Felix said the Chinese are ideally suited to pursue genetic ancestry testing, especially with the Y chromosome, since the Chinese have used surnames for so long. In Europe, surnames emerged around the twelfth century; by then China’s book of common surnames was already two centuries old. Being able to wed an ancient surname with a Y chromosome offers the chance to piece together an unparalleled early history of China’s population. What’s more, Chinese families rarely changed their names. “To do so would have been an insult to an ancestor,” Felix said. Unless, I thought, they were on the run from a murder charge or decided to convert to a Western religion.
For the most part, Felix said, people changed a surname only if it was similar to the family name of the ruling emperor. As a sign of respect they would adopt another name, and then revert back to their original name when the emperor changed. This happened in Felix’s own family. “My last name is Jin, which means ‘gold,’ and I know that about one thousand years ago my ancestors’ last name was Liu. But the emperor’s name at that time was [similar] and it would be offending to keep your last name, so you have to change it. Of course, most of the people, after the emperor died, changed back to Liu. Apparently my ancestors were very busy with something else and forgot to do that.”
“How do you know what your ancestors were called a thousand years ago?” I asked.
“It’s in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have my genealogy there, or rather they—the Mormons—have my genealogy there. I really appreciate what those Mormons did,” he said. They had sent a crew to record the genealogies of China through whatever documents they could find. “The Mormons love pu more than anybody!”
Yet, for all the pu in China, Felix suspects that genetic ancestry testing will be a tough sell. Genetics is controversial in China, he said, and his work is controversial, clashing as it does with the traditional ideas of what it means to be Chinese. For starters, Chinese culture holds that the Chinese have been a distinct people for some five thousand years. But his research, based on thousands of DNA samples from regions across Asia, suggests the Chinese population emerged much more recently than that. “The Chinese became Chinese probably about two thousand, at most three thousand years before present,” he said.
But even more contentious is who contributed genes to that effort. The Chinese have a strong belief, based in part on the skeletal remains of Peking Man, a 750,000-year-old fossil unearthed in 1923, that they evolved into modern humans—from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens—in their own native corner of East Asia, separate from other populations. But Felix is a leading proponent of the out-of-Africa model, arguing that the genetic record he has studied shows that the Chinese, like the rest of the world, descended from Africa. Based on Y-chromosome studies of thousands of men throughout the region, he concluded that modern humans migrated out of Africa and into Southeast Asia some sixty thousand years ago, and from there they moved into southern China. (East Asia’s Haplogroup O3 also carries the telltale mutation of Haplogroup C, considered one of the first migrant groups to leave Africa.)
The Chinese may have evolved with distinctive physical characteristics, but other populations have nonetheless contributed their genes to the mix, Felix said, including Caucasians. DNA samples taken from people in the northern part of China especially, he said, show “a great deal of Caucasian DNA.… I was very much surprised, and when it comes to light, I think a lot of people will be surprised.” He argues that the Chinese cannot be considered genetically unique. The Han Chinese, the country’s largest ethnic group, have traces of “multiple nationalities or ethnic groups … Chinese is not a genetic entity, it’s a cultural entity.”
His words made me think of my father. Without any cultural tradition connecting him to China, a single chromosome had proved to be such a powerful link that he wanted to adopt our long-forgotten Chinese surname. Felix was finding that even his fellow scholars had a hard time separating culture from genetic identity. That very morning he had shared his research in a talk he gave to colleagues.
“How did people react?” I asked.
“Not well,” he said. “One professor came to me and told me I had just created [the idea] of Chinese hybrids, and that probably would be offending to everybody.”
Yet despite these initial reactions, Felix had high hopes that curiosity will drive more Chinese to try genetic genealogy. He had a plan, “a dream,” he said, to assemble the entire genetic genealogy of China; he had already, in 2006, analyzed more than twelve thousand Y chromosomes in the country. He was starting to explain that he’d been talking with Mike Hammer and Bennett Greenspan about offering Family Tree DNA testing in China when I realized that Felix already had what I needed: a database teeming with Chinese Y chromosomes.
“Felix, do you think I could send you my father’s DNA sample and you might be able to cross-reference it against the database you have?”
“Yes, I can do that,” he said. “But you should send the sample to my office at the University of Cincinnati. If you send it to China, I don’t know what the customs people will do with DNA.”
With our DNA in the Houston database and my father’s Y on its way to Felix’s office in Cincinnati, I developed a new relationship with my email account. I have never dated by Internet, but I imagine it feels a lot like the months that followed: waiting for a compatible prospect to appear in the inbox, a man with all the right alleles. Late one night in the summer of 2006, as I was on my way to bed, the message landed, its subject line reading: “Y-DNA 12 Test Match 12 for 12.” Suddenly I was wide awake.
An exact 12 marker match has been found between you and another person in the Family Tree DNA database. You and the other person match in all 12 loci. If you share the same surname or variant, this means that there is a 99% likelihood that you share a common ancestor in a genealogical time frame. If you match another person without the same surname or variant, you still probably share a common ancestor, but this ancestor most likely lived in the time before surnames were adopted.
The match was not with my father’s Y chromosome but with the sample I had collected from Gladwyn deCouto, my father’s honky-tonk-loving, motorbike-riding cousin in Kochi. When I took Gladwyn’s DNA sample, I was wondering if the deCouto Y chromosome he carries might biologically point the way back to Portugal. That this first match was not with my father’s Y but with the paternal line of his mother didn’t matter much to me at that point. Even after my conversation with Felix, I had been losing faith in the whole process, but here was proof, in principle at least, that it was possible to find someone in the world with a Y chromosome that looked like one of ours. His name was James Theodore List. He had provided an email address and reported that his oldest known male ancestor came from Germany.
Gladwyn also had nine out of twelve matches with two other men of German ancestry, and also with men from Hungary, Ukraine, India, Mongolia, the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Men from Lithuania, Belarus, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan had turned up with eight markers in common. The founding father of the deCouto Y had apparently left a wide legacy. The lab pegged it as belonging to Haplogroup J2, a male line that emerged somewhere between four thousand and nineteen thousand years ago in the northern portion of the Fertile Crescent. This man’s male descendants then followed the spread of agriculture through the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, into south-eastern Europe and West Asia, and also south into India, seeding their Y wherever they went.
Some research suggests that J2 is the haplogroup of a third of Sephardic Jews and nearly a quarter of Ashkenazi Jews. In fact, many of the Y chromosomes of Judaism’s high priests, the paternal line of kohens—the ancestral line that launched the age of genetic genealogy—are also members of J2, and some have also been found to be members of J1. (Actually, researchers have found that markers once thought to be exclusive to the kohanim can also be found in other populations, and not all of them Jewish.) J2 appears in India almost exclusively as one of the Y haplogroups of upper-caste
men. It turns out that J2 is not as prevalent in Portugal as it is in Italy, where about 20 percent or more of men carry this Y type, in the southern regions especially. But J2 still includes about 10 percent of Portuguese men, making it entirely possible that the deCouto Y sailed into Cochin in the cells of a Portuguese explorer, merchant or missionary. How, I wondered, did it fit in with the story of Mr. List?
I drifted off to sleep that night making a mental list of the questions I wanted to ask him, wondering how personal my questions could be to a new-found relative. Was it best to stick to basics—Where was your grandpa from? When did he leave Germany? Why did he come? Or would I ask about culture, religion, colour—Dear Mr. List: Are you brown? Do you like Boney M and spicy food? Buck Owens? Johnnie Walker …?
As it happened, the very next morning, Mr. List made the first move.
Greetings,
I am informed by familytreedna.com that you [Gladwyn deCouto?] and I share an exact match of 12 DNA markers. I assume this is a follow-up to the National Geographic Genomic Program process to which I subscribed to trace my genetic heritage. I am very curious about this match, and would be most interested in sharing backgrounds. I know the lineage on my father’s side back four generations—to Bavarians who migrated to Michigan around 1840. The genomic project says I share genetic material with southern Italians, and about 20% of Spaniards. Please let me know your connections with the project and any information you think is relevant.
Jim List
Greetings. I loved that, one earthling reaching out to another, linked by our nucleotides. But Bavaria? Michigan? How about Lisbon, or Goa? The company had warned as much: if you don’t share the same surname, your common male ancestor likely lived before the advent of surnames, eight hundred years ago or more. The chances of Mr. List and I finding a common forefather were remote.
I wrote back telling Jim List about Gladwyn and my project. I explained that we believed the deCouto line originated in Portugal and that we could trace it back in India four generations, to a Ramon deCouto, born 1840. I told him Gladwyn lives in an old port city on India’s southwest coast and that Kochi had always been a magnet for traders, explorers and adventurers.
He was astounded: “Before the DNA analysis, I always assumed my background was pretty one-dimensional on that side. The only hint of a broader gene pool for the family was a vague family story of migration from Hungary to Germany in the Middle Ages.” He told me he lives in Maine but that his father and most of his relatives live in Michigan. He said his mother is a Swede from Minnesota, and added, “Now I would really like to know what her mitochondrial DNA would show!” With so much to discuss, we made plans to speak by phone.
A week after I first connected with Jim List, I ran into a surprise guest at my parents’ house. Ralph Pereira was in town, a first cousin of my father and the one who had compiled the book on the history of his mother’s deCouto line. An affable, adventurous man, a pilot and world traveller, Ralph is tall and still powerfully built for a man of seventy-two. His book had been invaluable when my father and I were combing through the records in Kochi, and I asked him what had made him so keen to compile it.
After his family left India for England in the 1950s, they often faced questions about their heritage, so in an effort to anglicize their identities they changed their name from Pereira to Williams. But with his dark skin, Ralph said, the new name only invited more questions. “Tell them your grandfather was Welsh,” his mother would advise. Ralph eventually felt that the entire family was running from its true identity, constructing a reality that hid any traces of India. So he set out to reconnect with his Indo-Portuguese heritage, changed his name back to Pereira, and began his family research.
As we sat down to the lunch of lentils and chili fry my mother had prepared, we realized that we had at least held on to India’s cuisine, passed down to all of us by Indian grandmothers whose identities had otherwise been lost. I told him that Dad’s mtDNA test result, which I had arranged at the same time as his Y-chromosome test, backed that up. The lab had found that my father’s maternal line belongs to Haplogroup M, as I thought it would, M being so ubiquitous in the subcontinent that it can also be found in India’s tribes, including the Kurumba people. Even though my father had not inherited his mtDNA from the juggler’s wife, his ancient maternal line may well hearken back to the common female ancestor they shared. M represents an unbroken line of mothers that reaches back to the earliest migration out of Africa, some seventy thousand years ago.
I told Ralph that this was his maternal line as well, because he and my father descend from the same maternal grandmother. Telling him, I realized that the genetic tests on my immediate family had personal relevance far beyond it. My father’s mtDNA test result was also Ralph’s test result. And it occurred to me that whatever I learned of the deCouto Y would be of interest to all the deCoutos. So I told Ralph about the match between the Y chromosome of Gladwyn deCouto and Jim List of Maine. “I have no idea exactly how we are connected,” I said. “List’s paternal ancestors came from Bavaria, and before that, maybe Hungary.”
“Ah, Hungary!” Ralph said instantly. “Well, there it is, then.”
“There it is?”
“Yes,” he said. “There is a well-known connection between Hungary and India: the gypsies of Romania and Hungary originated in India.”
The Roma people appeared mysteriously in eastern Europe about nine centuries ago. People called them “gypsy” from the mistaken belief that their dark hair and skin suggested an Egyptian heritage. But nineteenth-century studies concluded that the Roma language and its many dialects reflect ancient forms of Hindi and Punjabi; and, as with Indians, the Roma adhere to a strict caste system. Still, some scholars have argued that speaking the language of a particular place or practising some of its customs is not definitive proof that biological roots lie in that place. After all, the nomadic and culturally diverse Roma defy any narrow definition of a population. Without a written account of their history, the question of the Roma’s origins had remained unresolved until the genetic record began providing firm answers.
Studies through the 1990s, many of them led by a Bulgarian scientist named Luba Kalaydjieva, show that Europe’s eight to ten million ethnically diverse Roma actually descend from a small founding population. Their diseases tell part of the story. Roma suffer high rates of unusual genetic disorders such as spinal muscular atrophy, crippling Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and a metabolic disorder that makes them prone to cataracts in the first weeks of life. To geneticists these conditions are symptoms of a “founder effect”—evidence that a population has sprung from a relatively small number of individuals, making the mutations they carried more pronounced in their descendants. The effect is exacerbated if the founders’ progeny tend to marry among their own, as they do, say, among the Amish, or are geographically isolated, as was the case in Newfoundland and parts of Quebec.
The disease-causing mutations that Roma carry are also prevalent in India, but in few other places in the world. Based on this, and on Y chromosomes and mtDNA samples from more than a thousand Roma and Indian subjects, scientists estimate the founding Roma population left northern India eight hundred to a thousand years ago and may have numbered fewer than a thousand people. Maternally they tend to belong to mtDNA haplogroup M—the same grande dame grouping as my father. About half of all Roma men carry a Y that belongs to Haplogroup H, prevalent among India’s lower-caste men and seldom seen in big numbers outside India.
Interestingly, an estimated quarter of Roma men also carry a Y that belongs to J2, the same haplogroup as Gladwyn deCouto of Kochi and Jim List of Maine. Could anything in world history connect those dots? How did a quarter of Roma men end up with a Y chromosome prevalent in the Middle East? One theory suggests that the low-caste forefathers of the Roma people were caught up somehow in the eleventh-century Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. Another suggests that Muslim conquerors captured the Roma’s founding population in northern India and
took them back home as slaves to the Middle East, from where they eventually made their way into south-eastern Europe, including Hungary, where Roma males with a J2 Y chromosome can still be found.
Could that be the connection between Jim List’s family and mine? Did a long-ago male ancestor give rise to one male descendant who made his way into Hungary and another who ended up in Portugal, where he produced a son who would make his way back to India as a mercenary, explorer or missionary? Was it a bloodline connection to an eleventh-century Muslim invader that we shared? The only thing we could say with confidence was that we would never know. Our common ancestor had lived before surnames were invented, making it near to impossible that any paper trail could lead us to him.
Jim List and I finally spoke with each other in June 2006. We’d had a couple of weeks to ponder just how far the genetic family can extend, and it had only made both of us more curious about the other. Jim was fifty-six, the father of two, a biologist with a special interest in nature preserves and coastal research, and he’d always had romantic notions about his heritage. “I thought I detected an epicanthic fold in my eyes,” he said, referring to the upper eyelid skin fold usually associated with East Asian populations. “I thought maybe it was my mother’s ancestors’ wild Viking roaming that brought that into the bloodline.”
We laughed and Jim said, “Oh yes, I’ve had a lot of romantic notions.” When he read in a magazine about the National Geographic-IBM effort to trace the genetic history of the world, he decided to take the test. “The first thing I learned was that my ancestry, maybe ten thousand years ago, came from the cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia and we were agricultural—which is a bit of a disappointment.”
“What were you hoping for?”
“Well, being a romantic, I wanted to be the line that went straight north [from Africa] to the steppes and became the first ones to tame horses. I guess I had nursed this fable of the Hungarian and the Mongol and the epicanthic fold and all that.”
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