A few days ago BBC1 ran a two part tale on DNA basing it on
the cross dressing entertainer, Eddie Izzard; the in depth DNA analysis on the
female mitochondrial chromosome specific to his mother’s female line and the male
Y chromosome specific to the father’s line.
It was meant to be an outline of the human story made
personal for popular and easy viewing.
Why Eddie was chosen might have been because he was born in Yemen, a
location critical to the story line, he lost his mother who died when he was
very young, he had blue eyes and could relate to those he met on the journey
without any difficulty.
There wasn’t much to grumble about in the presentation given
that it was just a story stripped down to the basic plot, there was an
absence of lecturing and based on what the mainstream theory of genetics seems
to be telling us.
It was going up to half way through the second part that it
appeared that Eddie’s Y chromosome was the same as mine. At that point it was still around 25,000
years ago but for some people that might have been too close. But it became closer.
We both have blue eyes and it seems that the genetic glitch
for this goes back only a few thousand years and seems to have occurred in what
is now Romania ,
according to the article on the net dealing with this topic. It is possible that there are people out
there, many in total, some of whom would prefer not to have these connections.
But it became still closer; the next stage was that his male
line cropped up around the Elbe in Saxony not
so long ago. As did mine, although it
was further down the river. The question
then was when did the move occur? This
is an open question, there are options.
The picture, however, may have changed already. At the beginning of each of the two
programmes, Eddie was taken to the parts of Africa
where the origins were thought to begin on the evidence available. In the second part, the Y, this was a
particular group of hunter gatherers.
In the last few days, there has been a report in Science
Daily suggesting that on the basis of very recent evidence, the Y chromosome
can now be tracked back a lot further, from around 150,000 to 370,000 years
which is quite a stretch. The story is
in a short item below and has been quarried already in the press:
Quite what else might turn up in the future we can only
guess at, but the story is not yet over and can become more complicated. There has already been the discovery of a
different branch of humanity, the Denisovan and as the geneticists can go
deeper and deeper with new techniques it could become very interesting.
It seems that already we are not quite what we thought we
are and our ideas about who, what, how, where, when we emerged, moved and
changed is still an ongoing project in many respects. But this is in the deeper past.
Nearer to the present there has been the use of DNA to seek
to identify the remains at Greyfriars in Leicester
as those of King Richard III. It looks
very likely and I would like it to be right because once I parked my Vespa
Scooter over the spot.
Along with this is the claim to Irish Ancestry of Kate,
Duchess of Cambridge, which is something of a giggle. It goes back to the De Burghs of the Middle
Ages. In the male line these were the
usual bunch of Norman land grabbers who in this case took their chances in Ireland
and married into the families of local chieftains.
Had the newspapers that proclaimed this done their sums they
would realise that the chances of Kate having other Irish ancestry somewhere
relatively recent are quite high, the problem being lost traces probably around
the 17th or 18th Centuries. It would take some expert work and maybe DNA
to run a check.
What also the press missed out on is that the De Burgh
ancestry linked in to a descent from Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence and
son of King Edward III. This is the man
who provided the ancestral claim to the throne of King Richard III. That Kate might be descended from Lionel is no surprise.
If you were to check out all the possible descendants of
Lionel over the last 600 years you would be hitting very large figures and all
sorts of unexpected people. Many of
these would not like to be either related to each other or to have this lurking
in the family tree. It would wreck many
people’s ideas about their identity.
You never know, because Eddie was told that the in depth
analysis he had showed that 2.8% of his male Y DNA is derived from the
Neanderthals.
Which means that so does mine.
More research is clearly needed.
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