The Sorcerer, Les Trois Freres, 13,000 BCE
Maternal Haplogroup T2f1
March 3, 2011
What does 45,000 years of mitochondrial DNA mean? It ought to mean something beyond the shock and awe it inspires in me, not that I imagine I’m unique. What human being doesn’t have 45,000 years of genome? It’s merely I have scientific proof of it now staring me in the face, not an abstraction, linking me to human beings in today’s Middle East, who had migrated out of Africa, with my T2 sub-mutation at less than 33,000 BCE, some taking the T marker into Pakistan and India, back into Eastern Africa, and then into the Basque region at about 15,000 BCE, with the retreating of the glaciers.
I had learned last year when my son had had his genome tested that our paternal line has a mutation reaching back 20,000 years BCE to the Franco-Cantabrian region of Spain and France, inspiring me to test my own genome separately, now dating it at about 17,000 BCE. I’ve always known my mother’s ancestry extended from Croatia and Germany, but incredibly her lineage must have had a connection as well to the area of the ancient caves.
Mitochondrial Eve. Ancestor shamans stare out at me.
