The Man Found In A Melting Glacier — And The DNA Test That Found 17 Living Relatives Centuries Later
Unlike the nuclear DNA that occupies the cell nucleus and is inherited from both parents, mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively through the maternal line.
A person’s mitochondrial DNA comes from their mother, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, all the way back through time.
This means that mitochondrial DNA traces a single line of descent — the maternal lineage — rather than the complete web of ancestry that includes both parents and all four grandparents and eight great-grandparents and so on.
Two people can have identical mitochondrial DNA while sharing only a tiny fraction of their total ancestry, if the rest of their ancestral lines diverged long ago.
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