I was perusing National Geographic magazine's latest issue, and there is a sidebar article on a project to trace human migrations all the way back to the first ones across, then out of, Africa. The article in question talks about a July, 2008 instance where 163 individuals from Astoria in Queens, NY were sampled, and offers four examples from that sample as showing the various treks human populations have made.
With a trip to see family looming, and the issue of immigration legal and otherwise still simmering, I got to wondering what secrets might be locked in my own Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. There is a link here, if you will bear with me.
My parents are from different parts of the country; my father from the northeast, my mother from the midwest. Their five children all married and bore children to individuals from outside our hometown area, with different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Two of my sisters married men from Massachusetts, one of French ancestry, the other Yankee. My oldest sister married someone of Italian ancestry from Poughkeepsie, NY. My brother married an African-American woman from Frederick, MD. My wife is the great-grandchild of German immigrants from the prairie. The confusion of information in the genetic markers of our children might very well be as diverse as that from the sample in Astoria!
Since the beginning of the species, human beings have moved around, sometimes due to environmental pressures, sometimes in the search for better hunting and foraging grounds, sometimes due to political pressures (the various "barbarian tribes" that started swelling the border regions of Roman Empire were refugees from the rise of various Empires in Eastern Europe and western and even central Asia). While the legal and political issues surrounding the migration of human communities are vastly different today than at other times in our history, the reality of human population movement remains a constant. The results, in the various microscopical evidence in our DNA, gives the lie to the rhetoric of race, ethnicity, and their links to culture. We are, all of us (except, as the article points out, to some isolated groups, in particular a group called the Khoisan in southeastern Africa whose DNA shows the least divergence from the initial population 100,000 years ago) a glorious admixture of the human race in all its differences. This is something to celebrate.
I find it fascinating, a source of wonder really, that locked within the cells of each and every one of us is a map of the movements of our species. Each of us, and all of us collectively, show the links and ties that bind the human species together.
Virtual Tin Cup
