beginning all over again

In less than a week I leave for North Carolina where, hopefully, new granddaughter Izzy will be waiting patiently to make her grand entrance.  At this point, her mother says she seems to be trying to kick her way out of the womb.  For months I've been dreaming of her and thinking of how she carries my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's mitochondrial DNA back more than 40,000 years.  We are the daughters of "Jasmine".  Her clan lived near the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq, and her descendants traveled north through Turkey and Anatolia and Greece, into the Balkans before making a left turn and making their way into Northern Europe more than 8,500 years ago.  According to Brian Sykes in his book, "The Seven Daughters of Eve", her clan brought farming with them to Europe after the last Ice Age.

"Walking on Broken Glass" amulet necklace

 They brought domesticated grasses and sheep and goats.  The women were most assuredly weaving baskets and cloth.  I wonder if they were the people who built homes on the banks of the Danube with shrines for the goddesses of fertility - of life and death.  

Izabel enters a world so different from her Neolithic ancestors that it boggles the mind.  And still she carries in the mitochondria of each cell, the echo of their lives.

Epigenetics

“At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea—that genes have a ‘memory’. That the lives of your grandparents—the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw—can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself.”

From the BBC television program The Ghost in Your Genes

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-ghost-in-our-genes/