A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

But you have far less in common with your ancestors than you may realize, and there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them. I will

Fred Sanger quite rightly picked up his second Nobel Prize for Chemistry* for inventing it.

In contrast to the scraggy Y chromosome, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is only passed from mother to child.

So the result is, for each of the twenty-two autosomes, a new combination. It is this process, called “recombination,” that guarantees that your precise genetic makeup is unique to you, for all time.

Mitochondria and the Y don’t do this though.

Mitochondria exist in their millions in the busy milieu inside cells, and so the chances of their surviving the onslaught of time is higher.

It’s the analysis, the number crunching that takes real expertise.

The key finding was that the sequences of DNA generated implied that the human that led to us diverged from those who led to the Neanderthals around 500,000 years ago.

Our contemporary genomes had only been deciphered in any near-complete form in 2001 (and, as described in Chapter 6, really properly in 2003),

This is a seam that will run throughout this book, confronting and dispelling the culturally ubiquitous idea that genes are fate, and a certain type of any one gene will determine exactly what an individual is like. That this is a fallacy is universally known among geneticists, yet it is still an idea that carries a lot of cultural significance, fueled frequently by the media and an ultra-simplistic understanding of the absurd complexities of human biology.