sheep. He took his spear with him but had no illusions about killing anything; it was just to look the part. His real intention was to collect and bring back to the village as many wild grass seeds as he could. He had taken with him two large sacks made of stitched gazelle skin. He found a hillside where the grass was thick on the ground and the seed heads were already ripe. With one hand he gathered up a bunch of grasses, held them in the mouth of the sack and shook them hard. Most of the seeds fell off the heads and into the bag. It only took him an hour to fill both sacks, and he walked back to the village while his companions were still trying to kill their first gazelle.
When he got home his first job was to try to break off the brittle hairs that were still attached to the seeds. He did this with the grain still in the sack, rolling a large stone round and round on top of it. Then he poured the contents out on to the ground. The hairs blew away in the breeze and left a good pile of largely hairless seeds. He soaked these in water for a few hours, then handed Jasmine a handful. They were hardly delicious, but they were all right – though the husks still stuck in her teeth. He tried grinding the dried seeds between two stones, and this did crack off at least some of the hard outer skins which, like the hairs, dispersed in the wind. But he saved his best piece of ingenuity till last.
He had kept back a few handfuls of seeds to see if he could grow them near to the village. He already knew that the grains germinated into new seedlings. People had been bringing back pouches of wild grain for years, though not on the same scale, and he had noticed how seeds dropped accidentally on a damp patch of ground would soon produce a small green shoot which in time became a new plant with its own seed head. But he was going to try to grow wild grass systematically. With Jasmine at his side he walked down towards the river and found a piece of level land a few hundred yards from the near bank. It had a light covering of weeds and he set them alight to clear the ground. Then he took a stone scraper and scored a line in the soil. He put in a row of seeds and kicked over the topsoil to cover them up; he already knew that the village sparrows had developed a taste for grain. He planted ten rows before he had exhausted his supply of seeds and they headed back to the village.
Next day they returned to the plot. It was exactly as they had left it. It rained for the next few days and still nothing happened. Then, a week later, Jasmine took her baby down to the plot – and there, struggling out of the ground, were ten rows of tiny green shoots. She rushed back to tell her man, but he had not yet returned from another fruitless hunting trip. From that day on, Jasmine and her family spent as much time as possible by the plot. Together they cleared some more land and planted more seeds from the hills. They planted whatever could be eaten. Wild varieties of chickpea and lentil joined the original wild wheat. They showed off their plantings to the rest of the village, who expressed a range of views from the enthusiastic to the downright hostile. They didn’t claim that it would replace the gazelle or the pistachio as their staple diet, only that it would supplement it and make them less dependent on one food source. There was no denying that the grain growing on the plot could be eaten. Grinding it between large stones and separating the husks made the resultant mash far more palatable.
Jasmine and her man had also noticed that some of their plants produced seeds that stayed attached to the stem. This was after a fierce wind had stripped the seeds from most of the plants and severely reduced the yield. But a few plants had withstood this battering. On these plants, the seeds were stuck to the stem with less brittle attachments. When these seeds were planted, they wondered, would they grow into similar plants? So they tried it. And it worked. Little by little, year by year, they selected the plants with the attached seeds, the plumper grains, the stouter stems and took their seeds for planting. Within only a few years, the wheat in their plot no longer looked exactly like the wild varieties. It had been artificially selected for the most desirable properties.
By now most of the sceptics in the village had changed their minds, especially after the year when the gazelle failed to appear. A few other enthusiasts had taken to planting out their own plots using seeds given to them by Jasmine. Visitors from nearby villages were equally impressed, and begged Jasmine to let them take a few seeds back with them. The idea quickly spread around the region. By now Jasmine’s man had given up pretending to hunt altogether. He was enjoying the sedentary life. They had five children, rather too many for his liking, but what could he do about it? Jasmine just kept getting pregnant. Even before her first child was completely weaned she conceived again. At least there was now sufficient food coming off the plots, which they had enlarged many times since they had started.
They heard that someone from another village, six days away to the north, had found a way of keeping wild goats. Apparently they had captured two kids on a hunt and taken them back as pets for the children. When they grew too big to play with, instead of killing and eating them, which had been their original intention, they tied them to a wooden stick to prevent them escaping and let them browse on whatever vegetation they could reach. A year later one of them produced a kid. Now they had a dozen goats of various ages. When they needed meat, they killed a goat. It was a lot easier than hunting them. The idea of growing your own food was definitely catching on.
Things were going very well for Jasmine and her family. They had a large plot by the river and took on some of the other women and children of the village to help them, rewarding them with a share of the produce. More and more people took up this new way of life. It had great appeal. Anyone could join in – children, mothers with children, grannies. There was always some job to be done, whether it was getting rid of weeds, doing a bit of watering or cleaning a new piece of land. You didn’t have to depend entirely on the harvest because the oak and pistachio trees were still there. The gazelle could still be hunted. It was a perfect combination.
As Jasmine sat looking at their field with the wheat ready for the harvest, little did she realize that she and others like her had started a revolution that would change the world for ever. Within only a few generations after her, villages throughout the region had switched their way of life from one of hunting and gathering to one of herding goats, sheep and then cattle, and to growing domesticated crops. Selective breeding had transformed the plants and animals from their wild state to the service of humans within a remarkably short space of time. Sheep grew longer, woolly coats, which could be spun into garments. Goats provided a regular supply of milk. Cattle, domesticated from the ferocious wild aurochs, became docile suppliers of meat, milk and traction.
With food production and now the landscape increasingly under human control, the population increased relentlessly. This was partly due to a more consistent source of nutrition, but also because the new cereals, high in carbohydrates, removed the hormonal check on ovulation during lactation that had ensured a long gap between children. The increasing population was not all good news. It led to overcrowding and the arrival of epidemics of infectious disease which had never had a chance to take hold in the widely spaced bands of the hunter–gatherers. The close association of humans and animals after domestication enabled animal viruses, harmless to their hosts, to spread into the human population. Measles, tuberculosis and smallpox were caught from cattle, influenza and whooping cough from domesticated pigs and ducks. Judging from the signs of disease retained in their bones, the health of the early farmers suffered a sharp decline compared to their hunter–gatherer antecedents. Moreover, as people eventually abandoned hunting altogether and came to depend exclusively on a few crops and animals, they were vulnerable to famines when plants or animals failed due to drought or disease. But still the population grew. Nothing could stop the spread of farming. A thousand years after Jasmine, the unstoppable agricultural economy had crossed the Aegean from Anatolia and arrived in the plains of Thessaly in northern Greece. From the scarcity of hunter–gathe
rer archaeological sites of the same date in the region it looks as if this part of Europe was empty of humans at the time, until the farmers settled in. But elsewhere in Europe the hunter–gatherers were still doing well.
As the Great Ice Age ended, the southern edge of the tundra slowly receded. The rich game went with it, followed by the humans. The descendants of Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara and Katrine moved north to reclaim the great European plain. Behind them, the warmer climate encouraged the growth of trees and the landscape became one of thick deciduous forests with pines growing on the hills and mountains. Though not so productive as the tundra, these lands were still fully occupied by humans who looked increasingly to marine resources, fish and shellfish, to complement the reduced availability of game.
Old maps plot the spread of agriculture using large arrows curving across the surface of the globe with all the purpose of a well-planned military campaign. They show Europe embraced in a pincer movement from the bridgehead first established on the Greek mainland. On the southern flank, seaborne insurgents spread along the Adriatic and Mediterranean coast as far as Portugal. Meanwhile a massed attack on northern Europe was orchestrated from the Balkans as legions of farmers poured out of Hungary and occupied the continent from Belgium and France in the west to the Ukraine in the east. What hope did the locals have in face of this massive onslaught? But there was no such onslaught. Careful analysis of the archaeology of the early farming sites has certainly plotted the direction and timing of the spread of agriculture. These sites are easy enough to recognize, pottery and various agricultural implements, and the outline of huts in the ground, being among the obvious signs. But, as we saw with Jasmine’s story, the whole essence of agriculture is that it can radiate quickly by word of mouth and by a few seeds and animals. It is an idea. It can spread. There is no need to insist that the spread of agriculture took the form of a large-scale invasion.
Recent archaeological investigations have shown that people took up farming at different rates in different places. The inhabitants of Denmark, for example, where the seafood harvest was rich enough to support a sedentary and prolific population, did not adopt agriculture on a large scale for over a thousand years after their neighbours only a hundred miles to the south. In other places, like Portugal, farming sites appeared not far from contemporary hunter–gatherer sites happily subsisting on the rich marine resources of the Tagus estuary. This does looks like a new injection of people, probably only small in number, that brought the knowledge of farming by sea to new lands.
The new evidence from Europe which this book presents argues strongly in favour of our genetic roots being embedded firmly in the Upper Palaeolithic. Six of the seven women who are our ancestral mothers and whose imagined lives we have glimpsed were part of that resident population. They knew every inch of their landscape. They had good contacts with each other. They traded raw materials and finished goods. They were opportunists. If it suited them to farm, then they would take it up. It only needed someone to teach them; and among their tutors were the descendants of Jasmine. The mere fact that her descendants are alive and well and living in Europe is proof of the substantial genetic input from the Near East – substantial, but not overwhelming. Less than one-fifth of modern Europeans are in Jasmine’s clan. The rest of us, with only a few exceptions, have deeper roots in Europe. At some time in the past our ancestors switched from hunting and foraging to embrace the farming economy. In more recent times some of the descendants of these ancestors abandoned the land for an urban existence sustained by the machine age. That is just another of the transformations that take place as people make individual decisions to take them to a better life.
Today, just under 17 per cent of native Europeans that we have sampled are in the clan of Jasmine. Unlike the other six clans, the descendants of Jasmine are not found evenly distributed throughout Europe. One distinctive branch follows the Mediterranean coast to Spain and Portugal, whence it has found its way to the west of Britain where it is particularly common in Cornwall, Wales and the west of Scotland. The other branch shadows the route through central Europe taken by the farmers who first cultivated the fertile river valleys and then the plains of northern Europe. Both branches live, even now, close to the routes mapped out by their farming ancestors as they made their way gradually into Europe from the Near East.
22
THE WORLD
The imagined lives of these seven women raise many questions. Were they the only women around at the time? We have seen very clearly that they were not. They lived and died among many other women. Ursula, for example, the oldest of our ancestral mothers, had many contemporaries. But she is the only one of them to whom a substantial proportion, about 11 per cent of modern Europeans, are connected by a direct maternal link. The maternal lines of her contemporaries did not make it through to the present day. At some point between then and now they petered out as women either had no children or had only sons. It is very likely that some of their genes which reside in the cell nucleus and which can swap between the sexes at every generation have made it through to today. But they will have arrived by a tortuous route which is impossible to trace. Many of Xenia’s contemporaries, though not Xenia herself, would have been maternal descendants of the earlier Ursula. Likewise Helena, Velda, Tara and Katrine will have mixed with members of older clans. And when the descendants of Jasmine arrived from the Near East with other agricultural pioneers, they would have passed on their knowledge to the descendants of the other six women.
Figure 6
Another frequently asked and reasonable question is whether there was anything special about these women, anything that would make them stand out from the others around them. Sadly, the answer is no – other than the necessary condition that each had to have two surviving daughters, there was probably nothing remarkable about them. They were not queens or empresses – such titles did not exist. They may or may not have been especially beautiful or heroic. They were essentially ordinary. Their lives were very different from ours today, but within their own time and people they would not have been exceptional. They had no idea they were to become clan mothers and feature in this book, just as any woman alive today with two daughters has the potential to be the founder of a clan which, were this book to be rewritten in fifty thousand years’ time, might feature prominently on the cover. By then one or other of the seven clans may have drifted into extinction, to be replaced by others the founders of which are living somewhere today.
But perhaps the most intriguing enquiry is about the ancestors of the seven women themselves. Amazingly, we have also been able to discover the genealogy of these seven women. We can track back from the present day to reconstruct the mitochondrial DNA sequences of the seven clan mothers, then work out the ancestral relationship between them. I have retraced these connections in Figure 6. Each of the circles represents a particular mitochondrial DNA sequence, and the area of each circle is proportional to the number of people who share this sequence. The larger the circle, the more people share this sequence. The lines joining the circles represent mutations in mitochondrial DNA, and the longer the line between two circles, the more mutations separate the sequences that they represent. The figure plots out the exact relationships, so far as we can tell, between the different sequences found in Europe today. Each of the pathways is a maternal lineage traced by DNA. We can not only see the relationships between sequences within the same clan, but also make out the relationships between clans. The clans of Helena and Velda are close to one another. They share a common ancestor, shown by the small circle where the clan lineages split off from each other. Jasmine and Tara also have a common ancestor, as do Ursula and Katrine. With the possible exception of the Helena/Velda ancestor, these common ancestors lived way before modern humans ever reached Europe, most probably in the Middle East. Towards the top centre of the figure is the common ancestor of all Europeans, where the Xenia branch leads off from the rest. Through this woman, the whole of Europe is joined to the
rest of the world. This connection is shown by the dashed line. And since there is nothing fundamentally special about Europe, we can construct a much larger maternal genealogy that embraces the entire globe.
Although most of this book has been about Europe, what I have described here can be done anywhere in the world. Over the last ten years active research programmes have analysed and published mitochondrial DNA sequences from several thousand people from all corners of the globe. We have put all of these through the same process that we used to discover the Seven Daughters of Eve. The end result of this analysis is that we have discovered twenty-six other clans of equivalent status in the rest of the world. About some of these we know a lot; about others, very little. Even so, I have given them all names. The picture will no doubt change in the years to come as people from previously unsampled regions volunteer their DNA. But we know enough already to have a good idea and to make a start on interpreting their meaning.
Figure 7
WORLD CLANS AND WHERE THEY ARE FOUND
Of the thirty-three clans we recognize worldwide, thirteen are from Africa. Many people have left Africa over the last thousand years, a lot of them forcibly taken as slaves to the Americas or to Europe. But their recent genetic roots are quite clearly in Africa. Although Africa has only 13 per cent of the world’s population, it lays claim to 40 per cent of the maternal clans. The reason for this is that Homo sapiens has been in Africa for a lot longer than anywhere else. The archaeology supports this statement, the study of human fossils supports it and now the genetics supports it too. There has been a very long time for mutations to accumulate in Africa. This means there has been time for new clans to form and become distinctive and recognizably different from one another. Different clans are more frequent than others in some parts of the continent, but there is no specific association between genetic clans and tribal structures. This is a reflection of the great antiquity of the genetic roots, which predate the formation of tribal and other classifications by more than a hundred thousand years.