In women's circles we talked about this. In the book (The Push by Ashley Audrain) which I'm reading currently, she opens with this:
"It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat.. Actually the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old-foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her own grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born......
Layne Redmond: When the Drummers were Women.
I didn't realise that our eggs evolved so early. Here was I thinking that I had never known either grandmother. On a very intimate level I was wrong. I did know my maternal grandmother.
ReplyDeleteAnd she knew you too EC. I find it extraordinary but it makes so much biological sense. An unending chain of women's eggs.
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WWW
I am the family's amateur genealogist. These days, with genetic genealogy available to even family genealogists, I can many times trace the ancestor from whom I and other family members inherited a certain segment of DNA. As I've done this, handling my brother's DNA kit, too, I've noted that I often have significantly more inherited DNA from my grandmothers, while my brother often inherits more from the distant family that haled from Scotland and Wales: from my father's family. That's not always true, but it somehow feels right that my DNA matches more strongly to my grandmothers'.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting book and thought-provoking comments...
ReplyDeleteFascinating! A unique way to look at our ancestry.
ReplyDeleteI remember learning about the formation of a woman's eggs back in freshmen biology. About all I did learn.
ReplyDeleteI knew this but had never thought about it.
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