Update on Mark Barsley please - gizagu on APAT

Great updates tighty, enjoyed following them. Cheers.

Best of luck to Mark Barsley and Brian Martin today.

haha so funny the lads who are scared of flying got there and the ones taking the p*ss stuck at home. Best of luck to those who had the foresight of taking a minibus :-)

Great updates Maria and Tighty.

Very best of luck to that greek fella.

More on mitochondrial DNA and the common ancestor(s) here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

'Tis a fascinating subject.  Arguably more enjoyable than a Dick Francis novel.

Interesting link Dan - thanks.

I suspose this statement from there, clarifies Jon's point, although I still think its pretty amazing that one of those ancestors still lived local to the remains.

The Human MRCA. All humans alive today share a surprisingly recent common ancestor, perhaps even within the last 5000 years, even for people born on different continents

I don't know a great deal on DNA, however I was reading a history book the other day and there was mention of scientists who had DNA testeted the cheddar man, which is the oldest remains of a human found in the UK possibly Europe, which carbon dates back to approx 7000BC.

They extracted something called MtDNA from a tooth of these remains, this type of DNA is passed down through the female line and as I understand it never changes, so for example I have the same MtDNA as my mother who has the same as her mother who as the same as her mother and so on. Anyway to get to the point through this dna sample, they managed to find a guy, a local school teacher IIRC who lived within half a mile of where they found the remains who had the same MtDNA string, so obviously not a direct line of the Cheddar man himself, but possibly of his mother or sister. How amazing is that, an a direct line to an anscestor over 9000 years.

This got me looking into dna a little bit, and there is a similar strand which gets passed down the male line, father to son to son etc I think it was called Y-DNA, but might be wrong there.

So I thought how cool would be from a genelogy point of view if there was a massive dna database of these Mt and Y types, it would interesting to see just how many people were related today for example from a single woman thousands of years ago. The cost would be massive to set this up, and I'm not sure how moral it would be, people digging up grave yards for example to take dna tests, but you get my drift.

Just thought I'd share my little bit of dna knowledge that poked the imagination the other day.

BAM is off here, we are awaiting the trip report before we book it up.

No need for a trip report eccles, its the mfckin nuts!!  Only been here a few hours but it is deffo the best place I have ever stayed in Vegas.  Just had a nice jacuzzi, now I'm on the balcony having a cwoffee.  Free wifi too!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just like trigg I will be taking lots of pics and not uploading them.

Laters bumders.

Hope you have a good time Brian.

Hope its snowing when you arrive back in Manchester ;-)

Stayed at the Luxor on our first visit, place was ok but the location was just too far out of the way. Second time round we stayed at Planet Hollywood, much better room, spot on location and price good too, infact I couldn't fault it and would stay there again.

if you put it all between 2 slices of thick cut bread, it might get a 4/10 as a sandwich, but as a salad its a pretty poor 0.

Congrats George

Good Luck George

[ x ] attended
[   ] played well
[ x ] out already.

DTD are going to run this next weekend as well probably due to the numbers that turned up today, met its 270 cap, 40 odd alternates and 40 more turned away apparently.

Have added you all, always enjoy reading blogs at work - lunch hour obviously

thx for the updates over the weekend Kev, quality as always.