Ancient Ancestry

Your ancestors didn't travel to the New World on the Mayflower? Not listed in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage? No worries, mate. For a couple of hundred bucks, Oxford Ancestors, a new British biotech company, will add cachet to your lineage by extending it back at least 10,000 years.

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Your ancestors didn't travel to the New World on the Mayflower? Not listed in Burke's Peerage and Baronetage? No worries, mate. For a couple of hundred bucks, Oxford Ancestors, a new British biotech company, will add cachet to your lineage by extending it back at least 10,000 years. You may be more of a blueblood than you know, a long-lost cousin to royalty.

Take commoner Bryan Sykes, for instance, who is professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford and founder of Oxford Ancestors. Sykes has discovered he is related to Nicholas II, last Tsar of Russia. And now the mitochondrial DNA analysis Sykes applies to his own family tree is available to everyone. Building on Sykes' research on the genetic origins of human populations, Oxford Ancestors is the world's first company to place mitochondrial DNA analysis in the service of genealogy.

Inheritance of mitochondrial DNA proceeds strictly from ...

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