Though I have to admit my background in the hard sciences is very limited, the use of DNA to unravel the mysteries of the past especially human evolution and genealogy is something I find absolutely fascinating. A couple of years ago, I finally gave in to the urge and paid a genetic testing company to test my Y chromosome line. Thats the line of your paternal ancestry thats passed down from one father to another.

Since traditional documentary sources on my fathers family peter out in the late 18th century, Id hoped this would help me tie in with another more distant line of Coles.

DNA testing didnt really help much with my Cole genealogy, but I still havent given up on what it might tell me about my past. Just recently I tried autosomal testing, which examines the 22 pairs of chromosomes we have in addition to our X and Y sex chromosomes.

One of the things autosomal testing will give you is a pretty good idea of your national and ethnic ancestry. Since Cole is an English surname, I wasnt surprised to see an autosomal finding of 49 percent UK ancestry, but I was a bit surprised that I was 32 percent Scandinavian (though my prior Y chromosome test had indeed also revealed some Scandinavian matches). The rest of my other autosomal origins (Celtiberian, Sephardic Jew and other European) came in at 5-9 percent each.

When I received the autosomal findings, I remembered Bryan Sykes Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (2006) and thought it might shed some light on the Scandinavian result or at least, suggest a theory to explain it. Sykes, who is a professor of human genetics at Oxford, also is author of the popular The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001), which explores how virtually everyone of European descent can trace his or her ancestry back to one of seven women.

As most everyone knows who is familiar with U.K. history, between the eighth and 11th centuries AD Vikings, mainly from modern-day Norway and Denmark, raided and invaded the coasts of the British Isles. In 866 AD, they even captured York, one of the largest cities in England at the time.

Though Sykes was working with Y and X chromosome matches rather than autosomal DNA, his research identified especially high concentrations of Viking DNA (37 to 42 percent) in the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney). Perhaps these and other areas of old U.K. Viking settlements are places I should look for my own ancestry assuming Im interpreting all this right.

The complexity of all this DNA stuff reminds me that I used to kid around about being a low-browed Neanderthal, the ancient Eurasian humanoid species, extinct since about 30,000 B.C., which is genetically closest to Homo sapiens. In his investigations in the U.K., Sykes wrote about a story hed heard of alleged living Neanderthals in the mountains of Wales near Plynlimmon. Though Sykes didnt take this seriously of course, he did hope one day to find just one person with Neanderthal DNA.

Turns out he probably did in fact, Sykes has probably tested lots of them. DNA research has advanced since he wrote Saxons, Vikings, and Celts,and in 2010 Dr. Svante Pbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, succeeded in mapping the entire Neanderthal genome.

This led to a stunning finding: When they compared the Neanderthal genome to Europeans, Asians and Africans, the Max Planck scientists found just a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans of European and Asian ancestry. This meant that there must have been gene flow between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, i.e., they interbred. The institutes work on Neanderthal DNA, detailed in Pbos Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes (2014), set off a human evolutionary firestorm of sorts among scholars because it didnt neatly conform to the Out of Africa model, which holds that modern humans are descended from Homo sapiens and originated in Africa. I suppose all this means that Ive actually got a little Neanderthal in me, as well as Viking.

The work of Pbo and his colleagues is certainly wonderful stuff, but if you simply want a great read about DNA research, I cannot fail to mention James D. Watsons The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968). It was of course the work of Watson and Francis Crick in the early 1950s at Cambridge which led to the discovery of the structure of DNA.

The Double Helix is an enthralling story of scientific discovery written in a very witty and lucid style. I believe Ive read this book three times and now that I think of it, I think Ill read it again.

As for my own adventures in DNA, I still have at least one thing left to test my X chromosome or mothers line. Like my paternal ancestry, the paper trail gets fuzzy in the late 18th century. Who knows what surprises might be in store?

After that, maybe Neanderthal testing?

Tim Cole is a reference librarian with the Greensboro Public Library. Decimal Points is a regular feature provided by the library.

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Decimal Points: Adventures in DNA - Greensboro News & Record