“Velda,”

Our Clan Mother

The Simple Story

According to Brian Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, the founder of Haplogroup V, “Velda,” lived about 17,000 years ago in what is now northwest Spain. Her people had retreated southward out of northwest Europe as the glaciers advanced in the last Ice Age, and lived in one of the last habitable places in Europe, called the “Western Refugia.” There were others in Croatia and the southern Ukraine.

A few of the people in all of the refugia carried mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the haplogroup now called Pre-V, the parent group for Haplogroup V. About 17,000 years ago in the Western Refugia, a pair of mutations occurred in one Pre-V woman—Velda--resulting in the beginning of a new branch of the mtDNA tree, called Haplogroup V.

Following the retreat of the glaciers about 12,000-14,000 years ago, Velda’s descendants spread all over Europe. In all of Europe, about 4% of all people carry Velda’s defining mutations in their mtDNA.