In New, More Detailed DNA Tests, Geography Meets Genetics
For most of us, race is more than just skin color. It’s also about ex perience and the context of one’s life.
Amid all the condemnations and finger-pointing over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s ill-chosen words and toxic rhetoric, that’s actually the useful lesson he has to teach us. One does not have to embrace his words of blame and negation to understand they arise from a life, and the lives of forebears, that encompassed centuries of injustices rarely captured for history.
Yet far more binds than divides us in a world where history is written in the genes, and Barack Obama reportedly shares ancestry with both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
Human DNA is an unfolding map of the human expe rience, billions of “letters” and hun dreds of thousands of “words” that tell of tragic die-outs, great migrations, rapid adaptations, devastating military conquests - and, most importantly, the kinship of all who breathe.
Every person living today shares more than 99 percent of his or her genetic code.
And yet it is those tiny differences that tell the story of the last 200,000 years of human history - the time that has elapsed since a hypothesized genetic “Eve” lived in Africa.
She wasn’t the real Eve or the first woman. Dating the genetic recoding for mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA - the DNA that is passed virtually unchanged from mother to children - remains an inexact science.
Yet because of a mishap that befell the female descendants of all other women who predated her, this theoretical Eve became the likely progenitor of all of us.
It turns out such “bottlenecks” have happened more often than most of us realize. Soberingly often.
The word “bottleneck” sounds so innocent, yet it denotes huge die-outs of ancient peoples, whether from disease, war, weather or genocide. And the history of these horrors is written in our genes.
One such catastrophe may have winnowed the first peoples to settle the Americas. A new study suggests that most Native Americans alive today can trace their roots to just six founding “mothers” who survived a population collapse in Beringia - the now-submerged land bridge between Asia and Alaska - 20,000 years ago. The study was conducted by an international team including researchers at the Utah-based Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation.
Other bottlenecks overtook ancient Europeans, with potential disease implications today.
A recent Cornell University study of nearly 40,000 genetic “letters” in 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans found in the European descendants the genetic slips and potentially damaging variations associated with such a bottleneck. That study was reported last month in the journal Nature.
Scientists theorize that such built-in genetic error codes tend to arise in cases where populations first crash and then explode based on a smaller gene pool and less eradication of bad DNA.
The prevalence of such catastrophes, as signaled by our DNA, is humbling. That is especially so given our deeper kinship as illustrated by a slew of recent studies heaping new evidence on the out-of-Africa theory of human migrations.
In one, scientists at Stanford University recently tested more than a half-million genetic “letters” in 51 population groups around the world. Published in the journal Science last month, results of the tests confirm the richer African genetic diversity of the “founders’ ” homeland, as well as its corollary: radiating bands of lessening genetic diversity the farther away from Africa people’s origins progress.
Yet the Stanford study also suggests the dawning of a new age of genealogical discovery by showing the potential for a rich mining of genetic markers, thousands of times more detailed than most commercial genetic testing. The time may be coming when individuals will be able to pinpoint their origins with geographical precision, and learn in even greater detail how our shared family tree has both blossomed and faltered.
Elizabeth Sullivan is The Plain Dealer’s foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.
© 2008 The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Folks at Common Dreams: I don’t know if you monitor these comments or not, but the permalink to this article on your front page is wrong. I had a hell of time finding it.
Fascinating information.
Bottlenecks resulting in die-outs probably functioned as a geographical barrier to cross-breeding among humans, much like corn growing true to its own genetics if separated far enough from other varieties to make cross-pollinization far less frequent than if planted closer. Such a geographical separation might result in the eventual “averaging” of gene-distribution among isolated groups.
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dponcy
You often get only the home webpage and must search for the specific article. In that case you can google the name of the organization with the author or a word or two of the title and usually find it, I think quicker than trying to find it from that site’s homepage.
We’re all one - the one that’s us - we’re all us.
I’ve been following and participating in these studies for years. My take is that they are 50% politics, 25% religion and the balance is a mix of science and whimsy. That said, I have been fascinated by the results.
“Conquistadors slaughtered South America’s men and took their women, DNA study shows
Last updated at 12:42pm on 21st March 2008
European settlers in South America slaughtered the men they found there and fathered children on native American and African women, analysis of inhabitants’ DNA suggests.”
{Dailymail.co.uk}
(Ever wonder why they don’t celebrate Columbus Day?)
Our genes are from Africa and our civilization is from Mesopotamia but we seem to be desperately trying to hide a Neanderthal ancestry.
If people knew how interconnected we are. Many Hispanics of Spanish descent and Christian today may find they are descended from Israel and were Jewish whose ancestors were forced into Christianity, and therefore are crypto-jews.
Queen Elizabeth II despite being Christian has traced her ancestors back to the Prophet Mohammed.
A number of Muslims ancestors were in fact at one time Jewish who were forced to convert to Islam to avoid persecution, and so are crypto-Jews.
One of the things I believe this DNA testing has done is to make many people aware that they have genes that can be traced back to Israel or the Khazarian Jews, hence our one sided alliance with Israel and tolerance for hispanic immigrants.
How many people that that 1000 years ago there was country called Khazaria that was a Jewish state for several hundred years that struggled to prevent being absorbed by Islamic jihad one one side and Christian crusades on side before being obliterated by the Mongols from behind, forcing many to migrate to Europe.
http://www.khazaria.net/
These racial and religous divisions orchestrated by the powers that be to divide and rule are insane.
from Juan Coles Informed Comment
http://www.juancole.com/
“Gen. Omar Bradley, who bore a Semitic, Muslim first name, and shared it with the second Caliph of Sunni Islam, was the hero of D-Day and Normandy, of the Battle of the Bulge and the Ruhr.”
“Barack is a Semitic word meaning “to bless” as a verb or “blessing” as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: “And God blessed (ḇāreḵə ) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.”
Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.
Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph”
“Queen Elizabeth II [is] Descended from the Prophet Muhammad
I was surprised that the writers of comments over at Salon.com did not know ……. It is common knowledge to anyone interested in genealogy
The Greater Mediterranean got all mixed up over millennia. Most Sicilians (i.e. most Italian-Americans) also have Arab Muslim ancestors. It works the other way around, too.
This is connected to just pointing out that having ancestors named Hussein is more common among Europeans and Americans than is usually realized. Elizabeth II can’t be descended from the Prophet Muhammad without also being descended from his grandson, the original Husayn / Hussein, since that is the line of descent of the Sayyids.
‘United Press International
October 10, 1986
MOSLEMS IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE
Mixed in with Queen Elizabeth’s blue blood is the blood of the Moslem prophet Mohammed, according to Burke’s Peerage, the geneological guide to royalty. The relation came out when Harold B. Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s, wrote Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask for better security for the royal family. ”The royal family’s direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists,” he said. Probably realizing the connection would be a surprise to many, he added, ”It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact.”
Brooks-Baker said the British royal family is descended from Mohammed through the Arab kings of Seville, who once ruled Spain. By marriage, their blood passed to the European kings of Portugal and Castille, and through them to England’s 15th century King Edward IV. ‘ “
In basic university primatology studies two decades ago, I learned of a rather common species of monkey, a macaque I think it was, which lived in troops. At times one troop would attack another (same species) and if complete success was attained the winning males would kill off/drive off the males of the losing troop, kill the infants fathered by those now dead males and absorb the females of the losing troop. Young ones were killed to avoid having up-and-coming competitors that did not have a close (psychological + genetic) bond, and it caused the females to soon go into estrus, meaning ready to get pregnant (nursing mothers generally won’t get pregnant).
Kinship ties are key within the troop.
I’ve spent nine years in Asian cultures and, where I am now (Vietnam), no one wants to adopt (or marry a divorced lady with a son) for the reason that that blood kinship is essential - financially, in terms of trustability and to worship ancestors.
While genetics can be lab determined, there is something else, something more, that is so ‘important’ that mass killings result. And this is outside of cultural analysis, unless one considers monkeys as having culture in the same context as humans have culture.
Makes one wonder about the ‘value’ of genetic relatedness and its existential nature. One thing’s sure, the closer the relatedness/kinship, the more likely there will be caring and support.
If we were both kings (or businessmen), I might want my daughter to marry your son. That’s a step up from the lower primates. We can be pleased and proud to have advanced so far.
The farther apart the relatedness/kinship is, the less caring one can expect to exist. Interestingly, the propensity to care of those thought to be unrelated varies from culture to culture among humans. Empathy and compassion are not absolutes (all or nothing) and, in the absence of a known genetic tie, its interesting to observe to what degree empathy and compassion are felt and expressed in different human cultures. It varies quite a bit.
This is a really good and interesting article, but not quite accurate on one point. The fact that mitochondrial Eve existed does not necessarily imply a bottleneck in the human population. All it means is that this particular person (who probably lived in east Africa about 150k YBP) is matrilinearly related to all current living humans. There were lots of other women living at the same time, and they are probably related to the vast majority of living people. “Eve”, however, is related to everyone. Interestingly, there has to be a much more recent common ancestor if one considers both the patrilineal and matrilineal line, but this would be harder to identify because the analysis would need to use the whole human genome, not just that of the mitochondria. There was probably also a “Y-Chromosome Adam”, who is a patrilineal ancestor of all living humans. He probably lived about 60 KYBP, also in Africa.