Vanity Fair: Out of Africa

[Coexist]

Not quite strict Anthropology - but a fascinating look at human migration.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/07/genographic200707

Out of Africa
Somewhere between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Africa saved Homo sapiens from extinction. Charting the DNA shared by more than six billion people, a population geneticist—and director of the Genographic Project—suggests what humanity "owes" its first home.

Here's how it works. The human genome, the blueprint that describes how to make another version of you, is huge. It's composed of billions of sub-units called nucleotides, repeated in a long, linear code that contains all of your biological information. Skin color, hair type, the way you metabolize milk: it's all in there. You got your DNA from your parents, who got it from theirs, and so on, for millions of generations to the very beginning of life on earth. If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda—the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

What about humanity, though? What about creatures you would recognize as being like you if they were peering over your shoulder right now? It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live. You may be from Cambodia or County Cork, but you are carrying a map inside your genome that describes the wanderings of your ancestors as they moved from the savannas of Africa to wherever your family came from most recently. This is thanks to genetic markers—tiny changes that arise rarely and spontaneously as our DNA is copied and passed down through the generations—which serve to unite people on ever older branches of the human family tree. If you share a marker with someone, you share an ancestor with him or her at some point in the past: the person whose DNA first had the marker that defines your shared lineage. These markers can be traced to relatively specific times and places as humans moved across the globe. The farther back in time and the closer to Africa we get, the more markers we all share.

...but it ends on a very somber, thought-provoking note:

<snip>
The world population that was spawned in Africa now has the power to save it. We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago. As their good sons and daughters, those of us who left, whether long ago or more recently, surely have a moral imperative to use our gifts to support our cousins who stayed. It's the least we can do for the continent that saved us all thousands of years ago.

[eleny]

1. Thanks!

I didn't know he had an article out. I saw the documentary about him and his work some time ago on tv. He fascinates me.

[Jed Dilligan]

2. So is Bono's mum "Black Irish"?

Her lineage appears to stop in Spain.

Good article.

[applegrove]

3. For about $110 you can get your own DNA map from National Geographic.

Interesting stuff. And they claim they will update your profile once new markers come in. I did it.

[Jed Dilligan]

4. Any surprises? nt

[applegrove]

5. Nope. It vaguely put my ancestors in nothern Europe. All they way from Africa.

[Jed Dilligan]

6. I read an article in Harper's by an aristocratic Southern white guy

He'd been told all his life he was a "direct descendant of Charlemagne" and his DNA placed him squarely in West Africa--not very long ago.

I'll try to dig that up...

On googling, I find it's not readily online but it's by Jack Hitt and it was collected in the Best American Science Writing 2006

http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Science-Writing-2006/dp/006072644X/ref=cm_cr-mr-title/002-1915294-3977637

[applegrove]

7. Oh unprovable family myths exist in many families. And they get

circulated again and again. Someone kept telling my family that they were descended from some french finance minister 500 years ago. When I looked back at the family tree using the internet..my family name and my family were in rural england for 1000 years. MYTH BUSTED. Plus I looked back at all the family correspondence and I could see how the rumour was perpetuated. The man who believed it actually gave money to the family in France during the war cause they were poor and hosted them in Canada in the 20th century. No harm done. But it is funny how myths go.

I had a great grandfather who died in a wagon accident across the country. My mother must have been told that he died in a sawmill accident by some relative (my mom was in inlaw). Turns out there were two of them who died in BC within two years of each other. One in a horse and cart accident...one in a sawmill. And they both had the same name. Easy to see how it got all muddled.

Part of the fun of genealogy is finding out about the myths. There is another story in my family that said a girl was adopted by a lay minister and his maid wife from a rich family in Scotland. I found the birth certificate and for sure it mentions that the lay minister and his wife stood sponsor for a baby girl..."whose parents were supposidly named x & Y". So that part of that story is true.

Genealogy can be fun and frustrating.

[Orsino]

8. Haplogroup R* (M207) here.

My latest identified marker on my Y-chromosome is M207, believed to have arisen in central Asia about 30,000 years ago:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic
"...An individual in this clan carried the new M207 mutation on his Y-chromosome. His descendants ultimately split into two distinct groups, with one continuing onto the European subcontinent, making this man the ancestor of most western European men alive today. But your gnetic lineage does not descend from this westward migrating band of hunter-gatherers. the second group did not head west into Europe, but rather likely turned south, ultimately ending their journey in the Indian subcontinent and giving rise to many men whose lineages survive there today...the ancient migrations of this second group, and the distribution of genetic lineages that it ultimately gave rise to, still remains largely a mystery. This is because we have precious little data with which to uncover the history of this haplogroup."

I'm a white guy, of Scotch-Irish ancestry, though I don't seem to have come from the first European Homo sapiens. My ancestors arrived later, somehow.

I think it's fascinating that this information seems to predate most or all modern notions of ethnicity. My father was intrigued (my results apply as well to him as to my thrice-great grandfather through the male line), but noted that his own father would not have been pleased to have learned of our African heritage.

[applegrove]

9. It is all so cool. I got no surprises through National Geographic but

a few surprises when I did genealogy on the files in my extended family.

[Odin2005]

13. I took that test around a year ago. I have Y Chromosome haplogroup I.

Which isn't that suprising since I'm of Norwegian ancestry and Haplogroup I is common in Scandinavia.

[bananas]

10. How does this compare with Martin Bernal's "Black Athena"?

If a conservative group considers it one of the worst books, there must be something to it!
"In 2003, the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed Black Athena as one of the worst books of the twentieth century."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena

[semillama]

11. I don't know about that

Admitting that I've never read the book, but this comes from the wikipedia link you posted:

"Black Athena ignited a a furious debate in the academic community. While most reviewers admitted that studies of the origin of Greek civilization were tainted by a foundation of 19th century racism, many excoriated Bernal for the admittedly speculative nature of his hypothesis and for working far outside his field of expertise. Some subsequent writers have been heavily critical of what they consider to be Bernal's confusion of culture, ethnicity and race, and his unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies. Bernal in turn accuses academe of deliberately and continually obscuring the importance of African and Semitic civilizations since the 19th century."

If the work is "Admittedly speculative" from an author "working far outside his field of expertise" then there's probably not much to it. Although searching for more about the book lead me to THIS book, which looks really interesting: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Heresy_in_the_University_298.html

[Odin2005]

12. It's aload of crap.