Tag Archives: mitochondrial ancestor

The ten thousand year old woman.

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Tony shuffled down to the kitchen, to make a cup of coffee. My efforts to write ten or fifteen more pages into the story that had no plot, was not going that well. He already had four different versions of it. He even forgot what was there in the first version. But none of the threads were good enough. The story lacked sand. It lacked the valleys and the peaks, the change of season and the sudden thunder. It lacked direction, and a strong basic theme.
Since the last coffee machine started leaking, he had changed over to instant coffee. He heated a cup of water in the microwave.
And thats when he saw her. She was looking at him through the kitchen window. She appeared elderly and small, and wrapped in some sort of a shawl. She was standing by the maple tree, fifteen yards from his kitchen. The light had faded from the sky. His front lights faintly illuminated her face. Her face had a strangeness – like it was cut from an old stone. And she was peering at him, intently.
Tony forgot his coffee. He felt riveted by this unknown woman. His eyes remained locked on her. He struggled and finally broke away from that hypnotic stare and looked away. Turning, he moved out of the kitchen and into his entrance hall, and opened the front door. He stepped through the door and looked up again at the maple tree.
There was nothing there, other than the tree, the grass of his front lawn, and the asphalt on the road beyond. The woman with the face of stone had vanished. Tony wondered if what he saw from the kitchen was an illusion. He stepped onto the front lawn and walked to the tree. The grass was short cropped but heavy. He did not think there would be any footprints, and he was right. No footprints in the grass.
Tony leaned on the tree and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. He was tired. The water for the coffee would go cold soon. He turned and walked back to his house – still wondering about the missing woman.
Ahh, well – he’d warm up the cup of water again, and make that instant coffee yet.
—————————

Neil and Mabel walked to the movie hall from the parking lot. Neil was trying to get used to this new sensation, this new arrangement, where Mabel was his girl friend, and they were together as lovers. Mabel seemed to take this a lot more naturally. In fact she looked almost radiant. He hooked her arm around his elbow as they walked around the parked cars and crossed the road to enter the movie hall. There were people milling about near the entrance to the hall.
—————
As Neil and Mabel walked through the opened doors, Tony saw the woman, again.
She was standing outside. She had that shawl around her. And this time, she had a child with her, standing next to her. They were holding hands.
Tony recognized her this time. She was Suta, the woman of of southern Europe or central asia, from around the end of the last ice age. The one that carried similar mitochondial DNA as he himself did. She was in direct line of his maternal ancestry. She was also the product of his own imagination. He had named her Suta and written about her in two of his chapters.
It seemed that she had started appearing in his real life, as well as the section of the story which was anchored in the present time, and proceeded through the life of Neil, his own alter ego.
He started reheating the cup of water. He wondered, how an imaginary woman that was in direct line of his maternal ancestry, from ten thousand years in the past, could also be present in his imaginary story of the present.
Besides, she appeared to be present in his, Tony’s own life, looking at him through his kitchen window. From his stories, she was crossing a line, and appearing in his real life.
He added a spoon full of instant coffee granules and a dash of milk. He reached for the sugar and took a spoonful of it to add to the coffee.
His story just got one more layer of complication.

He let Neil and Mabel walk into the darkened theatre. They apparently did not notice the woman. In fact, nobody else indicated an awareness of her presence. After all, a ten thousand year old woman walking about in today’s world should be noticeable, should she not?
She was short. Uncommonly short. Tony tried to recollect what he saw, or imagined he saw, outside of the movie hall, and compared her with others around. She must have been less than five feet. Even young kids were taller than her. And yet, she did not seem to be a midget. Four feet seven or eight inches? Was she wearing heels ? Tony climbed the stairs, heading for his study, holding the cup of coffee in one hand, and his laptop, folded up, in the other.
She was not wearing heels. In fact, she was bare feet. Her tiny feet looked kind of gray brown. It peeked out of her garment, which, Tony thought, was a kind of wrap around shawl. It was not quite a sari, and not quite a toga. Perhaps the sari and the toga had a similar origin. This woman was perhaps wearing the mother of all saris.
Tony set the laptop on is desk and opened the lid. The screen came to life and lighted up. He checked the top right corner of the screen. Hmm – forty three percent of juice still left. It will last more than an hour before he would need to plug it into a power supply. He brought it on his lap and leaned back in his swivel chair, placing his socks wearing shoeless feet on the desk. He had gotten into this habit of walking about with socks inside his home, especially in winter. It felt comfortable.
Thinking back on the scene, he balanced his hands on the keyboards and lightly touched the keypad. Thoughts mixed with imaginary scenes came trickling at first, and then tumbling about in his head. One moment, he saw the woman’s hands, rough, strong, creased, with the palm having hardened warts from a lifetime of rough work. The nails appeared gnarled, thick and even twisted and broken at places, black dirt sticking under them. Although she was small, her hands could probably strangle him or break his neck if she so wished.
Her wrist bones were not normal. Tony closed his eyes, and tried to figure out what was abnormal. Was there a lump or a projection ? Perhaps her wrist had broken once and healed unevenly. Or perhaps she had some bone defect. About half of all human bones were in hands and feet. Too many pieces to make it possible for humans to use their hands like no other animal could, and to walk on two legs with dexterity that no other primate could. But, back ten thousand years ago, the stress on those limbs were likely a lot more severe, in the course of one’s life.
He tried to imagine her features, and ended up scratching his eye brows. Imagination can play tricks here. Otzy, the iceman of the Italian alps, over five thousand years old and mostly intact, had, as far as he could tell from the photographs, distinctly European features. If Otzy’s ancestors had walked out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago, and assuming that first generation to have more or less similar features as man in Ethiopia or Sudan today, those features had changed over the course of a hundred thousand years, and the last five thousand had more to do with height, weight, and stature, that facial features. In fact, the body size apparently started growing rather recently, perhaps only in the last seven or eight hundred years, and as a direct result of better nutrition during growing years. Europeans started eating better, and thence began to grow taller and lankier, perhaps in the northern reaches first.
Tony felt a little unsure of himself at this stage. He was stepping onto unknown territory of the history of the growth of human body size in the Eurasian steppes. But, going back another five thousand years before Otzy, and ten thousand years from now, he felt sure that the tall thin and dark appearance of the East Africans would by then have changed to shorter, stockier, and fairer humans in the mediterranean, the middle east and central asian steppes. Besides, they where surviving through the ice age. Protection from heat was less of a problem. Surviving intense cold, in an environment were plant material should be scare and availability of food would be a constant worry for a hunter gatherer.
Tony stopped again. When was agriculture invented? Was that not forty thousand years ago or so? Alright, it was perhaps only seasonal agriculture, only on river banks and places where natural irrigation and soil fertilization made it suitable for experimentation with planting select seeds could bear fruit. It would likely be a long time before this had any direct impact on daily meals of an average human, especially those that were forced to move around, migrating from land to land, and still living mostly a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence.
Tony started typing – ‘the woman held the hand of the little child and peered intently as Neil disappeared into the darkness inside the movie hall, then turned and walked away, fading into the evening mist and disappeared from view’.
Tony knew by now, that she was there carrying his mitochondrial DNA, for a purpose. She wanted to be part of the story Tony wrote. Somehow it has to connect.
Somehow, so many things had to connect. The story of life, even his own undramatic life, had so many little nooks and crannies, so many twists and turns, that all had to connect with each other to make the present possible.
Ohh well, he would have to pry something more about his mitochondrial DNA. He knew a bit already. The ‘L’ haplogroup was the origin. All living humans today shared it, and it originated in north eastern Africa around 150,000 years in the past. From that point on, as mankind fanned out to the rest of the known world, different folks developed different twists into their mitochondria and left those marks, those footprints in the sands of their genetic shores. Today, it was possible to pry out some of that ancient tales and travels of individual ancestral lineages through the geographic and cultural lands of the past tens of thousands of years, and link an ice age woman of central Asia to a man born in India and living in Canada, taking a Canadian woman out on a date.
Tony looked into his empty cup. He needed another coffee.

Old woman sacrifices herself

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It was one of those days. First, Tony did not like the title of this blog. He toyed with a number of alternatives, including naming a few of the giant mammals that went extinct between ten and twenty thousand years ago.
This was the time frame that was to provide one of the threads in his story. Many remember this as the phase of the last ice age of the planet.  It may well be that the earth was losing some of its ice coverings, while at the same time early humans were getting more adept at exploring hitherto uninhabited regions of the world. His maternal lineage was probably moving along the Eurasian landmass at this time, as revealed by reports of the analysis done on his mitochondrial DNA.
And Tony was trying to write up on this imaginary trail of an ancestral female that morphed from generation to generation, moving from one era and landscape through to the next, till they come into historical times, and the scene gets fuzzy. Clarity was to come as the second thread of the story, of a young Indian engineer meets up with his past. The story is not supposed to end there. The mitochondria that he carried would not be passed to the next generation. Only females did that. But he had sisters, and the line would continue, at least in the foreseeable future, onto a few more generations.
But, meanwhile, he was to weld the past with the present, which involved a Canadian woman, or perhaps two. Tony scratched his head and went back to constructing a scene that involved either a mammoth, or a saber tooth cat, or perhaps a shivatherium, that would confront an elderly woman in the central asian steppes.

American Lion - wikipedia

The woman in question would likely be separated from her clan during a hunting expedition that went wrong. While her immediate clan remained two hundred yards away, a group of the giant mammals, angry and afraid, were preparing to make a last stand against the spear throwing humans, when they chanced upon the woman.
There were a few things that was special about this woman – who was called Suta by her clan. She had, on an earlier blog, represented as a small girl sleeping in a cave during a winter storm. Now she was old. She carried a piece of mitochondrial DNA that was to pass on its copies down thousands of years all the way to Sunil Dustidar, or Neil Dusty, of British Columbia, Canada, in the year 2012.
But she was not alone. She had with her a kid – a small daughter, huddling wide eyed behind her, as she crouched, holding a piece of stone, and hissing at the approaching animal.
In the story, she would end up sacrificing herself, and injuring the animal enough to let her small daughter dash for her life, to the security of the rest of her clan – running the gauntlet of hostile animals in the central asian steppes, her tiny feet making small tracks on the wet snow as she dashed between rocks and ran, crouching. She was barely five years old, but was an expert runner and tree climber. She was hoping to reach the line of young fir trees beyond the gully ahead of her, surprising a group of giant rodents that were a cross between rabbits and skunks.
Meanwhile, the old woman, Suta, had been gored, or bitten, by the animal that felt trapped by the hunting humans on one side, and the stone throwing woman on the other. Tony could not decide what animal it should be. A saber toothed cat would likely bite her somewhere. He remembered reading somewhere that a human skull bore puncture marks of a saber toothed cat. But biting a skull appeared to be a bad way or attaching a human. The puncture marks might have been after the human had died. Perhaps the skull had rolled out into a stream bed and the cat was trying to crack the skull to get as the rotting brain.
But in the cast of Suta, an attacking carnivore should use the most economical and efficient way to kill a prey. A bit at the neck? Or stomach ? In the story, the animal would attack the woman partially as self defense. And the woman would ensure that the animal’s attention remained on her, thus allowing her baby to escape to safety. And while all this was going on, her own clan were frantically yelling and grunting, and throwing spears. Tony did not know how good the clan would have been in handling fires. Could it be that they learned the tricks of wrapping dry reeds or wine around the spear handle, soaked in animal fat or bitumen, and light a fire before throwing those burning lances ?
Such a tactic might not be any better than throwing a spear with a sharp stone at the front designed to pierce the skin and embed deep into the prey. But it might have the psychological effect of panicking the animals into irrational behavior and coax them out of their corners and into the open. It might also scare them away from attacking Suta and her baby.
If not saber toothed cats, it would be mammoths. It could be cave lions of Eurasia. It could be a sivatherium. When it came to saber teethed cat or cave lions, Tony felt unsure than a hunting party of late pleistocene humans would attach a predator of that kind. Also, it was almost certain that predators did not move in large herds, and would more likely to ambush the humans rather than humans ambushing them. So, a predator could be accidentally caught in the cross fire between the hunting party, and the giant herbivores.

Straight-tusked Elephant - wikipedia

If not mammoths, a sivatherium provided an attractive alternative. A giant giraffe like animal with multiple horns on its head and a mouth that might have resembled a modern tepir – this animal carried the improbable name of a hindu God. Why it carried shiva in its name, Tony was not sure – but such a name and an animal might add variety. Cornered and injured, it was massive enough to attack and gore a single wild haired human, especially an elderly woman wearing animal skin and brandishing small stones.
In the other half of the story – Neil was trying to piece together the thread of his ancestral lineage. Since the last blog, several things had happened. He had ended up sleeping with Mabel a few times a week, and stopped feeling awkward about it. His initial hesitation, because of the difference in age, as well as the perception of race, had not completely vanished, but were no more troubling him. Man was a creature of habit, and had a habit of getting used to things. Mabel certainly brought a degree of thrill and happiness that was missing in his life. She looked positively radiant some of the time, and very pleased with herself in general.
Neil guessed they were sort of dating each other, and were kind of paired up. His idea of dating normally involved taking a woman out for an evening of eating, or drinking, or watching a movie or something. But Neil had done none of those. If they went out together, more often than not in involved walking around in sandy shores or among thick vegetation in some nature park. Neil would normally be hauling a heavy camera and lens mounted on a tripod – the whole contraption balanced on his shoulder as he moved. Mabel would also have a backpack with additional photography gear of Neil. But lately she started adding sandwiches, fruit juice, water, and even a birders field guide to her pack. Neil did not like carrying field guides, but refer to them later, back in his car, or back home. But Mabel wanted to catch up on the general identification of birds. She was soon to learn the difference between different kinds of swifts, martins and swallows, or gulls, or birds of prey, and waders.
She loved spending time with Neil, and Neil was getting used to having another person with him on his days of bird watching.
There was going to be complications coming into the cozy relationship developing between Neil and Mabel. They were not aware of it yet.

———————————-

Cave bear worship - wikipedia

Cave Paintings of ice age eurasian animals - wikipedia

The story was soon going to have some sort of a triangle. There needed to be either another woman, or another man or both. Tony was more inclined to create another woman, a single mother with a child. He even named her Karen.
Two months ago, Tony did not have a clue on the plot for the story. But that was two months ago.
Tony stopped typing and put away the laptop for a while. He was hungry. He spent the last few hours walking about in the Galleria mall in Houston and move through the stores of Macy, Sacks fifth avenue, Sony, Apple, and a number of others, without finding a single thing he wanted to buy. The closest he came to purchasing anything was a half sleeve white sweater in Macy. But they had small sizes and extra large but no Large size, which was the right size for him. Just as well, he really did not need a white half sleeve sweater, even if it looked nice.
Why he was there? Well, he had finished his work ahead of time, and instead of returning home to Vancouver on Sunday, he tried to rebook his flight a day earlier, but failed. So, he essentially had a day to spare. He decided against going out to the art galleries, or the nature parks, or search out some friends there. The walk in the mall was more to do with stretching his legs and getting some exercise.
Sitting near the fountain inside the mall, he had read up two newspapers, the Financial Time, and Houston Chronicle. He was unimpressed by the trivia but liked a few articles, especially in the pink Financial Times.
Papers had their share of news about the fighting republican candidates that wishes to challenge Obama in the coming presidential election. He found the news mostly boring, and also silly.
Nobody discussed real politics, or real economics, or real anything anymore.He had left the papers and moved on. Perhaps another shopper would find a better use for them.
He had stopped at a spot where baby dogs were on sale for potential pet owners. The dog pups were a hit among young children. There were no price tags, so Tony did not know how much they cost.
Back to the hotel, which was across the street from the entrance to the mall, Tony had sat at the bar and had a beer, trying to watch a basketball game on the wide flatscreen TV there. Unimpressed, he came up and started writing about Suta and her sacrifice.
The item had a link with his own immediate ancestry, going back a few hundred years. He had learned, from his father and his uncle, that their ancestors had one deformed male that actually grew to adulthood and produced off springs that made it possible for the lineage to continue.
But the deformation was not from birth. As a child, he was apparently attacked by a tiger in what is today Bangladesh. His mother, a tiny sari clad woman, had chased and attacked the tiger holding a sort of machete. The tiger, or perhaps it was a tigress, got furious, dropped the bleeding child and grabbed the mother, killing and dragging her off to the marshes. She had sacrificed herself for the sake of her baby. That baby, now deformed for life, survived. Tony had heard of that story, from his own father and his fathers elder brother.
That was linked to his paternal ancestry. But in the story he was writing, he decided to attach a similar incidence, pushing it back to the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, and moved it from his paternal, to his maternal ancestry.
But now, it was time for a hearty meal. Tony decided to walk back into the mall. He had seen a nice restaurant and bar that was better than the coffee shop in the hotel. He was planning to have a glass of wine, a very large salad, and perhaps a cheese cake.
He put put on his wind cheater, took his iPad, and walked out of the hotel, mulling about a saber toothed tiger, a four tusked mammoth, and a shivatherium, and how a tiny woman might sacrifice herself to save her daughter, thus allowing her mitochondrial DNA to survive through another ten thousand years all the way to the present.

Suta at the Riviera

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She woke up with the sound of howling winds. It rattled the stone buttressed flaps of leather across the narrow entrance to their cave. Puffs of snow burst through the narrow gaps and settled at the entrance. The stone below was cold, and her bed was lined with soft soil and leaves, on which she had part of a wooly rhinoceros hide, on which she had curled up with some dry grass and straw and another fox hide atop her. Hairs on her arms , back and legs had not grown much yet, and in any case, was not protection enough from the cold. Her mother had already left the cave, likely with Solu, their clan leader. Only baby Oth kept sleeping, curled around the wolf pup. Mama wolf had also gone, with the elders.

Suta gazed at the cave ceiling. The cave had earlier been used by bats, but abandoned since they themselves moved in. The strong smell of their excrement and urine made her heady at times, but every time the wind passed through the cave, the smell would go away for a few days. The cave had a narrow opening through which they could crawl out. The interior of the cave thinned out but did not end. A small shaft connected to the outside without the rocky mound. They would cover that opening with a stone slab, to prevent reptiles, wolverines and small critters from entering the cave. But when they needed the cave aired, they would open up both ends.
The cave was once also the home of a smilodon – a sabre toothed cat. Solu and his brother had fought and chased it away. Even now, the sabre tooth would occasionally pass by and growl at night, as if reminding them that it would like to have the cave back. Suta and her mother were not able to deter the smilodon from attacking them unarmed. But his mother had become and expert thrower or stone hand spears, a demonstration of which the sabre toothed cat carries on its hind flank as a scar, and learned to give them some distance in day time. A sabre tooth was an ambusher, and not a frontal attack predator – at least not for humans. Suta was still learning to throw a stone spear, but she was too small, and was more comfortable with the stone axe with the short wooden handle, used close to her body. She had once confronted a cornered fox with it and came out the winner, without getting bitten.
The cave was at the edge of a shallow lake in what in the future would be named the riviera. It would be a balmy popular oceanfront land of rich people. But in Suta’s time, it was a bleak, ice encrusted covered region in the grip of an ice age.
She was only six years old, and less than three feet tall. In another two years, she might find a mate and pair up either in their clan or go her own way. She did not know it yet, but she carried a piece of mitochondria, that, many thousands of years in the future, was going to end up in a woman of India, who would pass it to her son, who would be migrating to Canada, and sit down with a cup of coffee, and write about her times in the cave by the French riviera.
———————
Tony wrote this much, and leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the table, noticing that his big toes had some thick and fierce looking nails that were due for clipping. He sighed. He was never very good as chores of this kind. Fishing out the toe nail clipper from the shelf, he proceeded to tend to his toes, letting his thoughts go back to what he wrote.
The thing is – he was beginning to get an idea of a plot, and it was getting complex by the minutes.
First, there was this Canadian young woman, Mabel, that had taken an interest in Neil. Tony was never going to be a romance writer. So, Mabel was likely going to unsuccessful in getting Neil to commit himself for several hundred pages, and the reader by then would have given up.
But, there was a way out – and this involved writing about the fun detective work Neil was engaged in with regard to tracing his own paternal and maternal genetic lineage. Tony was going to get Mabel involved in it, and let the two of them figure things out from that point.
And then he was, perhaps in alternate chapters, add one more layer of complexity – that of a stone age women, who hypothetically carried the mitochondria that would end up, or rather, a sort of an imperfect copy of which would end up in Neil. And the story would sort of progress on two fronts – one more or less locked in time to the present, involving Neil and Mabel and the crazy world of today, while the other front would have the ice age cave woman gradually morphing through time, to end up a few generations ago into north-eastern Bengal, preparing the seeds that would eventually end with Neil himself, while Neils story would be very close to Tony’s own.
How is that for a story that had no plot, to end up having a hell of a complex one ?
The thing is, Neil did not know if it was normal for a cave dweller, ten thousand years ago in French Riviera, was expected to have hides of wooly rhinoceros. He did not know if the time, and the place was both right, for the now extinct animal. He did not even know if French Riviera area had any natural caves.
He did not know how much body hair folks had those days before the invention of fabric and clothing. He did not know at what age young women of the late stone age were consider to have reached the age of consent. Neil did not know a whole lot about ice age Europe. But, Tony suspected his maternal as well as paternal ancestors passed exactly through that land at that time.
And he was intrigued about it.

Ahh well, time to go to sleep.