Where are you from?

No, I mean really … not where do you live or even where did your grow up. Not even where did your parents come from, or your grandparents, or their grandparents. Maybe what I really mean is, Where are we from? And how did we get wherever we are?

My partner and I are about to participate in a scientific mega-project designed to answer these questions. The aim of the Genographic Project being conducted by National Geographic is to learn about the “human journey,” the migration patterns of Homo sapiens and their close evolutionary cousins over the past 200,000 years or so. Our cheek swabs will become micro-drops in a great genetic bucket that will teach scientists—and then us—tons about our human history. (This isn't the sort of analysis that provides information on disease risks and such. The point is not to understand health risks at the individual scale but to understand the emergence of the human family at the billions-of-people scale.)

The idea of tracing anyone’s ancestral history back tens of thousands of years seems like the stuff of science fiction. It wasn't too long ago that scientists figured out that we all came from one ancestral “Eve” who lived in east Africa and from whom all living humans descended. Eve, not “Adam,” is the identifiable ancestor of us all because mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted maternally, provides the basis for tracing lineages. It’s the tool scientists use to study the evolutionary relationships among species and among populations within species.

So, anyhow, after analyzing our swabs, the good scientists at National Geographic will be able to tell us where our genes came from, how our ancestors migrated over time, which groups of modern humans and their hominid cousins added genetic information to our DNA. This information, in turn, will contribute to the process of mapping how humans have migrated and morphed over time.

You’re no doubt wondering about those “close cousins” I keep mentioning. There are two: the Neanderthals and the Denosivans. The Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) are a well-known relative—well enough known that we've managed to stereotype them as stupid and backward, although those stereotypes may be erroneous. The Neanderthals lived in Europe, and they apparently crossed paths with Homo sapiens, even occasionally interbreeding with them. On the other hand, Denosivans (Denosiva hominim) are a far newer story. Less is known about them, most of it from DNA taken from a fragment of a finger bone of a young girl, which was discovered in a cave in what is now Siberia. Genetic evidence shows that this group interacted and even interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. So now, most of us carry small traces of these early interactions—in other words, modern humans are part Neanderthal, part Denosivan, and part Homo sapiens. Maybe that will quiet those stereotypes a bit.

So why, you may ask, are we doing this? I’ll confess, it was at my instigation. Part of my enthusiasm about this project is sheer curiosity, part is my fascination with what used to be called “popular science” (i.e., science translated to a form that educates everyday folks). But apart from all that, I love the idea of participating in the creation of a story of us all, a genogram of the whole human species. Thinking about this project—and viewing this map of the “human journey”) brought to mind a comment often made by astronauts: From space, there are no borders. (In fact, a Mexican-American astronaut got some flak for using this observation to support comprehensive immigration reform). National borders are artificial, invented for purposes of dividing groups. The Genographic Project, on the other hand, seems to me reminiscent of the view from space. It erases borders, unites people.

"The Human Journey" from the National Geographic Genographic Project

This project reminded me of recent news stories about findings from genealogy, which have also expanded our view of our ancestry—or at least the ancestry of some famous folks—at a more personal level. For instance, President Obama apparently has ancestral links to one of the earliest American slaves—through his (white) mother’s family. Michelle Obama had a white great-great-great grandfather. And then there’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whose family emigrated from Czechoslovakia around WWII, so she knows something about borders and their divisiveness—not to mention their impermanence. After being raised as a Catholic, she learned late in life that her parents had both been Jewish. 

How these stories dismantle tidy identity categories! How connected we all are—really! Like, in a very concrete sense. We’re even connected to the groups that we might regard as most distant and different from us. Stories like these make the categories we create and the borders we lay down seem not only artificial, but also cruel. I’m hearing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in my brain:

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

OK, call me a dreamer, but I can’t help but think that greater awareness of how profoundly related we all are can only help. And if learning about our genographic connections as a species contributes to that awareness, I'm all for it.

I suppose it would be interesting to get a personal genealogy done, just to know in detail who my more immediate ancestors were. But for now, I’m content to know what I share with the Neanderthals and Denosivans. And how many miles my ancestors traveled, acting for all the world as if the landscape didn't actually need to be partitioned into nations.