I am a white male of European descent
My last normal job — the 9-to-5 kind — was as an assistant at Oliver Stone’s production company. At the time, he was in post-production on Natural Born Killers, and developing future projects, one of which was a remake of Planet of the Apes.
Any version of Apes must tackle the basic question of, “How does the hero get stuck on a planet full of goddamn apes?” Screenwriter Terry Hayes’s adaptation forewent rockets and crash-landings, and instead had our hero (or heroes, it’s been a while) traveling backwards in time through mitochondrial DNA. The device itself didn’t make a lick of sense, but it all felt very Michael Crichton: with enough jargon, almost anything sounds plausible.
The Terry Hayes/Oliver Stone version never got made, but it was my first introduction to mitochondria, which are fascinating relics we all carry with us. Essentially, they’re like little power plants inside our cells that are only vaguely related to us. We inherit them only from our mothers, which means geneticists can use mitochondrial mutations to track back lineage, determining who is related to whom, in a very broad sense.
So it was with my Planet of the Apes memory that I was intrigued by a post on Kevin Kelly’s very geeky Cool Tools feed about National Geographic’s Genographic Project. It’s an attempt to learn more about how humanity spread out around the globe by doing genetic testing on indigenous populations. The timing has become somewhat urgent, because people don’t stay put the way they used to, and they don’t always marry within their ethnic/tribal groups. In a generation or two, it may be very difficult to say exactly whose genes are whose.
National Geographic’s program is actually a kit you can order, which includes swabs for taking samples from the inside of your cheek. You mail the samples in, and a lab processes them. A few weeks later, you can enter your special code number on their website, and pull up a history of where you came from, genetically. For women, they track mitochondria. For men, they track the Y-chromosome, which is passed from father to son.
The home-test version is pretty rudimentary, and is really intended mostly to fund the larger project of testing indigenous groups. But it ended being pretty fascinating anyway.
The test revealed that I am a white male of European descent.
No shocker, there. My family is largely German, with a little English and Scottish thrown in. This translates to Haplogroup R1B (M343). I’d venture that most white guys reading this would be similar, if not exactly the same. But what’s more interesting than the result is the journey, which National Geographic charts really well. The report generates a map which shows where your genetic line branched out, in my case charting the journey from Africa (M168), through Central Asia (M9), and finally to Europe, where they kicked the shit out of those Neandertals.
For instance, my ancestors travelled through the Pamir Knot, which I’d never heard of. But looking at the picture, you realize that somewhere back in history, some relative lived there. Hunted there. Died there. It was 40,000 years ago, but it’s still in my blood.
And perhaps more importantly, it’s a shared history with pretty much anyone in the Northern Hemisphere — the Eurasian Clan, which includes Native Americans.
All of this got me thinking more about my long-gestating (or perhaps dead; it’s hard to say) adaptation of Tarzan at Warner Bros. One of the fundamental challenges with Tarzan is finding a way to handle race and ethnicity; having a bunch of white people fight over Africa brings back unwelcome memories of colonialism. My answer was to build the Mother Africa meme deeply into the story. No matter where you come from, no matter what color your skin, you’re related to exactly one African man who lived 31,000 to 79,000 years ago.
To me, that’s the Joseph Campbell/Star Wars-y aspect of Tarzan. Africa is destiny.
My little genographic field trip won’t advance science much, nor will it move Tarzan out of development limbo. But it made for a nice diversion. For $107.50, it’s a nice family project, particularly if your kids are old enough to understand why you’re scraping the inside of their cheeks. It’s a nice way of demonstrating the connectedness of things, and helping break down common assumptions of “us” and “them.”
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October 24th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
A few years back a tribe thought to be indigenous to South Africa, the Lemba, claimed to be of Jewish descent. While some of their culture was distinctly “Semitic” (ie: of Middle Eastern origin — either Jewish or Muslim), there was no way of proving they were, quite possibly, one of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel. But this one scientist had the idea to test their priestly lineage. In Judaism, there’s this tribe of priests, Kohanim (usually if you know someone of the last name Cohen or some derivative thereof, that’s a sign they’re descended from the priests). The lineage of priesthood (a subset of the tribe of Levi) is passed down from father to son. Misogynistic!, yes, however, because of that, these scientists traced the Y chromosomes of the priests of the Lemba, and Y chromosomes of Sephardic and Ashkenazi (Mediterranean and Eastern European respectively) Kohanim and found there is, indeed, common ancestry. Basically, us white Hollywood Jewy types are pretty darn closely related to the Lemba. How cool is that?? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/familylemba.html
As Michael Jackson said in his post-Thriller, pre-lawsuit days: Don’t matter if you’re black or white.
It’s corny, but it’s comforting to know we’re all kind of the same, even if it’s in the little bitty pieces that make us up.
October 24th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Was it a “few weeks” or eight weeks like they said? Not that it matters.
I have a friend who is big into this stuff from a “we are all the same people” kinda way and she had her racial percentage done for a hundred bucks or so. The results were pretty interesting.
Thanks for the link. I think I’ll send out for mine next week.
October 24th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
Note that the comment system is currently off-line. I’m working on getting it back up and running.
October 24th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
Things should be fixed now.
October 24th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
John:
You got me. My $107.50 has been sent. I’m hoping to get something back more detailed than “Typical Jew”.
October 24th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
Here’s an idea, why don’t we start a similar lab, but aimed for advocates of Intelligent Design?
They send us their swabs and two weeks later, they receive a certificate that their samples prove they were designed by the Lord Himself.
I know a lot of people that would pay more than $107.50 for that!
October 24th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
John,
Have you read Greg Egan’s story Mitochondrial Eve? It’s a speculation on the sociopolitical ramifications of this technology getting better, for example getting good enough to trace one’s lineage much more specifically. Check it out…
http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/91804-ebook.htm
http://206.137.17.63/ebooks/eBook918.htm
Or if you like ye olde booke tech like me, try his collection Luminous.
October 24th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
Craig:
Curious what you’ll get back. Since they’ll test the Y-chromosome, what matters is where your father’s lineage goes. I don’t know if you’ll have some extra detours around the Fertile Crescent or not.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Please excuse the numerous parentheticals in the following:
There’s this tribe in southern Africa (I believe in both Zimbabwe and South Africa) called the Lemba. They seemed to be similar to other indigenous tribes of Africa, but claimed to be Jewish. Anthropologists looked at their traditions and noticed they were Semitic (ie: Middle Eastern — Judaic or Muslim) in nature, but there was no way of knowing if their claims were true. Well, in came genetics. There’s this tribe of priests called Kohanim in Judaism, it’s something that’s passed down from father to son (anyone with the last name Cohon or something of the sort is probably of priestly lineage) and a few thousand years ago, all Kohanim were theoretically descended from the same few Hebrew tribesmen. Because it’s passed from father to son (yes, I know, how misongynistic), it was easy (I say this knowing nothing about how difficult it may or may not actually have been) to trace the Y chromosome of the “Kohanim” of the Lemba and the Kohanim of Sephardic (Meditarranean) and Ashkenazi (white, Eastern European) Jews. Turns out us pasty, white Jewy Hollywood types are pretty darn closely related to the Lemba tribe of southern Africa. (And the Sephardim). We were all pretty much the same just a couple of millienia ago! How cool is that??
As Michael Jackson said post-Thriller, pre-trial: It don’t matter if you’re black or white.
We’re all pretty much the same. And genetics proves it. Kinda makes you want to give the world a Coke, doesn’t it?
October 25th, 2005 at 12:30 am
I love this project. When I am a little more flush–say, a particular commercial I shot a while back actually starts running–I want to throw my weight behind it in my small way.
I understand the logic behind the nominal fee, but part of me wishes there were a way for people who really couldn’t pay in to contribute samples without cash. I’m growing weary of the escalating (small-minded) allegiance to race/religion/relatively fleeting cultural moorings. It would be nice if we could all shake hands and be friends before the pandemic wipes the slate clean.
(Was this overly bleak? It was–it was overly bleak. Sorry! I’ll be cheerier next time.)
October 25th, 2005 at 6:06 am
Fascinating stuff.
October 25th, 2005 at 9:57 am
Colleen –
While participating in the study would hopefully get some people over their small-mindedness (and thinking small-worldiness), just getting more media coverage for the study would probably be a big help. I was surprised that I only heard about it through a website.
In terms of the testing itself, what the National Geographic people probably don’t want to say is that they don’t really need any more American genetic samples. America is a melting pot, which is good for everyone but geneticists.
The urgency is in Africa, and maybe a few remote places, where there’s been enough genetic isolation that there’s still new stuff to be discovered. While it’s true that we all came Out of Africa, there’s obviously groups of people who didn’t, and the more we can find out about the branches of the tree that remained in Africa, the better idea we’ll have about the whole picture.
Of the $107.50, I suspect less than half of it pays for the testing and the website. The rest goes to fund this other research, which I’m all for. That $107.50 is a lot of money for some families, but it would also be a great class project — draw one student (or maybe use the teacher) — and chart where he/she came from.
October 25th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Hmmm, very interesting… I may use this to satisfy some curiousity on my part. See, I’m adopted from the Orient and have no idea what my lineage is. Perhaps this could tell me a little about myself. Thanks for the heads up!
October 27th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Mitochondria figured prominently in A Wrinkle In Time, if I recall correctly.
(It’s been awhile - hi! - glad to have found yr blog. waving)
October 28th, 2005 at 4:08 am
Because I’ve been interested in doing this w/ my wife and myself, does the kit contain materials to do more than one sample? Or, is it a hundredish per person?
October 28th, 2005 at 8:29 am
The kit is for one person only. You take two samples, but I think that’s just as a backup. If you were to try to send in samples from two different people, they’d only give you results for the one they processed.
November 17th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Hi John,
Just FYI, the Today Show is doing a segment on this tomorrow morning, approx 7:40 am-ish… I’m sure the segment will be viewable later that day on MSN’s video site.
~Captain Oats
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:28 am
My brother took this about 6 months ago and he and the rest of the family are considered to be African American or Black.
He is light skin with red hair and our great grand father was Scottish (McDowell), his type showed up as Haplogroup R1b (M343). He was looking for the African gene out of west Africa, showed up out of east Africa instead.
January 21st, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I indentify myself as African-American or Black and both my parents do as well. I participated in the study and also anticipated that my results would yield a map of migration from east to west Africa. I was really shocked when my Y chromosome placed me in Haplogroup R1b(M343), which essentially means that my male lineage going back thousands of years is European, not African. I should probably also mention that I have medium to light brown skin, freckles and what has often been desrcibed as European features. Also, my father’s surname is Harris, which is Irish. R1b(M343) occurs in more than 90% of men in some areas of Ireland. I guess this was shocking for me because although I thought of myself as African, this scientific study says thats not entirely the case. I plan on having the test run again but through my mtDNA, which comes from our mothers. I wonder what that will come up as. So much for social constructs and political labels.