West Londoner Kara Dolman
MIDDLE EASTERN, CAVE PAINTER — NEANDERTHAL
It might sound like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster but a professor from Harvard Medical School is searching for a woman to gestate a clone of prehistoric man. Professor George Church — one of the world’s leading geneticists — believes he can create a “neo-Neanderthal” by injecting artificially created Neanderthal DNA based on genetic code found in fossil remains into a human embryo. “Now I need an adventurous female,” he told German magazine Der Spiegel.
Well, call off the search, Dr Church — because there’s a living, breathing cave baby right here!
Or a partial one, at least. As I type, my DNA is being redeciphered at a lab at Queen Mary University to ascertain just how much of my genetic code is owed to ancient man. It all started before Christmas, when four guinea pigs from the Evening Standard offered to be tested for a new DNA mapping project — BritainsDNA.
“Now, not everyone likes what I’m about to tell you,” warned a voice on the phone a few weeks later. “Your results show you are part Neanderthal.” Indeed, it did take me a few stunned moments to get over the shock that I carry up to four per cent of Neanderthal DNA — exotic, even for a resident of diverse west London.
But according to BritainsDNA our capital is more of a melting pot than we’d imagined. The project has been analysing samples from citizens to find where our ancestors originated from by identifying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) markers passed from mothers to their children — and the Y DNA passed from fathers to sons.
Of the Standard’s sample group, four of the 4,000 people already tested, my own DNA proved to be the most “ancient”. My mtDNA group, U, arose around the Persian Gulf in 54,000 BC. This makes my motherline the First Artists: hunter-gatherers who, having got it on with long-extinct man around 40,000 BC, migrated from the Middle East into Europe, leaving behind a trail of cave paintings in northern Spain, southern France, Derbyshire and North Wales — where my family tree dates back to the 16th century.
Recently, my housemate had told me about a documentary on the world’s oldest cave paintings, which use the contours of a cave in southern France to make illustrations of horses, cattle and lions appear 3D. Before I had the chance to see it our test had traced my DNA back, in a thrilling coincidence, to the painters of those caves.
“Your ancestors were also very powerful sprinters who could jump on to the back of their prey to bring it down,” added Alistair Moffat, project director of BritainsDNA — the voice on the other end of my phone. “And far from being stupid,” he continued, “Neanderthals were incredibly brave and resourceful people.”
So even though this DNA discovery has revealed I’m not — all — modern human, there is something oddly comforting about knowing that in many ways, my ancestors were ahead of their time.
South Londoner Andrew Neather
CELTIC, FARMER — TATTOOED MAN
I have often been curious about my ancestry: my surname is extremely rare. And though my father’s family are Gloucestershire born and bred — I know they’ve been there for at least two centuries — a lot of us don’t look, well, especially English.
I, like my father, grandfather and most of my aunts and uncles, have very dark curly hair, brown eyes and dark skin that tans deeply. I get taken for a local in Spain or the Middle East. Indeed one of my great-grandfather’s sisters was known as “Granny Turk” because of her dark looks. Could Mediterranean blood have reached the Cotswolds?
Apparently not, on my father’s side, at least. My Y DNA carries S145, the “quintessential Celtic marker”, a subgroup of the much larger M269 group found throughout Western Europe. Researchers have nicknamed this Celtic group the Pretani: when Greek explorer Pytheas visited Britain around 320 BC, he reported that its inhabitants were known as the Pretannikoi, the “tattooed people”. Via Latin, “Pretannike”, the name for their island, became “Britain”.
Within the S145 subgroup, I have a rare variant — the S474 marker, from a group closely related to the ancient Irish: it is commonest in Ulster and Scotland, though scattered in England too.
But my mother’s DNA line is that of the “first farmers”, the hunter-gatherers in the fertile crescent who began to cultivate native grasses around 9,000 BC. This is the J marker group: it is most common in southern Arabia and England, though at some other points between, and to the east too — the places settled by farmers who first moved out around 8,000 BC, reaching Britain 5,500 years ago.
North Londoner Charlotte Ross
ARTIST, TAILOR — BREEDER
So, I don’t just feel old, I am officially ancient. My motherline came from the Western Refuges, the caves of southern France around Lascaux, famous for their wide array of surprisingly beautiful wall paintings. Although my mitochondrial DNA marker — H — originated around 40,000 BC somewhere between western Iran, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, my ancestors probably spent most of the last few millennia huddled together in French rock shelters, exploring their creative side and inventing fashion.
Some of the earliest evidence of tailoring has been found here, including fine needles, indicating that leggings, capes and tunics were all the rage not just in Swinging Sixties London, but also in Southern Europe around the end of the last Ice Age. On a personal level, I’m intrigued to learn that the family traditions of tailoring and textiles are also in my genes.
Hedonism, I am less surprised to discover, is a defining feature of my ancient heritage (and my recent one: the Scots certainly know how to party). As well as having a taste for early sculpture, jewellery and ornament making, mine was a society that valued leisure as well as skill, though I suspect the bison and reindeer they hunted were dinner rather than sport.
My main contribution to the world, though, is fertility. My forebears repopulated pretty much the whole of Europe after the last Ice Age, breeding faster than real bears could eat them. As a result the H marker is the most frequently found in all of Europe, the dominant maternal lineage. So my people were Europe’s top breeders, style-makers and pleasure-seekers. I salute them.
East Londoner Joshi Herrmann
BOHEMIAN, JEWISH — MOUNTAIN MAN
The finding that my DNA marker is extremely rare in Britain (fewer than one in 1,000 have it) comes as little surprise, because I am not from these parts. My father’s family hails from rural Bohemia and Moravia, once proud kingdoms and now regions of the Czech Republic. They ran big distilleries and farms making Slivovitz (plum brandy) and other spirits (I tried in vain to find the one named after them on a recent trip with friends). Excitingly, one of them founded the Austrian football team and another was apparently born of the Schwarzenberg princes of Bohemia, making me considerably more Bohemian than all the try-hards I meet out in Shoreditch. Being of largely Jewish heritage, they came to London via Vienna to escape Nazi persecution.
That tallies with my paternal marker being much more common in Eastern Europe than it is here, and also with the finding that five per cent of Ashkenazi Jews carry this subtype. It suggests my ancestors came from the Altai mountains (in East-Central Asia, where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet) and settled in the Slavic lands, perhaps via the Turkish expansion (16th to 18th century) or perhaps during the Avar “khaganate” in the sixth century.
For more information visit BritainsDNA.com