by Lone Frank
You can observe a similar sentiment in recent years among African Americans, who have used genetic tools to trace where their forefathers came from. For them, it is not enough to know the broad historical account of the slaves hauled in their millions to American coasts, where they mixed – and were mixed – with other groups and created a new, common culture. No, they wanted to connect with a specific line of origin – a country, an ethnic group, or, better still, a particular tribe in a particular village. Despite the fact that many of these Americans have never visited the African continent, they identify strongly with a distant biological affiliation with what is today Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire, though neither country existed at the time of the slave trade.
Some of the interest in tracing genetic roots back to Africa has been stimulated by celebrity DNA tests. Chris Rock, the comedian, sought the counsel of the genetic oracle and learned that his ancestors hailed from Cameroon and the Udeme people. Based on a DNA test she took in 2007, Whoopi Goldberg can brag that she is a descendant of the Papel people of Guinea-Bissau. (The country’s tourism ministry invited her to visit, but she declined.) And Oprah Winfrey threw herself into building girls’ schools in South Africa after she discovered in 2005 that her DNA showed her to be a descendant of the region’s Zulus. Suddenly, the fate of the local population lay heavy on her mind. Alas, the connection to the Zulus turned out to be a mistake. Winfrey was tested again, and this time proclaimed to be a descendant of the Kpelle people in what is now Liberia. The extent to which this will benefit Liberian schoolgirls remains to be seen.
Such tests are the primary business of African Ancestry, which promotes itself as the only company with the technology to trace a person’s heritage back to a country and a region in today’s Africa. The company, which makes a point of being “black-owned,” claims that its information edge comes from a database of twentyfive thousand DNA samples taken from the people of thirty African countries and covering two hundred ethnic groups. For $349, African Ancestry compares selected genetic markers in a customer with the markers from Africans in its database and – with luck – finds an ethnic and geographical match.
Academic specialists, including the geneticist Deborah Bolnick of the University of Texas at Austin, have raised serious doubts about whether African Ancestry has enough data to satisfy its advertised promises. But that doesn’t slow the stream of new business – presumably because customers are not seeking the absolute truth but instead an identity, and are willing to think of that identity as an ongoing project. As the founder of African Ancestry, Gina Paige, told the BBC, the real goal is to change the way African Americans look at themselves.
BUT WHERE DOES the need to see yourself in the blinding light of genetics come from?
Maybe it’s because the biological view of humanity seems to be in the ascendant, pushing back decades of focus on culture. In the Western world, we have long convinced ourselves that everything human is just a social construction, that we have no nature but, on the contrary, are defined by our culture. And this seemed plausible, in particular, because most people live in a culture of which they could easily, painlessly, and pretty much automatically feel a part. A culture of which their ancestors have been a part for generations.
People were Danes, because they belonged to a special Danish culture – something having to do with pickled herring, Hans Christian Andersen, and red and white flags. South of the border, the Germans identified with Goethe and Schiller, schmaltzy music, and the Oktoberfest. Even in melting-pot nations such as the United States, people made reference to distinct cultures – black, Jewish, born-again, Latino, WASP, and countless others. Everyone could have a marvelously clear sense of his or her cultural affiliation.
Now, however, we are living in a world that is much more blended and stirred, like a well-mixed Martini, where even societies that have traditionally been homogenous are now describing themselves as multicultural. And as soon as you start to look a little more closely at the concept of culture, it is terribly difficult to define. A culture is a little like water – it has no fixed contours. The more the world is globalized and cultures are mixed, the more difficult it becomes to fasten down and, ultimately, to define your identity in this old-fashioned way. What culture do you belong to if your parents were born in Pakistan but you were born in Britain and have every intention of living the rest of your life in that country? Do you have more in common with Pakistanis your age or your British peers?
In this cultural cacophony, it is handy to be able to refer to something biological – for example, digital information that you can read and decipher and print out. I am a Zulu, or a Kpelle, because it is written into every one of my cells, no matter where I find myself or what culture I’m familiar with. Identity is in the genetic bar code.
WHAT ABOUT ME, Lone Frank? Can an ordinary “ethnic Dane” find some form of identity in her genetic background, and where do I even go to look?
There is, of course, the Genographic Project, founded in 2005, which in exchange for just a hundred dollars tests what they call deep ancestry. That is, where our early – very early – ancestors came from. Several years ago, the project met at an expensive restaurant in central London to hear the young American geneticist Spencer Wells explain how, using genetic analyses, he had traced the human migration out of Africa and around the globe. Over finger food and white wine, Wells described central Asia as “the playpen of humankind.” Humanity’s cradle was Africa, from which the first wave of modern Homo sapiens migrated and spread. It had long been believed that Europe was peopled by an emigration via the Middle East. However, when Wells and his colleagues analyzed DNA samples from population groups all over the world, they determined that the steppe peoples of central Asia had made the move west – not just to the rest of Asia, but to Europe, India, and the American continent, over the course of several population expansions.
Since the swanky London gathering to celebrate the publication of his book The Journey of Man, Wells has been promoted to the august position of “explorer-in-residence” at the National Geographic Society. He isn’t resident much. Eternally wandering, like any good explorer, he serves as the photogenic front man for the Genographic Project, which is a joint undertaking between the society and IBM. More than anything, this enterprise appears to be a genetic search for our collective identity as a species. As Wells himself puts it, “In this future-obsessed era, it is important to seize a snapshot of our past before it is lost forever, in order better to understand ourselves and where we are headed.” In his view, this snapshot is procured by collecting and comparing DNA from hundreds of thousands of individuals, who represent all the ethnic and tribal peoples of the world.
The project’s ambition is to map in detail how different groups and peoples are related to each other and how they have moved around and mixed over the millennia. As reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the project’s geneticists have uncovered that the past’s great sailors, the Phoenicians, are the ancestors of the modern Maltese. Similarly, they have looked deeply into the genome of today’s Lebanese population and analyzed how the migrants of the past left behind not only stones and monuments but chromosomes. A study of just under a thousand Muslims, Christians, and Druze revealed that, while the Christians largely bear traces of a European heritage, which presumably derives from the Crusaders, the Muslim population shares many genes with people from the Arabian peninsula, which can be attributed to the expansion of Islam between 600 and 700 CE. Curiously, they did not find any genetic traces from the Turkish Ottomans, who swamped the area in the sixteenth century.
More recently, the team has thrown itself into a new reading of our very early evolution, back when the first Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa and had not yet set eyes on the rest of the world. Paleontologists have discovered fossil remains of Homo sapiens that are two hundred thousand years old. Yet, despite the fact that three-quarters of the story of our development as modern human beings took place in Africa, that peri
od has largely been ignored, in favor of untangling the events that occurred after the first migration out of Africa, around sixty thousand years ago. The Genographic Project is changing that. Now, studies of DNA from a large group of living members of the Khoisan people – the Bushmen of southern Africa – are developing a new and interesting picture of the human past.
It seems there were very small groups of people, who dispersed into two distinct populations, which were separated by climate and a large desert that spread around today’s Lake Nyasa, between Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. For a hundred thousand years, these distinct populations, one in the northeast and one in the south, constituted their own evolutionary line. Genetic analyses indicate that the forebears of the Khoisan people may have comprised a distinct line, different from the others, for far longer than one hundred thousand years, and not until forty thousand years ago did they mix with other peoples, from the north.
MOST ANCESTRY STUDIES use the help of two keys: the male Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, a tiny circular chromosome found in small structures, mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of cells. Both types of chromosome have the special, and crucial, feature that they are passed on from generation to generation in virtually the same form. All the other chromosomes exchange genes left and right, meeting up in pairs and mixing freely when egg and sperm cells are made. This genetic dance is called recombination, and it mixes up the available genes into ever new combinations. Just like a deck of cards that must be shuffled before each deal, so each round of egg and sperm is not like the one before. This means, in practice, that the chromosomes you inherit from your father and your mother are not identical to the ones your parents carry around.
By contrast, the Y chromosome does not, for the most part, recombine, which means that a son’s Y chromosome is a replica of his father’s. Kinship testing consists of examining how the Y chromosome looks with respect to a band of special markers. The most frequently used markers are small “cassettes” of repetitions of short base sequences – for example, GCC – which are somewhat like genetic Lego blocks. The blocks are found in special positions on the Y chromosome and, at every position, you can count the number of repetitions and use this number as the relevant marker.
Women have no Y chromosome, but they are responsible for passing on mitochondrial DNA. This molecule is transmitted unchanged from mother to child – both to sons and daughters – because the mitochondria of embryos are provided exclusively by the egg. The sperm cell is such a scaled-down model that the only thing it brings to the party at the embryo’s cell nucleus is the father’s contribution of twenty-three chromosomes. The markers tested in mitochondria are of the good old SNP type, mutations that change one base for another and which can be found in particular regions of the mitochondrial DNA.
The markers we carry constitute our genealogical table. They are, so to speak, a catalog of the mutations that have occurred over the course of genealogical time, and by looking at the markers we can divide male and female descent into different lines. You can think of it as a tree. At the root is the clan father. Every time one of his descendants forms a mutation on the Y chromosome that is passed along to the next generation, the tree branches. The same holds true for clan mothers and mitochondrial DNA. Because geneticists know how often new mutations occur, it’s possible to compare markers in two living people and calculate roughly how far back in time their last common clan father or clan mother lived.
For both women and men, researchers from the Genographic Project have been able to use the markers from thousands of people, living in different regions of the globe, to place humankind onto different branches of our family tree. In scientific jargon, these branches are called haplogroups, and the older they are, the more subgroups (or thinner twigs) they have. An illustration is the seven common haplogroups that are found in European women, each of which has developed and provided the source for many subgroups found in particular geographical regions.
Interesting differences can also be observed in a population’s male and female descendants. For example, in Iceland today, Y chromosomes are primarily Nordic, while mitochondrial DNA is primarily Celtic. This is due, it appears, to the fact that Icelanders descend from Nordic men – the fierce Vikings who fled from Norway to conquer new lands – and the Celtic women snatched as these conquerors sailed past Ireland.
In Europe, you can see traces of the struggles between primordial hunter-gatherer groups and invading farmers. Recently, a research team reported that the most widespread haplogroup among European men – R1b1b2 – came from farmers who spread from Anatolia eight thousand years ago. These healthy swains penetrated the continent’s original stock of men. Their Y chromosome constitutes eighteen percent of European men, and is known as haplogroup I. And those Anatolian farmers must have appreciated the local hunter-gatherer women, because today’s European populations carry mitochondrial DNA that can be traced to these foremothers.
“HERE AT THE National Geographic we were all surprised that the interest in being tested is so great,” says Spencer Wells, when I call him up at the Society’s headquarters in Washington, DC. He is apparently taking a breather between two exotic expeditions and has a little time to spare.
“The guys in the marketing department estimated that we would, at most, be able to sell ten thousand test kits – if we were lucky. Because, honestly, how many people today can really be interested in knowing what route their Stone Age forefathers took to get to Asia or Europe?”
There were ten thousand who wanted to know exactly that on the very first day the test was available. Five years later, just under four hundred thousand test kits have been sold, of which eighty-five percent have gone to Americans. As Wells says, “Europeans may find this enthusiasm harder to understand, because they still have a connection to their villages.”
I wonder just what he means by that.
“Over there, there is a sense that your kin have always lived in Denmark, in France, or wherever. There is an ethnic identity connected with being a European. That doesn’t exist in the US, where all Americans are hyphenated – African-American, Cuban-American, Chinese-American or some mixture across ethnic demarcations.”
On the other hand, this mixed America offers a bounty from the genetic ocean. Wells is working on a film project in which he visits a particularly multi-ethnic neighborhood in Queens and takes DNA samples from two hundred randomly selected inhabitants.
“We pretty much find the whole human variation in the form of haplogroups represented in a very small piece of American soil. And we can tell all of them who know nothing about their descent a fascinating story,” he explains.
But familiarity with deep ancestry is not enough for everyone. I think again of A.M. Homes, who ordered a test from the Genographic Project and got the result “haplogroup U,” which places her in the so-called Europa clan, which originates from a woman who lived about fifty-five thousand years ago and whose descendants have spread across the continent. “I feel I have used hundreds of dollars to find out something I already knew – namely, that I’m related to everybody else,” noted the disappointed Homes in The Mistress’s Daughter.
Spencer Wells thinks her attitude is regrettable.
“Of course, it is only a microscopic part of your overall descent, but it is a part of your descent,” he stresses, a tad offended. “And most people get a kick out of it. To feel a connection to the first small groups of modern human beings in Africa and the whole fantastic journey the species has taken is something new and meaningful.”
I myself can well understand how an identity-confused author would want knowledge that was closer to her: genealogy as opposed to anthropology. However, family tree research has also taken a step towards DNA. Whereas enthusiasts once pored over church records etched in Gothic letters and government censuses scratched in efficient shorthand, they can now test their DNA, and that of others, to get an unambiguous answer. With genetic genealogy, people can finally get all the way into the cell
s of the individual and see for themselves. Who is your real family and who is not? Papers can be falsified or misleading, but the signs written in DNA don’t lie. If there is an “illegitimate” child somewhere, it can be covered with the right signatures in the right places, but the genome in the child and the child’s descendants reveals what happened with unfailing certainty.
In the past few years, a veritable cottage industry has arisen in such genetic genealogy. In the United States alone, there are just short of fifty private companies offering genealogical tests of varying types and quality, and there are international genealogical organizations, interest groups, and networks.
Like my first confrontation with the hyper-extended family, this industry began with a question of Jewish identity. And it had to do with the group of Kohanim, who, according to myth, are descended directly from the biblical Aaron, the man who spoke to the assembly in place of his hot-tempered, stuttering little brother Moses. A Canadian kidney specialist, Karl Skorecki, belonged to this specific clan, and, when he ran into another Kohen in his local congregation, it struck him that they were very different in appearance. Skorecki was an Ashkenazi Jew, with fair skin and Eastern European roots, the other was an olive-skinned Sephardic Jew, with roots in the Spanish diaspora. But if, as the myth prescribed, these two men had a common forefather, it must be reflected in a common biology.