My Mitochondrial Mom
Once there was a woman who crossed the line. She took her kids, and her sister and her kids, I believe.
She came to the river but it didn’t have a bridge. Later she found a shallow, quiet place and waded across, carrying the littlest one.
She made a clean getaway. I’m not sure her sister was so lucky. Maybe she turned back, or wandered away, or came to harm.
The going was tough. She was on her own for the first time. But turning back was not an option for her.
And then she met another woman, older, and joined with her. She made herself welcome by bringing food to share.
Normally she ate right away what she found, or fed it to her kids on the spot. The day she realized she could find favor with her new friend through bringing her her leftover scraps? That was the day she felt she had found a new family.
The next day she divided her best food and gave half to her new friend. So when the night grew cold and they hadn’t found a good place to crawl in and find some warmth, she was able to take comfort in the other woman’s arms.
Every day they walked. And looked for food. And hoped for shelter for the cold nights.
The routine of walking, finding food, finding shelter, began to be comfortable.
And then a stranger came, alone. A man.
He brought nothing. And he spoke in a strange tongue. He pointed somewhere off to the side, and the two women and all the children huddled together and had each others’ backs.
The man talked most insistently and pointed and gestured, but they couldn’t make out his message. His urgency scared them.
He held up a finger. ‘Wait,’ it seemed to say. He turned and ran, then looked back and held up the finger again, ‘Wait’, and then ran until he was out of sight.
The women looked at each other, collected the children, and ran in the opposite direction.
It was night before they saw the man again. He had something in his arms. It was food. He sat down and laid it out at their feet. He pointed to his mouth, then at them: ‘Eat. It’s for you,’ he seemed to say.
One of the kids ran up and grabbed something and put it in her mouth. The other kids followed. The mothers hung back but they were hungry.
The man pointed to the ground. ‘Sit down,’ he seemed to say. ‘Enjoy this food.’
And that was how they came to travel together. They wandered, until the weather turned bad, day after day. The rains didn’t stop, and they were always cold.
The man ran off. He didn’t return that day. Or the next day, until dark. He ran up to them, pointing and jabbering, running off, running back. ‘Come,’ he seemed to say.
They looked at each other, and then they ran after him.
The running was hard in the dark. And they came to a stream they had to cross.
He ran on, and they scooped up their little ones and ran after him.
And then he disappeared. They stopped, confused.
And then he reappeared, close to them.
He guided them by hand in that stormy darkness until they blindly entered a shelter where the rain couldn’t reach them.
So that’s where they spent the winter.
Each day they went out and found food. Sometimes it was hidden beneath the snow, sometimes the man killed a bird by hitting it with a rock. They built a fire in their shelter to stay warm by and to cook the bird.
The children learned to kill birds, and the man came back with a big animal and they were filled for days.
The woman who had crossed the line was one of the first to leave the Fertile Crescent and begin her journey into Europe. That was 50,000 years ago. Her family’s journey didn’t end until she ran out of land and encountered cold ocean waters.
In between her offspring spent 10,000 years fleeing from the ebb and flow and resurgence of glaciers.
The group this woman’s family founded split several times. They wandered northward and westward, here and there, forming into new groups, again and again, as they grew in number.
Let’s label this first woman U. Later the daughters of the daughters of U got their own labels, U1, U2, etc. One daughter’s line is called U5.
Each mutation in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA, the separate DNA that provides our energy) of our founding mother’s line results in a new layer of labels. (Mutations happen every few thousand years, or so, on average.)
Later generations became U5a, U5b, etc., depending on their heritage. By the time the years had gone by, the labels had accumulated, so that my mother (and her mother and so on, and I) are U5a1b1.
These are the designations of our mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the female line for 50,000 years, starting with U.
The U remains. It doesn’t wash away from the mitochondrial genetic record. Every woman and man has mtDNA. We couldn’t live without it. And every child inherits it from the mother. Scientists today can see the U from the founder woman in my mtDNA. And they can see the branches as we split from our sisters.
For example, my mother-in-law is U5a1a1. In prehistoric times we had the same ancestor, U. And for many thousands of years we had the same ancestor. Only in recent times — say in the last 10,000 years — did we split off from each other. One of went west, one went east. They became U5a1a and U5a1b.
The U family is found spread out all over Europe by now, as well as some other places. They got there by leaving the Fertile Crescent before agriculture. They lived by gleaning and hunting, fishing and keeping track of seasons. And probably by living in caves, after the last Ice Age surge began.
While my ancestors, or maybe yours, were holed up in caves because of climate change (returning mega-glaciers), they found their way down deep into the caves’ deeper compartments and drew what they saw, the animals that migrated through their area.
The paintings of Lascaux (20,000 yo, in SE France) and Chauvet (more than 30,000 yo, in SW France) attest to their life in those areas.
It’s fun to think about, these wanderings of my ancient ancestors. First, I know they survived despite the harsh conditions. Second, I know they kept moving.
I have plenty of questions, too.
- What about my father’s mother’s line? Men can’t pass on their mtDNA (though they have their own inherited from their mothers). My father died in 1977, his mother in 1939, and he had no sisters, no sources of his mother’s mtDNA lineage. But what about his mother’s mother? She of course died long ago, but what about her other daughters and their female descendants? Is there one alive today whose mtDNA I could access? The last one I tracked, my grandmother’s niece, died too soon for the age of DNA analysis. I’m still looking for a woman living today who is descended from that female line.
- My mother’s mother, and her mother (my great grandmother), have the same mtDNA as mine (assuming no mutations). My great grandmother was born in east-central Ireland. How did her female line get there? Over time as we grew in numbers and were joined by other groups, we became part of a population made up of several mtDNA groups, called Western Hunter Gatherers (WHG). This population spread throughout western Europe. Later, when farmers looking for land emerged from the Fertile Crescent, the WHG population was pushed westward, as far even as the British Isles. That is probably how her U5a1b1 female ancestor got to Britain. Later, invasions of Britain pushed them westward again. So her ancestors ended up in Ireland. And fortunately for me, she went even farther west, to the US. (That was in 1876.)
- Who else has U5a1b1? Do you? The U5s are a common bunch. You can find out through 23&Me and some other services. (But be careful: not all genetic testing services report mtDNA.) You can know — in broad strokes — the pathway and timing of your journey out of the Fertile Crescent, or wherever else your ancestral path brought ‘you’ from.
All the while we U’s and other WHGs have been traveling. We didn’t do agriculture, we just ate what we could find, berries, mushrooms, the occasional deer or rabbit. Fish, eggs, snails, bugs? Fruit in season, greens, roots.
And this is what I eat today. After a lifetime of sorting through foods and learning to leave alone the ones that don’t agree with me, my list today is the same as that of my hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The later-arriving farmers’ list of edible foods is quite different. For one thing, it includes wheat. My ancestors left for Europe before wheat was cultivated in the Near East. I have no history with it, and I can’t digest it.
Likewise, I don’t tolerate tropical foods: no bananas, coconut, or avocado for me! I need apples and hazelnuts and salmon. Just like my Mitochondrial Mom.
Another trait from 50,000 years ago that might still apply is restlessness. Those ancestors of mine never stopped moving. And I like to keep moving. Did that come from my mitochondrial mom, too? I wouldn’t be surprised.
It’s a lot of fun speculating about the way life was for our ancestors. Knowing your mtDNA can add some real information about that. I’d love to hear what you learn.
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, a linguist, and a life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
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