Would you like to trace your genetic ancestry? Most of us can
trace our family history for a few generations - possibly down
to our great-great-grandparents - but certainly not thousands of
years into the distant past, when Europe and other continents
were settled by prehistoric tribes and peoples. Others of us
have little knowledge of even fairly recent ancestors and
suspect that they may hark from an exotic land - but until now
have had no way of knowing for sure. As we showed in the BBC
documentary "Motherland - A Genetic Journey" and in the recent
American PBS film "African American Lives", modern genetics
shows us a way to address these questions. In the genetic
material in each of us, a mass of historic information is
encoded, with which experts can for the first time gain clues to
our past ancestors. Over the last ten years, groundbreaking work
by geneticists has shown that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA - which
is passed from mother to child unaltered for many generations)
and Y-chromosomal DNA (Y DNA - pas