Slashdot Mirror
DNA Testing Of Deep Ancestry
Randall Burns writes: "
Oxford Ancestors, founded by world-famous University of Oxford scientist
Bryan Sykes has announced the public availability of an inexpensive($US 180) service that will trace matrilineal ancestry using DNA tests. Applications include forensics, genealogy and research of history. Coverage includes a recent BBC story. The currently available test can trace matrilineal ancestry back to one of seven women who lived 150,000 years ago to which 99% of all people of European descent can trace their ancestry."
But of what REAL use is this? If it could tell me more about my family, and how they got here, and where they actually came from, THAT would be useful.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
99% of people come from one of these seven women? Man, they must have been huge sluts! :)
Seriously, I don't see the point of this. When people want to trace their ancestry, they're mostly concerned with who their great great grandparents were and who their relatives were that lived during the Civil war, not 150,000 years ago. Yeah, it's cool, but nothing I'd pay $180 for.
who my great great great great great great great great great great great ..... great great great .... great great parents where. I guess, they were great.
... ancle's brother is Bill Gates.
On the other hand I can see how some people could be disapointed to find out that their great^n n->inf was some OOG who built the StoneWedge, or maybe even that their cousin's mother's brother's father's sister's daugter's
You can't handle the truth.
Can this technology help us finally figure out what species Janet Reno is?
SILLY SLASHDOTTER, WHY YOU NO PAY ATTENTION!!! OOG BE FIRST SLASHDOTTER IN RECORDED HISTORY, EVEN BEFORE TACO CREATE SLASHDOT!!! EXCEPT OOG NO LIVE IN GREAT RIFT VALLEY, THAT JUST BASTARD COUSIN OF MINE (RIFT VALLEY HAVE SHITTY INTERNET ACCESS, OOG DEMAND BROADBAND)!!! ALTHOUGH SHITTY GENE TRACING PROGRAMS NO MENTION OOG, OOG BE REAL ANCESTOR!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD AND POST SLASHDOT SINCE MAN FIRST EVOLVE!!!
OOG WONDER HOW DARE YOU OVERLOOK YOUR HERITAGE!!! WHY YOU BE UNGRATEFUL BASTARD!!! IF NOT FOR OOG YOU NO HAVE SLASHDOT ACCOUNT WITH +1 BONUS!!! OOG DISSAPPOINTED IN YOU!!! AS OF TODAY OOG CUT YOU OUT OF INHERITANCE OF OOG FAMILY FORTUNE!!! OOG SUGGEST YOU SHOW MORE RESPECT TO CAVEMAN ANCESTOR!!! PERHAPS OOG ALSO SHOW YOU DISCIPLINE BY BREAK HEAD!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
Actually, there is already legislation protecting a persons DNA from being used agains them as a form of discrimination. Businesses may not genetically test people for screening. I believe this also applies to the insurance community but i may be wrong.
As far as being African-American. Unless you're planning on carrying a cross through your neighborhood in celebration of our happy little christian holiday on Sunday, you'll probably admit that life pretty much began in and about africa/fertile crescent. thusly - YES! we are all indeed African-American (or black as i like to say) in heritage. Damn - i'll bet that really pisses people in the KKK off....oh well, i guess now they'll just have to lynch themselves!
FluX
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
SO there are 7 women 150,000 years ago....my question...did Dick Clarke impregnate them all on the Rockin' New Years 148,000B.C. ? But think 150,000 years of evolution and we have "who wants to marry a millionaire" go figure
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I don't believe there was such thing as a whore. Those were simple days, old days, days of peace and inbreeding, nothing fancy. One OOG and seven chicks. No feminism, no shovinism, no sexuality (seriously. It was invented during this century by Freud and implanted into the culture as Foulcaut explained.) The only problem was not to get killed by a saber toothed tiger while hunting down a mammoth. Anyway, those people were way purer in heart than ALL OF US, although they would kill and maybe even eat you while you're bleeding to death. Chew on that.
You can't handle the truth.
Personally, I am deeply offended that Slashdot does not recognize the validity of psychics. I mean, for only $4.99/min I discovered who my ancestors are, plus I found out that my g/f was possibly cheating on me and a long trip is in my future!
Now moderate this up before I pour hot grits down your pants, sailor!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Its so cheap that all the men in one town in Australia are to be DNA tested to help solve a rape case. It turns out the someone admited doing it just after a DNA sample was taken.
This makes me wonder just where that DNA info is going and how well it will be tracked. I know labs can screw up (remember your chem lab assistant - they are now doing this for a real living).
I once had a drug test when I was considering working for GTE in Florida and I got a call from the lab saying they had got the names on the covers mixed up and if I wouldn't mind, they would send me a new cover that I could sign my name on and they would put it with my sample. Yea Right. With DNA the results will be absolute because everyone knows everyones DNA is different.
I'm hoping you're just being humorous and joking about OOG and Katz.
What separates you from an idiot? Not to troll, flame, or whatever, but inside you/me/he/they/us is about the same chances for genius, idiocy, murderers, parents, children, etc.
Fine, you don't like Katz, that's just a personal thing. But I really hope this was a thought out comment, and not an innate, subconscious thread of your personality...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Gee, SEVEN women? Adam had quite a harem!!!
--
But that's my point. (You think)Katz is an idiot. He's not being spectacularly different than you or I, and doesn't deserve the label any more or less than we do.
/. is today. I don't mean to take /. seriously, I mean to take you seriously, because you are a person/entity, and /. is not; it's a collective, and emergent response behavior of all the yous and Is on the site.
If we are his peers, we can judge him. But if we are truly his peers, we realize we are just like him at some level, and any judgements we can make are hollow, pointless, and empty. Of course, if we aren't his peers, we actually have very little basis on which to judge him, then.
I don't begrudge the OOGs or the Katzes, both are part and parcel of what
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
[luke skywalker]
NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo! ! ! ! !
;)
___
(Scene opens with armored mercenary on horseback approaching a stone castle retrofitted out of the decaying hulk of the abandoned steel husk of an office building. Camera pans, giving audience a breathtaking view of the barren, wrecked skyline of a post-apocalyptic American metropolis.)
Guard (steel spear glinting as he shouts): "Halt! Who goes there? Know ye that this place be the realm of the descendents of Bertha the Bountiful. If thou be a son of Agnes the Prolific, begone from here, lest we slay thee!"
Mercenary: "Good soldier! Stay thine blade, for I, too am of the Tribe of Bertha!"
Guard (in stupid, low grunting Superbowl-commercial voice): "Whazzuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!"
Mercenary pulls a flintlock pistol from his belt, cocks the hammer, and fires at Guard, killing him instantly. Audience cheers.
Guard (lacking the decency to just DIE): "Lo! I am sped! Dead am I! I am made as dust by the treacherous asp! Gone am I from this mortal coil! I am---"
Mercenary: "Why won't you DIE??!"
(Mercenary dismounts, then proceeds to kick Guard till he falls dead, and more importantly, silent. Audience cheers.)
Mercenary: Never underestimate the 1% descended from Jane Doe the Probably-Just-a-Rounding-Error-In-Our-Calculations !
Mercenary proceeds to singlehandedly storm the castle, raping and pillaging, stealing treasure, weapons, and office supplies.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Good luck with finals then!
I like your sense of humor
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
first of all the bbc link shoud point to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 19000/719376.stm According to BBC story all 7 women decended from one of three clans that still exist in Africa today. I assume the other 1% of homo sapians would have decended from the other two clans. Wouldn't it be cool if we could trace combine this with historical and archeological records as well as some new genttic research to create a family tree of the entire human race. We could set it up a server with a CVS like service that people could login to and submit their familt trees. Historians an scientists could be responsible for putting it all together and tracking our ancient ancestors. The information could be put on the internet giving people that are still alive a serial number to protect their privacy. Maybe Slashdot could even set uo a page when you put in you serial number and it tells you how close of a releative you are to linus, Gates, John Katz, etc
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
However, it won't be that useful to geneaologists in the long run. The reason: a sad fact of European society (and most others, actually, dating back for most of recorded history): the family name and identity was generally handed down in a patrilineal manner, while mitochondria can only trace matrilineal ancestry. I guess it's sorta understandable, though; back when those rules were made the people didn't know about mitochondrial DNA (or, for that matter, any other kind of DNA).
Furthermore, mitochondrial DNA tracing is far less specific, since barring mutations mitochondrial DNA is identical from generation to generation. In other words, you're not going to get accurate family lineage tracing this way. You can get into the general ballpark (tracing back to one of seven women 150,000 years ago, for example) but you can't be very exact.
I guess it would have important symbolic value, however, particularly among warring nations. It proves that, in a way, we're all brothers (and sisters too, of course). Now if only we could get a few certain groups in the world, who shall remain nameless, to get that through their skulls...
This strikes me much differently than what seems to be indicated by most of the posts here already.
This awes me. That we've actually scientifically confirmed that one little tribe (or the roots of 7 little tribes) managed to fight their way though what passed for life for them, and the end result has been a large chunk of modern civilization.
For some reason it takes something like this to make me feel the wonder of something that could have been logically surmised and proposed beforehand.
I mean, logically you know that if our civilization manages to survive, it implies that:
But when is the last time something made your mouth drop open and think seriously and deeply about things like the above? When is the last time something happened and made it feel real?
I hope I've adequately expressed how this story makes me feel :)
Hmm. I try to get by without judgement. I mean, if I don't have the time or energy to deal with an article, I just won't read it.
I'm saying we aren't really peers of Katz because we don't write anything of substance for the front page of Slashdot. Thus my previous point; if we were really his peers, we would be walking in his shoes and living in his space. Since we aren't everything we see and say is clouded by the fact that we are, essentially, outsiders looking in. If you really don't want to be his peer, that's your choice, not mine. I can call you anything I want, real, imaginary, fictional, or otherwise, and that's just my delusion and reality.
So judge him, as long as you're comfortable with the fact that other people will judge you similarly. I prefer to not judge, if possible, on the grounds that I don't want to be judged either. Because, in all the world, in all the situations and contexts, sometime, someplace, you too will be an idiot, annoying as hell, etc... and someone just like you will be saying that about you. It would bother me if someone were to believe things like that about me... so I avoid believing that of others.
Now what would happen if Katz had another identity, and it happened to be OOG? Or some other of the trolls? It could happen ^^
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I know such things are controversial, but I think the most commonly accepted view is that Europe was inhabited by Neanderthals 150K years ago, and that the Nanderthals contributed little or nothing to the modern blood lines.
So if those seven women were of the "modern" type at that remote period, then they must have lived in Africa, or barely possibly the Near East. In which cases you should be able to trace a lot more people than just Europeans to them.
--
"Damn! And just when Piranha was starting to turn the tide of negative PR!"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> The science is fairly well established.
Actually, my latent Luddite tendencies make me somewhat skeptical of the science involved here.
The problem is, once you provide a tree-producing algorithm, it is going to output some tree, no matter what the input is. The validity of the tree depends as much on the input as it does on the algorithm.
To take a geek-oriented analogy, consider a simulated neural network. Given a network, it produces some output regardless of what input you give it. It can be out of bandwidth for what the network is supposed to categorize. It could even be an array of random numbers. It doesn't matter; the network is going to produce an output anyway.
So with DNA categorizing algorithms, at least according to the skeptical hemisphere of my brain. Maybe it gives you seven matriarchs; maybe thirteen; maybe only one. But it will give you something, no matter what the input was.
--
"Damn! And just when Piranha was starting to turn the tide of negative PR!"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The reason they were going the study at BYU is the Mormon geneology records have been kept for the past hundred and some years. The combonation of written geneologies and genetic geneologies would really help in figuring out certain aspects of a person's genes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I think it would be really interesting to see how the decendants of the different women are distributed. Are they evenly spread out, are they more or less partitioned off from each other (pretty unlikely), or are just identifiable centers which might suggest where these women lived?
Does anyone know anything about this? Or geographic distributions of the three clans of Africa? Also, does anyone know how much more specific this could get? What would the time limit be? Is it always going to be 100k+, or might it eventually get down to like 25k?
Gattaca, the name was taken from the initials used for the base pairs of DNA.
The problem with the hypothesized Gattacan universe is that just because you have a gene doesn't mean it'll be expressed. For example, I have celiac disease, which is genetic. Of the studies done, one involved identical twins, where it was found that where one twin expressed the disease, there was a 70% chance the other did.
Another study (I've been looking for it again) was on Type I diabetes. Basically, the study demonstrated that if one a) had the gene, b) was given cow's milk prior to 9 months of age, and c) had the third bout of influenza prior to puberty, the gene would be expressed.
Thus, I believe we'll develop rulesets, given a person's genes, of how NOT to express undesirable traits.
Thus, I see the future not in eugenics (as Gattaca would have us believe) but rather in providing information on working around genetic issues. To me, that is a far more plausible (and pleasant, if somewhat regimented) future.
_Deirdre
carbon date testing was proven false...
No.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
It would be more accurate to say that the modern Negro, and all other human "races" are descendants of Africans from 150,000 (or whatever the correct number is) years ago.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Um, obviously theoretical growth rates only apply in perfect conditions. Remember the bacteria they always talk about in middle-school math classes whose population doubles every 2 hours or whatever? Well, obviously that isn't a sustainable rate, otherwise the world would have been over run with them billions of times over by now.
:-)
Obviously. Don't think I'm reading too much into my little calculation
All I was trying to do was show that there is no reason, mathematically speaking, why there couldn't have been just 7 women in Europe 150,000 years ago.
Clearly it's the same with people. If you were to say that there were only 2 people around 150,000 years ago, your figure of 1.8*10^66 would be only reduced to a seventh, so there would still be 'a lot of people'.
Again, I'm not trying to make any claims about what the population growth for humans is or was, or what the population is or was. My formula was far too simple for that.
Of course its still wrong anyway, the formula for population growth isn't p = p0*r^t, its something more like p = p0*e^rt, or something like that (something with an 'e' I don't remember exactly)
Well, of course it's wrong. But it could never be wrong for the reason you just gave above. The equations p=p0*r^t and p=p0*e^rt are both exponential curves, and exponential growth can be expressed in either form - it doesn't matter. An exponential curve always has the property that it's "doubling time" never changes, no matter where on the curve you look. This is true for both equations you gave. The only reason people use the e^rt form is that it is easier to integrate and differentiate.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The Oxford Ancestors Matriline service relies on mitochondrial DNA which doesn't mutate often enough to provide the fine matrilineal distinctions that would be required for different matrilines that have a common matrilineal ancestress as recently as the Pictish clans probably do. However, it is interesting that the legend of the Pictish clans sets their number at 7 -- which is the same number of matrilines Sykes says constitutes 99% of the indigenous Europeans.
Seastead this.
...that the British Royal Family is more inbred than previously thought.
-AP
This reminds me a lot of Greg Egan's short story "Mitochondrial Eve" .. Basically, a religion springs up around tracing ancestry via the mitochondria.. Eventually, of course, the men trace their ancestry via the Y chromosome. Then there is a lot of large scale fighting between the people, because humans are still nasty to each other .. they've just decided on new borders of right and wrong.
Sigh.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Mixed population bacterial genetics may be a far better anology than eukayotic (nuclear) genetics for explaining the distribution and prevalence of mitochondrial populations
First, some much simplified background (I have a degree in molecular biology): Mitochondria are self-reproducing organelles (= cell 'organs') that many people believe were once independent organisms that entered into a symbiotic relationship with a host cell, and eventually became utterly dependent on the cell. They now function as the primary site for the production of ATP, the main cellular fuel. There may be hundreds or thousands in a single cell
Mitochondria reproduce (to some degree) independently of the cell, and contain their own DNA. The DNA for everything else is in the nucleus (the cell's brain) but the mitochondria 'live' and reproduce in cytoplasm (cell body). When we breed, the nuclear DNA does the whole dance of meiosis/mitosis we learned in school, but the mitochondria fission like bacteria. Most (if not all) of the mitochondria is from the mother because a) the egg has thousands of times as much cytoplasm as the sperm; and b) after first contact with the egg, the sperm's mitochondria go into hyperdrive ("the acrosome reaction") and burn themselves out.
Now for the Original Contributions
1. In the billions of years of symbiosis since the development of eukaryotes, many genes that are useful or essential to the mitochondria have 'migrated' into the nucleus.
2. Though the mitchondrial 'support' genes are fairly cosistent from person to person, they aren't identical in everyone. Those genes only got to the nucleus by accident (mutation, adaptation by mitochondria to the available cell resources, etc) and therefore not all strains may be able to live in all people, or certain strains may enjoy a competititve advantage in a given person
3. Some individuals are known to have multiple strains of mitochondria, due to the various flukes and accidents of biological history. I know of no study that states that *most* humans have only one strain, and doubt its the case. It's actually a good idea to have multiple strains, since anything that kills (or impedes the reproduction of) a solo strain would kill (or prevent the reproduction of) its host. Multistrain individuals should be slightly hardier.
4. Mitochondria became part of the cell when we were single celled organisms. The mitochondrial DNA variation we measure is presumed to be 'nonessential' because mitochondria have very little DNA, and most of it was largely fixed long ago. We presume we're sorting mitochondria by 'eye color', but we may not be.
4) Mitochondria must adapt to their host as the host changes. A cow's mitochondria is much less similar to ours than you'd expect, considering that cows and men didn't diverge very long ago on a mitchondrial timescale.
5) Suppose a type mitochondria in a remote tribe requires the (nucleus) gene PII'ase. This is fine if the tribe all carries the (nuclear) gene for PII'ase. However, this mitochondrial line may die out when interbred because outside populations may not carry the gene PII'ase.
6) I can think of a dozen other mechanisms, but let's not go overboard.
Conclusion:
Mitochondria are subject to many of the evolutionary and selection pressures as independent bacteria, symbiotes, etc. the finding that there are seven major strains of mitochondria in modern man simply suggests that seven mitochondrial strains are widespread and well-adapted to the core genome of humans
It doesn't mean there were only seven 'original women'
It may mean that there were only seven (mitochondrially) *undemanding* women [ducks!] and the truth may be far more complicated. (lesser strains may coexist with the support of the major strains, etc.) and probably are.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime