Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project

This week I read this short overview of the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project by Spencer Wells, the director of the project. I was in the library looking for a book by Matt Ridley (whom I read about in Reason Magazine), when I spotted Deep Ancestry on the shelf nearby.

A couple of years ago, I bought a NGS Genographic Project kit for my mom for Mother's Day. The Genographic Project is a research effort sampling and studying indigenous people's DNA around the world in order to map ancient human migration patterns. Part of their funding comes from selling DNA analysis to curious people whose DNA they don't need. As NGS (politely) explains, the people who can afford one hundred bucks for a kit are not people whose sample is helpful to the project, because they generally live in industrialized, "melting-pot" societies, and not in the same physical places their ancestors lived.

I previously read all the literature sent with my mom's DNA kit, but I was happy to get into more detail in the book. It gives a great overview of contemporary genetics, especially the system of dividing humanity into different haplogroups, based on prominent shared mutations.

I also got to read more in the book about my mom's haplogroup, which turned out to be mitochondrial haplogroup X. X is spread throughout Eurasia and also arrived in North America about 15,000 years ago. I know, it's not a very specific result - less about geneaology and more about anthropology.

The haplogroup system is used primarily for tracing ancient human movement as we moved out of Africa and colonized the globe thousands of years ago. However, Deep Ancestry mentions that some of its researchers hope to also use the data to study the genetic effects of more recent events like the conquests of Ghengis Khan or Alexander the Great. I would love to read the results of that line of inquiry. Totally fascinating!

The most wonderful thing about contemporary genetics is in showing how closely all humans are related. There is far more genetic diversity within so-called "races" than among them. The incredible variety of appearances among humans is rather unique among animals, and fools us into thinking different groups are more innately different than they are.