Posted on 12/30/2005 5:03:20 PM PST by blam
The Japan Times, March 9, 1997
Descendant of Stone Age skeleton found
LONDON (Reuter) British scientists Saturday celebrated their feat of tracing a living descendant of a 9,000-year-old skeleton and establishing the world's oldest known family tree.
In an astonishing piece of detective work, they matched mitochondrial DNA material extracted from the tooth cavity of Britain's oldest complete skeleton with that of a 42-year-old history teacher, Adrian Targett. The genetic material showed without doubt that Targett is a direct descendant through his mother's line of the skeleton known as Cheddar Man, which was found in 1903 in caves in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England.
"It is extraordinary that the DNA survives at all, but we were able to extract it and sequence it," said Bryan Sykes of Oxford University's Institute of Molecular Medicine. "They would have shared a common ancestor about 10,000 years ago, so they are related."
Targett lives about a kilometer from the caves where Cheddar Man was found. Previous tests have shown that Cheddar Man suffered a violent death at the age of about 23 in 7150 B.C.
The Oxford University team spent months analyzing samples from the skeleton before taking DNA swabs from about 20 local people whose families had lived in the Cheddar area for generations.
Targett, who teaches modern history, said he took part only to make up the numbers.
"I was astonished when the scientists said I was the descendant. Appropriately enough, I am a history teacher, but I have to admit I know next to nothing about Cheddar Man. I suppose I really should try to include him in my family tree," he said.
Targett can now boast a lineage millennia older than that of Britain's royal family, which traces its heritage back to A.D. 829.
The oldest previously recorded relative was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Confucius, who lived in China in the eighth century B.C.
Scientists said the odds of finding a match were not as enormous as might appear, because of the relatively small number of people who lived in Britain during the Stone Age.
Sykes said the discovery strengthened the theory that the ancestors of modern-day Britons were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers.
"There has been an idea that most modern European are descended from farmers that came in from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, reaching Britain about 6,000 years ago," Sykes told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "This kind of evidence shows that is probably not true, and that modern Britons are in fact descended from the earlier inhabitants like Cheddar Man who existed on hunting and gathering and who were not farmers."
Scientists said they were hoping to use the same technique of sampling mitochondrial DNA to prove whether Neanderthals, who died out about 25,000 years ago, were linked to modern humans or were a completely different species.
Professor Chris Stringer, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, said, "This work may finally let us end a 150-year-old argument which has existed since a Neanderthal man fossil was first found."
Targett, an only child who has no children, was still coming to terms with the idea of having a Stone Age man as a relative.
But his wife, Catherine, said, "Maybe this explains why he likes his steaks rare."
Time for its own thread.
I bet that's some sharp-assed cheese...
GGG Ping.
Butted by a moose?
The Stone Age was only 9,000 years ago?
Been in the neighborhood a while!
I rememeber reading about this when it was first reported. The most interesting thing to me is the guy lived right where the skeleton was discovered.
Your uncle?
With such a pedigree Adrian Targett is to be inscribed into peerage, and the sooner the better. How many of them have known ancestors even 1000 years ago?
Where is Gouda Man?
Really? This was never a thread? The article is practically archeological itself.
That is amazing! Time to redo the family tree to add Cheddar Man!
LOL
I like this part:
"Targett, an only child who has no children, was still coming to terms with the idea of having a Stone Age man as a relative.
But his wife, Catherine, said, "Maybe this explains why he likes his steaks rare."
Now..after 9,000 years..the family tree ends. This man owes it to Cheddar Man to marry and breed..lol
They go back 940 years some of them, most are since 1066.
So there.
opps..on reread i see he is married. Bummer.
They found the first Cheese Head.
At first read, I saw 9,000 year old stone skeleton.
It ain't easy being cheesey.
He is a Pict.
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A moose bit my sister once...
The Congo has REACHED the Stone Age?
"There has been an idea that most modern European are descended from farmers that came in from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, reaching Britain about 6,000 years ago," Sykes told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "This kind of evidence shows that is probably not true, and that modern Britons are in fact descended from the earlier inhabitants like Cheddar Man who existed on hunting and gathering and who were not farmers."
What an amazing leap in deduction! Why give these people any credibility? They know neither the 1st postulate nor the 2nd!
Fathers can be influential tooBiologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
by Eleanor LawrenceIs Eve older than we thought?"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
We talking Arlington Rte7A?
Yes
Less than that. Copper working started about 8,000 years ago, but copper smelting, that extracting the metal from the ore, only about 5,000 years ago. Agriculture only started about 8,000 years ago as well, probably in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq.
Were there several species of small furry animals gathered together In a cave and grooving with him?
If he does, or doesn't, the line dies with him. It would have to continue through his female maternal cousins. Mitochondrial DNA is completely inherited from the mother. This is because it's not in the nucleus of the cell, where all that sexual stuff goes on, but rather out in the mitochondria, which are present in the ovum before it's ever fertilized, and to which the sperm does not contribute anything.
Hmm, 1066 (William the Conqueror and all that) is 940 years ago. But the British Royals are so intermixed with royals from all over Europe, they are hardly British at all, at least nothing like this guy.
Of course since mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother only, this guys N-great grandmother could have been raped by one of those Normans, or earlier by raiding Vikings. What color is his hair?
Or maybe not. Note that at least the second article excerpted in post 33 post dates this article. Wonder if the analysis has been redone in the light of the more recent information?
Who knows? A Gouda man is hard to find.
Farming Origins Gain 10,000 Years
"Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say."
How many people do you think are going to get that ancient Pink Floyd reference?
I was betting nobody; guess I was wrong :-)
OK here's another obcure Pink Foyd reference for you.
Cheddar Man died a violent death.
What was his name?
Eugene.
The whole case was just a matter of luck. A Documentary maker was in town making a documentary about Cheddar Man and at someone's suggestion he decided to fund a DNA test of some of the locals. Turns out, Targetts school students volunteered to be tested. I thought there were more than 20 in the test but this article says only 20.
Not exactly. Cheddar Man could be an ancestor of Mr. Targett-- in fact, given the exponential arithmetic of genealogy, Cheddar Man is almost certainly his ancestor by many thousands of lines of descent. However, this particular finding does NOT prove direct descent.
What this proves is that Mr. Targett and Cheddar Man had a relative in their maternal lines in common. Males and females alike receive their mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) from their mothers. Cheddar Man had a sister or female cousin, perhaps a very remote cousin, on his mother's side. She had the same mDNA as he did, since they had a common female ancestor, and passed it down through many generations of daughters to Mr. Targett's mother and thence to him.
If Mr. Targett has issue, the child will get its mDNA from Mr. Targett's wife. The only hope for continuation of Cheddar Man's mDNA is via a female cousin on Mr. Targett's mother's side.
-ccm
Read this article before, shame he is the end of the line. An only child that has no offspring.
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