Weekend Pics

I took this whilst waiting at Wheelers for our Toronto company to link up with us.



Cuppa then led us on a walking tour of Perth ...



... where there are many interesting and fine old buildings ...




... and this one with a picture and a sign that I liked.



My BIL is really into photography and carted his tripod around town. He had just taken a photo of the house where the last duel in Ontario was fought. One guy died, and the other got the girl. Really.



A BBQ supper with only Cuppa missing (although we only see the top of the back of Zach's head). Someone had to take the picture.



The next day we went to Temples. I grabbed BIL's camera to take a picture of him with SIL. It's hard to get pictures of the two of them together, so I'm sorry this one didn't turn out better.



Our meal was followed by a saunter through the sugar bush and these two pictures of the sisters.



Th th that's all folks.

Weekend Doings

After a glorious weekend both in terms of weather and company, we are back to babysitting on a cloudy Easter Monday. Unlike normal Mondays, even Nikki Dee is home as her Daycare school is closed for the holiday.

It was a weekend of maple syrup and other meals for us. First, we met Cuppa's sister and BIL at Wheeler's Pancake House and Sugar Camp on Saturday morning. It's way way out in the country but tons of people found their way on the most beautiful day of the year so far. After visiting the Nature Lover's Bookstore in Lanark, we drove to Perth where we did a walking tour on which BIL took lots of pictures. From there, we headed to Thesha's for a bbq supper.



First thing Sunday morning we headed to Temple's Sugar Camp for a wonderful breakfast of think, yummy French Toast and pancakes abundantly covered with a super blueberry compote. Yum. After walking their trail we headed in to Ottawa, stopping to meander along the River Parkway before driving to the Byward Market. Which was incredibly crowded. There are very many restaurants in The Market, and each was overflowing with people inside and outside on the decks. We ended up at the Heart and Crown for their excellent fish and chips before heading back to Thesha's for dessert.

What with all of the exercise and good food, we were all sleeping soundly when out smoke detector noisily went into action. Twice. It has never malfunctioned in five years but did it twice last night. We checked carefully as we live attached to other townhouses, but all was clear.

This morning, shortly after awaking I was made aware of another malfunction, this time of one of my hearing aids. I find this aggravating, especially because repairs normally cost $300. So, that's the bad news after a fine weekend.

Easter Crocuses

Every year, I make it a point to take some photos of Thesha's crocuses. This year, they are glorious just in time for Easter. We have some on the way in our garden, but they're still cooking because our flower bed doesn't get as much sunlight. These little guys and/or gals are the harbingers of spring for me, and I'm chuffed that they're at their peak for Easter this year. May your Easter be joyous and bright.

Living and Learning

Before the onset of winter, Nikki Dee didn't know how to make this swing go by herself. Now she does. She hasn't got the hang of the other kind of swing yet, but all in good time.



Also, she couldn't manage to make the trike go last autumn, but now it's no problem at all.




Maybe she'll soon be able to teach grampa to tie his shoes.

That's My Mom

Unless new information spontaneously appears from out of the blue, I am thinking that this will be my last post about DNA and our ancient lineage. However, one of those seven clan mothers from yesterday's post is mine, and I want to mention her specifically. I am referring to Jasmine, the youngest of the seven supposed daughters of Eve.

After taking us carefully through all of his DNA science in The Seven Daughters of Eve, Sykes takes off on a bit of a flight of fancy. Essentially, he creates what he deems to be a plausible story for each one. I say story because although he can make a fairly accurate guess as to the time and place where each woman might have lived, he certainly can't be spot on. More importantly, once he had chosen a specific time and place, he could only take a wild guess as to what each woman's life might possibly have been like. Despite the guessing, I feel that creating some sort of plausible account, helped me to relate to my clan mother a little more closely, putting flesh on the skeleton as it were.

Sykes located Jasmine about a mile from the Euphrates River in what is now modern Syria about 10 000 years ago. She lived in a round hut with a thatched roof in a community of perhaps 300 people. As with the six other matriarchs and all people everywhere at the time, this was a village that subsisted on hunting and gathering. She (and perhaps her husband in Sykes' story) noticed that seeds from previous gatherings would tend to sprout where they had dropped.

The next step was to begin to plant seeds deliberately: the beginning of perhaps the greatest change in human history — the Agricultural Revolution. Then, Jasmine began to save seeds from the better plants and thus began to improve the crops and yields. The community soon had a more reliable food supply than ever before, especially when others began to emulate her efforts. From this community, archaeologists and other scientists calculate that the idea quickly spread: in the case of this the subject matter of Sykes' book throughout Europe. The new reality of abundant food supply in turn created a very significant population explosion wherever the Agricultural Revolution went.

Almost 17% of modern Europeans are descended from Jasmine with two specific branches of settlement being evident. "One distinctive branch follows the Mediterranean coast to Spain and Portugal, whence it found its way to the west of Britain where it is particularly common in Cornwall, Wales and the west of Scotland." Meanwhile, another branch traverses through central Europe. Even today, this distribution remains evident.

Jasmine had no idea of what she started and how she changed the world, but change it, she did.

The End

Candid Shots

Sometimes, Zach is as difficult to photograph as his sister but for the opposite reason. While she usually ignores the camera even when you beg her to look and smile, he tends to stop what he's doing to look at the camera. That's usually good, but sometimes you just want a candid. Here is a series of four consecutive candid shots of the boy being boy with a bracelet type of toy. In the first, he is just taking it from gramma,and by the end, it's on his arm.

Our Seven Mothers

As most of you know, I recently had my DNA tested and have posted on the topic a few times lately. What can I say, it interests me. Perhaps it's a yearning for the connectedness which I was musing on the other day. Perhaps it just interests me for no particular reason, Frankly, I don't know. What I do know is that I ordered Bryan Sykes book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and when it arrived from Chapters the other day, I ended up reading it in fairly short order. Much of the book is both an explanation of how DNA forensics works and Sykes' part in developing analyzing the process: the history and the science as it were. At times the book becomes heavily scientific and sometimes quite statistical, but for the most part it is comprehensible to the lay person.

The crux of the study is his analysis of Europe's population, where he and others have deduced that approximately 95% of Europeans exhibit the mitochondrial DNA of just seven clan mothers. Along the way he concludes that all Europeans and in fact all people are modern humans: that is to say, Homo sapiens. For quite a while it was speculated that some Neanderthal genes, for example, might have mixed with ours, but no evidence for this has been found, and it appears that modern humans totally replaced the Neanderthals in Europe and any other earlier forms of humans elsewhere.

The seven European clan mothers, or daughters of Eve, have been given names, at least by Sykes. Ursula, the oldest, is thought to have lived in what is now Greece about 45 000 years ago, and is the mother to 11% of today's Europeans. Jasmine, the youngest, came on the scene, probably in what is now Syria, only about 10 000 years ago; she is clan mother to 17% of Europe's people. In between the two are Helena (southern France, 30 000 years, clan matriarch to 47% of Europe), Xenia ( Caucasus, 25 000 years, 6% ), Velda (the mountains of northern Spain, 17 000 years, 5%), Tara (Tuscany, Italy, 17 000 years, 9%),and Katrine (near Venice, Italy, 15 000 year, 6%). It's plain to see that each of these matriarchs lived at different times and places, but it is their DNA that has been passed on to almost all Europeans today. As far as I can tell from what I know about my readers, one of these seven women is your clan mother.

In turn, all seven of these women can trace their ancestry back to Lara who lived in Africa long before this. While Lara, herself, probably did not leave Africa (as she has descendants there), it is clear that her descendants (carrying her DNA) did. Lara was not Mitochondrial Eve; that woman lived many tens of thousands of years before Lara (about 150 000 years ago), and she is the mother of us all.

Although Sykes' area of endeavor was in Europe, he does mention that worldwide there are thought to be 33 clans, 13 of them being African, which is where we all originated. Africa, with only 13% of the world's population, is home to about 40% of the world's maternal clans. This seems disproportion is simply because Homo sapiens have lived there longer than anywhere else, and therefore, there has been more time for genetic mutations to occur in Africa.

Note: I may go on to talk a little bit more about Jasmine, my clan mother, in another post, but I'm sure this one has been long enough and dry enough to induce great yawns from Texas to Scotland.