The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes Read Free Book Online Page A

would tell me about ancient man and found the results very disappointing.’ Even so, the unsuccessful attempts to explain human origins using blood groups had had their compensations for the liberal-minded Boyd. He wrote: ‘In certain parts of the world an individual will be considered inferior if he has, for instance, a dark skin but in no part of the world does possession of a blood group A gene exclude him from the best society.’
    After the Second World War, William Boyd’s baton as compiler of blood group data from around the world passed to the Englishman Arthur Mourant. A native of Jersey in the Channel Islands, Mourant originally took a degree in geology but was unable to translate that training into a career. His very strict Methodist upbringing had caused him considerable emotional unhappiness, which he determined to resolve by becoming a psychoanalyst. To do this he decided first to study medicine and enrolled, at the relatively late age of thirty-four, in St Bartholomew’s Medical School in London. This was in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. To avoid the German bombing raids on the capital, his medical school was moved from London to Cambridge, and it was here that he met R. A. Fisher, the most influential geneticist of his day. Fisher had been working out the genetics of the new blood groups which were being discovered, and he had become fascinated by the particularly convoluted inheritance of one of them – the Rhesus blood group. This new group had been discovered by Karl Landsteiner and his colleague Alexander Wiener in 1940 after they mixed human blood with the blood of rabbits that had themselves been injected with cells of the Rhesus monkey (hence the name). Fisher had come up with a complicated theory to account for the way in which the different sub-types within the group were passed down from parents to their children, and this was being violently attacked by Wiener who had offered a much simpler explanation. Imagine Fisher’s delight when the new arrival, Arthur Mourant, discovered a large family of twelve siblings which provided the practical proof of his theory. Fisher found him a job at once, and the meticulous Mourant spent the rest of his working life compiling and interpreting the most detailed blood group frequency distribution maps ever produced. He never did become a psychoanalyst.
    As well as being instrumental in getting Arthur Mourant a job, the Rhesus blood groups were also about to play a central role in what people were thinking about the origins of modern Europeans and in identifying the continent’s most influential genetic population – the fiercely independent Basques of north-west Spain and south-west France. The Basques are unified by their common language, Euskara, which is unique in Europe in that it has no linguistic connection with any other living language. That it survives at all in the face of its modern rivals, Castilian Spanish and French, is remarkable enough. But two thousand years ago, it was only the disruption of imperial Roman administration in that part of the empire that saved Euskara from being completely swamped by Latin, which was the fate of the now extinct Iberian language in eastern Spain and south-east France. The Basques provided us with an invaluable clue to the genetic history of the whole of Europe, as we shall see later in the book, but their elevation to special genetic status only began when Arthur Mourant started to look closely at the Rhesus blood groups.
    Most people have heard about the Rhesus blood groups in connection with ‘blue baby syndrome’ or ‘haemolytic disease of the new-born’ to give it its full medical title. This serious and often fatal condition affects the second or subsequent pregnancy of mothers who are ‘Rhesus negative’ – that is, who do not possess the Rhesus antigen on the surface of their red blood cells. What happens is this. When a