The Seven Daughters of Eve. Sykes, Bryan. Bantam Press. £18.99.

Let’s start with the title. We have to assume only one Eve served as ancestor to every one of us; what therefore is so special about seven of her descendants. The answer is that they all lived in Europe – and presumably the publishers liked the handle, even putting the seven, happily invented names of this matriarchal group upon the jacket. As the book is all about mitochondria, rather than Eve, we can understand why a publisher might flinch from such a word and prefer something more immediately appealing.

With so much current talk about helical DNA, the genome, our 46 chromosomes, the genes linked along them, and our blended inheritance from both parents, it is easy to forget that a section of our make-up comes in unaltered state from our mothers. Very, very occasionally this portion experiences mutation, but the chances are that our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and on and on did not differ one iota in their mitochondrial DNA. This female consistency therefore presents wonderful possibilities for the unravelling of ancestors.

Bryan Sykes can make us extremely envious if we are not human geneticists (he is Oxford’s professor on the topic). He has plainly had such fun, with frustrations and setbacks, of course, but all adding up to fun. He investigates the ice-man (so conveniently freeze-dried in the Alps). He gets involved with the last Tsar’s family and with Prince Philip. He checks on Cheddar man (from the gorge) and Neanderthals. Then he is off to the Cook Islands working with Polynesians, and to Wales for the Welsh. As we all possess mitochondrial genes we are all grist for his enthusiasm. So too golden hamsters when, with a ‘Eureka’ yell, he remembers that every golden hamster in the western world came from one female who had been resident, until 1930, in north-west Syria.

The book is part detective story (which is easy to read), part popular biology (being a good introduction to the whole topic), and part anthropology (educating us in all sorts of odd corners). Its author is a kind teacher, often making statements two or three times in case we didn’t catch his meaning initially. He is steadfastly jolly, as if desperate to interest the uninterested. And he is plainly delighted that human genetics involves him with human beings. In its funny, discursive, geographical, and wide-ranging fashion the book probably teaches us more about human biology that many a straightforward tome entitled ‘Human Biology’.

As for the seven daughters, he wished to discover if all those hunters and gatherers, so busily hunting and gathering in Europe as the ice retreated, were overrun by the Neolithic agriculturalists who, after domesticating crops and animals, could lead less haphazard lives. The answer, even if this gives the story’s plot away, is that they were not swamped by the invaders. Instead they gave up their former life-style, accepted the novelty, and became – well – modern. If that sounds a bizarre conclusion from a study of mitochondrial genes there is nothing for it but to read the book. It kept me amused right across the Atlantic and, as I say, made me deeply envious of Professor Sykes’s trade.

Anthony Smith