Before diving into the details of The Seven Daughters of Eve, it is first important to know the author of this work, Bryan Sykes. Dr. Sykes is an Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and currently a Fellow at Wolfson College. Dr. Sykes is popularly know for being the first to successfully recover DNA from ancient bone, as well as his work detailing “the colonization of Polynesia, the fate of the Neanderthals, the early settlement of Britain and the link between genetics and surnames” (Wolfson College).
Over the course of his career, his has published a number of notable books for a general audience, including The Seven Daughters of Eve and Blood of the Isles. Both works are based on the scientific phenomena of mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited and therefore useful in Dr. Sykes’ ancestral research.