Family Tree Has Odd, Deep Roots
By WAYNE GREENE
I’ve been looking into my family tree. More precisely, I’ve been digging at its roots.
The National Geographic Society has a fascinating project under way — the Genographic Project, an attempt to trace the entire world’s ancient forebears.
It isn’t genealogy. It’s anthropology. So, I’m not getting at grandpa’s grandpa here. I’m looking at the pre-historic humans who started migrating in and out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago and gradually moved throughout the Earth.
It’s done with DNA. To participate you send $100 and a sample of flesh that you scrape o* the inside of your cheek.
They unwind your DNA (anonymously, by the way), looking for key genetic markers.
It seems as if our proto-grandpas moved through the world, tiny mutations popped up in their DNA.
So, if your forebear split from the herd somewhere in central Asia, and somewhere down the line his descendants mutated a tiny bit, you will have that mutation in your DNA, but your ancient cousins back in central Asia won’t.
That establishes a series of genetic mileposts along the road of human history that map out what way your people took.
It’s more than just a curiosity for the National Geographic Society. It’s the last opportunity before the shrinking Earth becomes too genetically jumbled to track the paths of ancient man using DNA.
They’re trying to get DNA samples from the far ends of the Earth to help them figure out who came from where.
I got the idea from the late Hank Comby, a sociology professor at Tulsa Community College who had all of his honors students checking into the history hidden in their cheeks. The details on how you can be your own anthropology experiment are on my blog — www.tulsaworld.com/waynesworld.
Long, strange trip: National Geographic tells me I’m a member of Haplogroup R1B (P25), which is anthropological genetic code for “as common as dirt.”
About 70 percent of the men in southern England belong to the same group. In Spain and Ireland that number goes above 90 percent, the project reports.
What a shock! My ancestors came from western Europe.
My wife’s geno-history was much more exotic. She descends from a Scandinavian tribe and shares the same genetic markers as reindeer herders in Finland and Siberia.
Isn’t America great? I’m a garden-variety R1B (P25), and I married a Laplander. Despite the enormous number of cousins I seem to have in the western world, my proto-grandpas did have a long, strange trip.
It started in Africa, where modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. About 60,000 years ago some of those Africans started moving, and about 50,000 years ago Eurasian Adam, who lived somewhere near Ethiopia, mutated, leaving my first genetic milepost.
That genetic marker is common to everyone whose lineage isn’t purely African, National Geographic tells me. In a period of global warming, the descendants of Eurasian Adam moved out of Africa, laying down a genetic milepost about 45,000 years ago in what is today Saudi Arabia.
Next stop: Tajikistan.
We were big-game hunters, but changing weather again had us on the move, following the herds north. We wore animal skins, made weapons of stone and needles of bone, according to the trash we left behind.
About 30,000 years ago my people moved into Europe, but about 20,000 years ago, it got cold again and they moved into southern Spain, where they toughed out another ice age.
When it warmed again, about 12,000 years ago, they moved back north, populating all of western Europe.
There the story of the Greenes jumps a bit. I don’t pick it back up again until they were in North Carolina about 100 years ago.
That part comes from the family Bible, not National Geographic.
What divides us: I said it all sounded very ordinary, but if you think about it, it’s the common exotic heritage of millions of people.
And the big lesson here is that, viewed from the perspective of genetic time, the things that our modern society insists on using to divide itself — race, nationality, language — are insignificant.
We, the humans of Earth, all came from the same African stock. Some of my fellow R1B (P25)s are awfully arrogant about proto- grandpa, considering that he’s pretty new on the scene.
Eight years ago, when the census forms came around, I checked the Caucasian box without thinking much about it.
In 2010, I’ll look for the African-Saudi Arabian-Tajikistan- Spanish-American box.
Or maybe I’ll just select ”other.”
Read Wayne Greene’s daily blog:
www.tulsaworld.com/waynesworld
Wayne Greene 581-8308
wayne.greene@tulsaworld.com
Originally published by WAYNE GREENE Editorial Writer.
(c) 2008 Tulsa World. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.