The completion of the human genome sequencing project was the first step in allowing scientists to unravel the secrets contained in our DNA. Further over the past few years DNA testing has become affordable and easy to do. This has spawned the practice of performing DNA testing for Genealogical purposes which is called Genetic Genealogy.

One of the first genetic genealogy studies was conducted in the late 1980s by scientists with the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. These scientists Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan C. Wilson studied a newly discovered kind of DNA. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is contained not in the nucleus of our cell, but in the mitochondria organelles of our cells. These scientists chose to study Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) because of its three unique properties which they explain as:

First, mtDNA gives a magnified view of the diversity present in the human gene pool, because mutations accumulate in this DNA several times faster than in the nucleus. Second, because mtDNA is inherited maternally and does not recombine, it is a tool for relating individuals to one another. Third, there are about 1016 mtDNA molecules within a typical human and they are usually identical to one another (Cann 31).

They extracted and compared mtDNA from