New series: Yorkshire’s DNA... beginning with Adam

In the first of a major series of features tracing Yorkshire’s DNA, Alistair Moffat tracks down one of Adam and Eve’s direct descendants.

ADAM and Eve really existed, and a Christian faith is not required to believe in their existence. It is a scientific fact. They were not called Eve or Adam and, very sadly, they never met but DNA evidence insists that we are all descended from one woman and one man.

The Garden of Eden was in Africa and scientists estimate that Eve lived there 195,000 years ago and Adam around 140,000 years ago. DNA can build a family tree for the prehistory of the human race by working back through branches created by markers. We all inherit our DNA from our parents and markers are tiny errors of copying that occasionally occur in reproduction in particular places and at particular times.

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Some are very much older 
than others and are placed nearer to the roots of the tree, nearer to Adam and Eve. Geneticists can work out the relationship of markers, how younger ones evolved from older, and they can clearly demonstrate how they all descend from one man and one woman. We are, all of us, the children of Adam and Eve.

They were almost certainly black. Both archaeological and DNA evidence points to Central Africa as a huge Garden of Eden. As the imagery of Genesis implies, they were hunter-gatherers able to live off a wild harvest of fruits, roots, berries and whatever they were able to trap or hunt. In the Omo Valley of Southern Ethiopia, an archaeological expedition of 1967 discovered fossilised fragments of very ancient human skulls. The oldest was reliably dated to 195,000BC, 
and in the area where they were found many stone tools were identified. DNA studies of 
modern African populations suggest that very early humans also lived in the Rift Valley to the south of the Omo and also as far west as Cameroon.

These communities probably lived in extended family bands and they needed wide ranges to gather and hunt their food. The overall population was almost certainly less than 100,000 over this vast swathe of Africa, perhaps in the entire continent.

Other lineages existed at the same time as those of Adam and Eve – but they did not survive. Around 73,000BC a great catastrophe struck the Earth.

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When Mount Toba blew itself apart in what vulcanologists call a super-colossal eruption, a huge area of our planet was devastated. Most of the Indonesian island of Sumatra was incinerated under rivers of red-hot molten lava, more than 2,800 cubic kilometres of ash, pumice and other rubbish rocketed into the atmosphere, creating a lethal canopy of mineral aerosols (sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid and carbon monoxide) that darkened much of the Earth, blotting out the sun and beginning a long nuclear winter.

The most destructive eruption in the last million years, it was a climate shock the likes of which we have never seen.

As billions of tons of ash fell into the seas and rivers devastating marine life, the air temperature fell by as much as 10C.

In the cold and gloom most of the trees and plant life in Asia and East Africa perished along with the pollinating insects. And with the plant life went the plant-eating animals that were the main diet for Africa’s humans.

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It may be that a decade of cold, bleak sunless years triggered an ice age that was to last for 10,000 years and which would reduce humankind from about 100,000 individuals to less than 10,000.

The devastation was appalling but it cannot have been complete. Human beings did survive in Africa, even if it was a much reduced remnant. As the ash cloud cleared and the sun broke through at last, the land greened over once more. And in a recovering Central Africa a remarkable thing happened. A tiny group, almost certainly no more than two or three hundred, broke away from the survivor communities and began to walk northwards.

When they reached the Horn of Africa, they saw the Red Sea. At its narrows, known as the Gate of Tears, where it joins the Arabian Sea, they crossed to what is now Yemen. And from that foothold, these small bands of pioneers repopulated the whole of the rest of the world. All of us who are not Africans or recent descendants of Africans are their children. Brave and resourceful, our ancestors crossed rivers and seas, saw new horizons and ventured into unknown lands.

We do not know their names, and find it hard to inhabit their brief lives – but inside us, we carry their DNA. Markers can trace the immense journeys of our ancestors as they moved eastward, north and then ultimately west to Britain and Yorkshire. At the farthest end of the vast Eurasian landmass, this archipelago was as far north-west as it was possible to migrate. A place on the edge of beyond, Britain and Yorkshire consequently have a very diverse collective DNA – and much that is new and unexpected awaits discovery.

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It is an incontrovertible scientific fact that we are all descended from Africans. But one Yorkshireman is much more closely linked to the time of Adam and Eve than others so far tested.

DNA tells a very surprising story about John Revis. Born in East Yorkshire, he carries a rare surname (only 121 people had it in 1998) that derives from an East Yorkshire village, and it is still strongly focused in the east of the county.

He also has a remarkable Y chromosome marker, M31, and it is shared by seven other men who carry the surname. This defines the so-called A1a group and in the family tree of the human race, John Revis is in the second branch down from Adam.

Obviously he is as far removed from him as all of us are in time – but typical Yorkshiremen and John Revis’ male line family tree only connect about 108,000 years ago. He is a direct and living link with the vast sweep of our common human history and its beginnings in Africa, and in his case probably West Africa.

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The A1a marker is only found from Senegal to Niger and it is rare even there with only 0.5 per cent of men carrying it.

It seems that Mr Revis’ own family tree includes West African DNA from much more recent times, around the 1730s to the 1760s. This Y chromosome DNA may have arrived in Britain with a male slave through the routes of the infamous slave trade, and it is likely that equally fascinating links with the African Garden of Eden are waiting to be found in Yorkshire.

Part of the excitement of this new project is the likelihood is that DNA will tell us not only a great deal about Yorkshire and Yorkshire men and women, but also about the beginnings of the entire human race.

To find out more about the project to trace Yorkshire’s DNA go to www.yorkshiresdna.com. On November 1 at West Yorkshire Playhouse the first results of testing will be revealed along with a guest lecture about the project. To book tickets call 0113 213 7700.

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