by Bryan Sykes
23
A SENSE OF SELF
In the last chapter I could see myself slipping into the kind of language about human prehistory that I constantly try to avoid. It is the language of generalization, vitiated by the intentionality implicit in even such innocent-sounding phrases as ‘the first Americans’ or ‘the first Australians’. There is an underlying suggestion that these were some sort of cohesive unit with an agreed policy – almost as if they had read the textbooks: ‘OK, chaps, it’s fifteen thousand years ago. Time to cross the Bering Land Bridge. And hurry up, it won’t last for ever.’ Even the Neanderthals: ‘Sorry, lads. Time for us to go extinct and let the Cro-Magnons take over.’ This is all complete and utter nonsense. There were no plans. How could there be? No-one can know what lies beyond the horizon. The whole of early human prehistory is based on the decisions of individuals or, at the very most, small bands of not more than a few dozen people.
There is solidity behind the statement: ‘The Romans invaded Britain in AD 43.’ That means something. A well-organized military empire can make decisions and put in place large-scale actions to implement them. But this requires a far greater degree of organization and purpose than can ever have prevailed in our remote past. It is as if our present world of governments, corporations and committees has blinded us to the possibilities and importance of individual small-scale actions. I have tried to emphasize this in the imagined lives of the seven daughters. Though their whole existence depended entirely on uncontrollable elements of their environment – the movement of the herds, the advance and retreat of the ice caps – their day-today responses were a matter of individual choice within those constraints. In this view of human evolution, chance events and contingency are the variables. A boat sinks. A Polynesian island is not discovered for another hundred years.
I like this kind of genetics because it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on individuals and their actions. This is much more appealing than the old-fashioned type of genetics, which was constrained by its methodology to force people into increasingly meaningless and misleading categories. Until I started this work I always thought of my ancestors, if I thought of them at all, as some sort of vague and amorphous collection of dead people with no solid connection to me or the modern world, and certainly no real relevance to either. It was interesting enough to read about what ‘the Cro-Magnons’ got up to all those years ago – but nothing much to do with me. But once I had realized, through the genetics, that one of my ancestors was actually there, taking part, it was no longer merely interesting – it is overwhelming. DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection, handed down from generation to generation, carried, literally, in the bodies of my ancestors. Each message traces a journey through time and space, a journey made by the long lines that spring from the ancestral mothers. We will never know all the details of these journeys over thousands of years and thousands of miles, but we can at least imagine them.
I am on a stage. Before me, in the dim light, all the people who have ever lived are lined up, rank upon rank, stretching far into the distance. They make no sound that I can hear, but they are talking to each other. I have in my hand the end of the thread which connects me to my ancestral mother way at the back. I pull on the thread and one woman’s face in every generation, feeling the tug, looks up at me. Their faces stand out from the crowd and they are illuminated by a strange light. These are my ancestors. I recognize my grandmother in the front row, but in the generations behind her the faces are unfamiliar to me. I look down the line. The women do not all look the same. Some are tall, some are short, some are beautiful, some are plain, some look wealthy, others poor. I want to ask them each in turn about their lives, their hopes and their disappointments, their joys and their sacrifices. I speak, but they cannot hear. Yet I feel a strong connection. These are all my mothers who passed this precious messenger from one to another through a thousand births, a thousand screams, a thousand embraces of a thousand new-born babies. The thread becomes an umbilical cord.
A thousand rows back stands Tara herself, the ancestral mother of my clan. She pulls on the cord. In the great throng a million ancestors sense the tug in lines that radiate out from her source. I feel the pull in my own stomach. On the bright stage of the living, I look to right and left and sense that others feel it too. These are the other people in the clan of Tara. We look at each other and sense our deep umbilical connection. I am looking at my brothers and sisters. Now I am aware who they are, I feel we have something very deep in common. I feel closer to these people than to the others. Like my ancestors, they are all very different to look at; but, unlike my ancestors, I can talk to them about it.
When two people find out that they are in the same clan they often experience this feeling of connection. Very few can put it into words, but it is most definitely there. Though DNA is the instrument which traces the links, I do not believe it has anything directly to do with the sensation. It seems inconceivable that the few genes which are embedded in the mitochondrial genome can directly influence feelings of this kind. They are certainly important genes and, as we saw in an earlier chapter, they allow cells to use oxygen. Without any evidence it would be hard to make a case that it was purely the similarities of cellular metabolism that caused this emotional feeling of shared experience. The DNA is certainly a physical object which has literally been passed from generation to generation, but its power is as a token or a symbol of the shared ancestry it reveals rather than the body chemistry it directly controls.
Many people experience a feeling of closeness and intimacy with others in the same clan. But would they feel this if the DNA tests had not revealed the connection? Two strangers enter a crowded room. Their eyes meet and they feel instinctively drawn to each other but don’t know why. Are they acting under the influence of the subconscious awareness of an ancient connection? No research has yet explored this intriguing possibility, but as more and more people find out to which clan they belong, their reactions to their own ancestors and to each other will emerge.
What is it that we share with other members of our clan? We share the very same piece of DNA that has come down from our ancient maternal ancestors. We use it constantly. Cells in every tissue are reading the message it carries and carrying out its instructions millions of times a second. Every atom of oxygen we take into our bodies when we breathe has to be processed according to the formula that has been handed to us by our ancestors. That is a very fundamental connection in itself. But the route by which this gene reached us from those ancestors has its own special importance, for it follows the same path as the bond between a mother and her child. It is a living witness to the cycle of pain, nurture and enduring love which begins again every time a new child is born. It silently follows the mysterious essence of the feminine through a thousand generations. This is the deep magic which connects everyone in the same clan.
It is not a connection which is at all obvious in a world where family history and genealogy are dominated by inheritance through the male line. We are all familiar with the illuminated scrolls which celebrate the pedigrees of the rich and powerful. Without exception these trace the flow of titles, lands and wealth from father to son through the generations. Even the family trees of more modest households are built up around a scaffold of paternal inheritance. The immediate cause of this male monopoly on the past is simply that the written records on which all genealogy depends rely heavily on the use of surnames. With a surname as the only way into the records, it is no surprise that what comes out the other end is a family tree drawn around men. But the ultimate cause is the same patriarchal attitude of Western civilization that we encountered in the first theories of inheritance. Wealth and status were the only things considered to be worth inheriting, and they passed down the male line.
The common practice of women adopting the husband’s surname on marriage rather than retaining their maiden names makes it very difficult to trace a maternal lineage, for women’s names change at every
generation. But neither would retention of the maiden name resolve the problem, because a maiden name is, after all, only another surname – a father’s name rather than a husband’s. Against this background it is no surprise that it comes as a revelation to many people that there actually is such a thing as a maternal family tree, a mirror image of the traditional paternal version. I have certainly never seen one drawn out.
Genetics does help to reconstruct detailed maternal trees even within the existing records, but the best solution for future generations of genealogists would be to create a new class of name altogether. Everyone would get this name from his or her mother. Women would pass it on to their children. It would be, in effect, an exact mirror image of the present system with its surnames which people get from their fathers and, if they are men, pass on to their children. We would then all have three names: a first name, a surname and a new one, a matriname perhaps. A man passes on his surname to his children; a woman gives her matriname to hers. Since they follow a maternal line of inheritance, these names will closely correspond with mitochondrial DNA. They will also reflect biological relationships more accurately than surnames, because there is only very rarely any doubt about the identity of a child’s mother. In time people would be able to recognize their maternal relatives with the same matriname in just the same way as they can now link up to their paternal family through a shared surname. But until that time comes, if it ever does, reconstructing maternal family trees through written records alone will be much harder than drawing the male equivalent.
In the short time during which I have been able to help people reconnect to their ancestors or their relatives using DNA, I have received many requests from individuals who have tried to establish a link through the records but for one reason or another have not been able to do so. Paper records can be destroyed by fire, eaten by termites, erased by mould or simply just lost. DNA is able to fill in the gaps created by missing records. This helps to compensate for the inherent frailty of pen and paper; but there are many people for whom the lack of any written records about their ancestors is not an accident but is deliberate obliteration. In these cases, DNA is not just a useful supplement to the traditional techniques of the genealogist. It becomes their only physical link to the past.
For Jendayi Serwah, establishing a link to her past was a mission of great personal significance. She is a lady from Bristol whose parents had each arrived in Britain from Jamaica as teenagers. Their ancestors had been taken from Africa as slaves to work the plantations. But there were no records of this. The only details the slave ships kept were the most basic description of their human cargo: how many men and how many women were loaded on board, and how many survived the long sea voyage, was all that was written down. After they were landed and sold on to the plantation owners, their individuality was deliberately erased. They were given European names. No records were kept of births or marriages or deaths. Their pasts as individuals were intentionally obliterated. It was not that it would have been difficult for Jendayi to trace her ancestors in Jamaica back more than a few generations; it would have been completely impossible. Of course, she guessed that her deep ancestry lay in Africa; but there was no real proof of it, other than the general historical presumption that many captives from west Africa were sold to plantation owners in the Caribbean. So it was not surprising that, when we tested her DNA, Jendayi had a mitochondrial signature that was clearly African. However, when I told her of this result and also that we had found a very close DNA match with a Kenyan Kikuyu, the effect on her was overwhelming. She was literally lost for words. Here at last was the individual proof she had wanted for so long. It was as if the DNA was itself a written document from her ancestors, which in a sense it was; a document that had been handed down, one generation at a time, from the woman who had endured and survived that terrible voyage from Africa. A document that could not be obliterated by the plantation owners as it passed unseen and unread through the generations. And now in Jendayi here it was, a perfect copy of the African original preserved within her own body.
I have seen many other astonishing journeys witnessed by this remarkable piece of DNA. In western Europe more than 95 per cent of native Europeans fit easily within one or other of the seven clans. That still leaves a large number of people whose deep maternal lineages tell of a different history. Unlike Jendayi, they are usually completely unaware of the exotic journeys recorded in their DNA. For instance, a primary school teacher from Edinburgh carries the unmistakable signature of the Polynesian mitochondrial DNA which I can recognize from a mile off. She knows her own family history well for the past two hundred years, and there is nothing that gives any clue as to how this exotic piece of DNA came to her from the other side of the world. But there is no doubt that it did. What tales it could tell of the South Seas! Is she perhaps the descendant of a Tahitian princess who fell in love with a handsome ship’s captain, or of a slave captured by the Arabs on the coast of Madagascar? There are many other equally mysterious journeys recorded in our DNA: the Korean sequence that turns up regularly in fishermen from Norway and northern Scotland; the unmistakably African DNA in a dairy farmer from Somerset, a legacy perhaps of Roman slaves from nearby Bath; the sequence of a book salesman from Manchester that is so unusual that his closest match is found among the native Australians of Queensland.
One outstanding genetic journey involves a complete circumnavigation of the world. Two fishermen on a small island off the west coast of Scotland have unusual mitochondrial sequences, and I thought at first they might be closely related to one another, although they had no knowledge of it. As we discovered more sequences from different parts of Europe and the rest of the world, we began to find much closer matches to the two men – one in Portugal and one in Finland. These were still unusual sequences to find in Europe, not part of the seven original clans. The Portuguese sequence matched several from South America, and the Finnish DNA was close to sequences found in Siberia, where we also found the ancestral sequence of the South Americans. So the two fishermen were indeed related – but only through a common ancestor from Siberia. One line of maternal ancestors had travelled from Siberia along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to Scandinavia, then on to the west of Scotland, perhaps aboard a Viking ship. The other had crossed into America over the Bering Straits, then down to Brazil. At some time, presumably after Brazil became a Portuguese colony, a woman carrying this piece of DNA crossed the Atlantic to Portugal, from where, somehow, it had found its way up the Atlantic coast to the west coast of Scotland. The two journeys had ended on the same small island after travelling in opposite directions from the other side of the world.
These stories and others like them make nonsense of any biological basis for racial classifications. What I have related here is only the tip of the iceberg, the clear message from the gene that is the easiest to read. The tens of thousands of other genes in the cell nucleus would echo the same message. We are all a complete mixture; yet at the same time, we are all related. Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor. This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we have all inherited from the people who lived before us. Our genes did not just appear when we were born. They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.
At a recent conference I sat aghast in the audience as patent lawyers and biotechnologists debated the pros and cons of patenting genes. The arguments were legalistic in the extreme. DNA, to the lawyers, was just a chemical. Since it could be artificially synthesized, they argued, why should it not be patented like any other chemical? At one point an enthusiastic manager from a large pharmaceutical company stood up to address the audience. He was summarizing the current position, and illustrated his point with a pie-chart showing the division of ownership of the human genome, the sum total of all human genes, among major corporations. The pie was sliced up and the portions assigned. The financial arguments were impeccable. You could not expect major investment by pharmaceutical companie
s into genetics unless these investments could be protected by patents. Patents are being filed every day claiming ownership and a commercial monopoly on our genes. As I sat there, I had the overwhelming and very disturbing sensation that parts of me and my past were being bought and sold.
As the presentation continued I reflected on the fact that I was sitting here, in a conference room, at one of the most advanced DNA facilities in the world, while in vast halls on either side, rank upon rank of robotic machines were silently reading the secrets of the genome. An electronic board in the lobby continuously flashed up the DNA sequences as they came off the machines. Before my very eyes the details of the genome that had been hidden for the whole of evolution were marching across the screen. Was this, the reduction of the human condition to a string of chemical letters, the ultimate expression of the Age of Reason that first began to separate our minds from our intuition and to distance us from nature and our ancestors? How ironic that DNA should also be the very instrument that reconnects us to the mysteries of our deep past and enhances rather than diminishes our sense of self.
Not ‘just a chemical’ after all, but the most precious of gifts.
Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, has had a remarkable scientific career. After undertaking medical research into the cause of inherited bone disease, he set out to discover if DNA, the genetic material, could possibly survive in ancient bones. It did, and his was the first report on the recovery of ancient DNA from archaeological bone, published in the journal Nature in 1989. Since then Professor Sykes has been called in as a leading international authority to examine several high-profile cases, such as the Ice Man, Cheddar Man and the many individuals claiming to be surviving members of the Russian royal family.
Alongside this, he and his research team have over the last ten years compiled by far the most complete DNA family tree of our species yet seen.