Mitochondrial DNA is passed down virtually unchanged from a mother to all her children, only the daughters will pass it on. Therefore it has been passed down from your mothers, mother’s, mother’s, mother’s back to one of the “ Seven Daughters of Eve” our ancestral “clan” Mother. This is a relatively new science, well 30 years ago new. In 1991 the remains of a man were found by climbers in the Italian Alps. He became known as the Ice Man. Carbon dating placed him at 5,000 to 5,350 years old. Due to the condition of how the body had been frozen for so long two different teams were able to get DNA from the Ice Man and link him to a living individual in their data base with precisely the same sequence in DNA samples. In the following decade research into this idea of linking the modern European man through an unbroken genetic line to primeval ancestors was conducted. To read more about this I suggest “The Seven Daughters of Eve” by Bryan Sykes Professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University.

Those Primeval ancestors were seven women who passed their mitochondrial DNA unbroken through this maternal line. Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrina, Jasmine, These are called Haplogroups The bases for my Haplogroup (H1) trace back to a descendant of Helena, the name researchers bestowed on a clan mother who lived 14,000 years ago.

Here is my Maternal line

I am partial to my own mitochondrial DNA. Looking at this known Maternal line you will note that most of us are named Ada. This is the last of the line for Ada’s as well as the maternal line of DNA. Neither I nor any of my sisters had a daughter to pass our mitochondrail DNA on to future descendants.