Bryan Sykes

Bryan Clifford Sykes (born 9 September 1947) is a Fellow of Wolfson College, and former Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford.[1][2]

Sykes published the first report on retrieving DNA from ancient bone (Nature, 1989). Sykes has been involved in a number of high-profile cases dealing with ancient DNA, including that of Cheddar Man. However, the Cheddar Man findings have been disputed and it has been suggested that the results were the consequence of contamination with modern DNA.[3] His work also suggested a Florida accountant by the name of Tom Robinson was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, a claim that was subsequently disproved.[4][5][6][7]

Sykes is best known outside the community of geneticists for his bestselling books on the investigation of human history and prehistory through studies of mitochondrial DNA. He is also the founder of Oxford Ancestors, a genealogical DNA testing firm.

Life

Sykes was educated at Eltham College, received his BSc from the University of Liverpool, his PhD from the University of Bristol, and his DSc from the University of Oxford.[8]

The Seven Daughters of Eve and Blood of the Isles

In 2002 Sykes published a book for the popular audience, The Seven Daughters of Eve, in which he explained how the dynamics of maternal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) inheritance leave their mark on the human population in the form of genetic clans sharing common maternal descent. He notes that the majority of Europeans can be classified in seven such clans, known scientifically as haplogroups, distinguishable by differences in their mtDNA that are unique to each group, with each clan descending from a separate prehistoric female-line ancestor. He referred to these seven 'clan mothers' as 'daughters of Eve', a reference to the mitochondrial Eve to whom the mtDNA of all modern humans traces. Based on the geographical and ethological distribution of the modern descendants of each clan he assigned provisional homelands for the seven clan mothers, and used the degree to which each clan diverges to approximate the time period when the clan mother would have lived. He then uses these deductions to give 'biographies' for each of the clan mothers, assigning them arbitrary names based on the scientific designation of their haplogroup (for example, using the name Xenia for the founder of haplogroup X).

In his 2006 book Blood of the Isles (published in the United States and Canada as Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland), Sykes examines British genetic "clans". He presents evidence from mitochondrial DNA, inherited by both sexes from their mothers, and the Y chromosome, inherited by men from their fathers, for the following points:

Some quotations from the book follow. (Note that Sykes uses the terms "Celts" and "Picts" to designate the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Isles who spoke Celtic and does not mean the people known as Celts in central Europe.)

[T]he presence of large numbers of Jasmine’s Oceanic clan … says to me that there was a very large-scale movement along the Atlantic seaboard north from Iberia, beginning as far back as the early Neolithic and perhaps even before that. The mere presence of Oceanic Jasmines indicates that this was most definitely a family based settlement rather that the sort of male-led invasions of later millennia.[9]

The Celts of Ireland and the Western Isles are not, as far as I can see from the genetic evidence, related to the Celts who spread south and east to Italy, Greece and Turkey from the heartlands of Hallstadt and La Tene...during the first millennium BC…The genetic evidence shows that a large proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the same time as farming reached the Isles. (…)

The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus. This too may be the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland. (…)

They [the Picts] are from the same mixture of Iberian and European Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles.[10]

Here again, the strongest signal is a Celtic one, in the form of the clan of Oisin, which dominates the scene all over the Isles. The predominance in every part of the Isles of the Atlantis chromosome (the most frequent in the Oisin clan), with its strong affinities to Iberia, along with other matches and the evidence from the maternal side convinces me that it is from this direction that we must look for the origin of Oisin and the great majority of our Y-chromosomes…I can find no evidence at all of a large-scale arrival from the heartland of the Celts of central Europe amongst the paternic genetic ancestry of the Isles… can[11]

Sykes used a similar approach to that used in The Seven Daughters of Eve to identify the nine "clan mothers" of Japanese ancestry, "all different from the seven European equivalents."[12]

Alleged hominid samples

Dr. Brian Sykes and his team at Oxford University carried out DNA analysis of presumed Yeti samples and thinks the samples may have come from a hybrid species of bear produced from a mating between a brown bear and a polar bear. Sykes told BBC News:

I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive, may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it. It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behaviour is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend.
Dr. Bryan Sykes, BBC News (17 October 2013)[13][14]

He conducted another similar survey in 2014, this time examining samples attributed not just to yeti but also to Bigfoot and other "anomalous primates." The study concluded that two of the 30 samples tested most closely resembled the genome of a palaeolithic polar bear, and that the other 28 were from living mammals.[15]

The samples were subsequently re-analysed by Ceiridwen Edwards and Ross Barnett. They concluded that the mutation that had led to the match with a polar bear was a damage artefact, and suggested that the two hair samples were in fact from Himalayan brown bears (U. arctos isabellinus). These bears are known in Nepal as Dzu-the (a Nepalese term meaning cattle-bear), and have been associated with the myth of the yeti.[16][17] Sykes and Melton acknowledged that their GenBank search was in error and but suggested that the hairs were instead a match to a modern polar bear specimen "from the Diomede Islands in the Bering Sea reported in the same paper”. They maintained that they did not see any sign of damage in their sequences and commented that they had “no reason to doubt the accuracy of these two sequences any more than the other 28 presented in the paper”.[18] Multiple further analyses, including replication of the single analysis conducted by Sykes and his team, were carried out in a study conducted by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez, a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald H. Pine, affiliated at the University of Kansas. All of these analyses found that the relevant genetic variation in brown bears makes it impossible to assign, with certainty, the Himalayan samples to either that species or to the polar bear. Because brown bears occur in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine stated that there is no reason to believe that the samples in question came from anything other than ordinary Himalayan brown bears [19]

Works

Notes

  1. Leake, J. Scientist savaged for bigfoot claim Sunday Times, 29 March 2015.
  2. Bryan Clifford Sykes Debrett's People of Today. Accessed 2 February 2016.
  3. Bandelt H-J, Young-Gang Y, Richards M, Salas A. The brave new era of human genetic testing.
  4. Tom Robinson (16 June 2006), Genghis Khan or Not? That is the Question (Internet Archive version)., Self published, archived from the original on 2006-12-13, retrieved 31 January 2013
  5. Matching Genghis Khan, familytreedna.com, archived from the original on 8 March 2009, retrieved 3 June 2008
  6. Henderson, Mark (30 May 2006), How I am related to Genghis Khan, London: The Times, retrieved 2010-04-27
  7. Nicholas Wade. Falling from Genghis's family tree New York Times, 21 June 2006. Accessed 31 January 2013.
  8. Bryan Clifford Sykes Debrett's People of Today. Accessed 2 February 2016.
  9. Sykes 2006, pp. 280–281
  10. Sykes 2006, pp. 281–282
  11. Sykes 2006, pp. 283–284
  12. Japanese women seek their ancestral roots in Oxford Archived October 3, 2006, at the Wayback Machine. by Tessa Holland, 25 June 2006, Kyodo News Archived October 3, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
  13. Staff (17 October 2013). "British scientist 'solves' mystery of Himalayan yetis". BBC News. Retrieved 22 October 2013.
  14. Lawless, Jill (17 October 2013). "DNA Links Mysterious Yeti To Ancient Polar Bear". Associated Press. Retrieved 22 October 2013.
  15. Sykes, B. C.; Mullis, R. A.; Hagenmuller, C.; Melton, T. W.; Sartori, M. (2 July 2014). "Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 281 (1789): 20140161–20140161. doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.0161.
  16. Edwards CJ, Barnett R. 2015. Himalayan ‘yeti’ DNA: polar bear or DNA degradation? A comment on ‘Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti’ by Sykes et al. (2014). Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20141712.
  17. McKenzie S. Scientists challenge "abominable snowman" DNA results. BBC News Highlands and Islands, 17 December 2014.
  18. Melton TW, Sartori M, Sykes BC. 2015 Response to Edward and Barnett. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20142434.
  19. Gutiérrez, Eliécer E.; Pine, Ronald H. (2015). "No need to replace an "anomalous" primate (Primates) with an "anomalous" bear (Carnivora, Ursidae)". ZooKeys. 487: 141–154. doi:10.3897/zookeys.487.9176.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/29/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.