Eight
A
MEMORY OF MAN PAST:
GENETIC CLANS, ARCHAEOLOGICAL ANOMALIES, EVOLUTIONARY
ENIGMAS, AND SPECULATIVE SOLUTIONS
“Thus ‘facts’ turn out to be networks of arguments and observational claims.”
— Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson426
EUROPE IS POPULATED
by approximately six hundred and fifty million Caucasians, as of
this writing. No news there. The news is that all of them, along
with their American, Canadian, and Australian descendents across
the seas, are “cousins.” The reason is that Bryan Sykes, a
geneticist at the University of Oxford,427 discovered an
amazing thing: all Europeans come from only seven different clan
mothers, or The Seven Daughters of Eve
as he calls them, which is the title of his fascinating book
surveying his research and conclusions. Those seven different clan
mothers all in turn come from one common mother, “mitochondrial
Eve” as the geneticists call her, as indeed, do all humans now
alive on the planet.
If this sounds like
good news to the biblical literalist, it isn’t, but we’ll get to
that later. The real news, here as elsewhere, is in the genes, and
what they tell us about human origins and prehistory. Sykes, with
much more eloquence and elegance than most scientists, puts it this
way:
...(Each) of us carries a message from our ancestors in every cell of our body. It is in our DNA, the genetic material that is handed down from generation to generation. Within the DNA is written not only our histories as individuals but the whole history of the human race. With the aid of recent advances in genetic technology, this history is now being revealed. We are at last able to begin to decipher the messages from the past. Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an ancient land who lives within us all.428
Sykes’ book is the
record of his research efforts to trace that history back into “the
deep past” of high antiquity, utterly “beyond the reach of written
record or stone inscriptions.”429 That research
revealed that Caucasian Europeans and their descendents were
traceable to “only a handful of women living tens of thousands of
years ago.”430