Armchair Adventures
for April 1, 2012
by Paul Sullivan
A Little Look at a Big Picture
Is there any adult who hasn't wondered who they are and where they
came from?
When DNA analysis became widely available, we expected to learn
more about our roots, short-term and over our long history.
But as with science itself, the more we learn about ourselves, the more
questions arise.
Along my dad's side of the family there had been intriguing possibilities about American Indian ancestry in there somewhere. Yet they remained just that: possibilities.
More than a year ago my friend CG gave me an unusual Christmas gift. It was a kit to take part in National Geographic's Genographic Project. This is an effort to build a database of long-term DNA data to help fill out the deep ancestry picture of our human kind.
I didn't know quite what to make of it. In fact, I read the accompanying materials and then set it aside and did nothing at all with it for more than a year.
Early in February, I read through it one day while in Arizona and asked, "Why am I procrastinating about this?"
I promptly took the necessary cheek swabs and mailed it away to the lab in Texas.
My mother's and even my father's mother's side of the family are pretty much straightforward Anglo-European.
But dad's father, Timothy A. Sullivan, who had died when I was but two years old, could have been more complicated.
There was the story that dad had once said that at age two, his father had been placed in a Catholic orphanage. That much is almost certainly true. But for years the family story was that while at the orphanage, a woman-"dressed like an Indian"-would come to a window and talk to him. He was five years old at the time, according to the account.
We haven't the option of asking dad about these things again, as he died many years ago. It gets murkier here, but either she told him or he thought that she was his mother.
The results of the DNA analysis that I sent away in February came up online last week and they bore no surprises at all.
A deep DNA analysis is quite different from the shorter-term kind of analysis taking us back through a few or a few dozen generations. The deep analysis is intended trace our lineage all the way back to the emergence of modern man in northeast Africa-probably in the vicinity of what is now Kenya.
It is a big-picture view of some 60,000 years of the human journey rather than a look back a few hundred years.
The key to my results was graphically illustrated in a broad map depicting Africa, Asia and Europe.
When I typed in the code required to see the nearly infinitesimal part my family had played in the story of man, I didn't know what to expect.
There it was, clear as could be: a line tracing the genetic markers that led northward from Africa into what we now think of as the Near East, then eastward toward Central Asia and what we now think of as Iran, then making a near complete reversal westward across northern Europe and down into the heartland of western Europe and the British Isles.
If there had been any Native American influence-at least in the Y-chromosome faithfully carried by the male-that long line of migration would have traveled northeastward into the Asian heartland and eventually across the so-called Land Bridge to begin the population of the Americas via what is now Alaska.
It simply was not there.
Now I have never studied anthropology, but I am inclined to believe these results do not really settle the issue, definitively. To do that, we may have to trace the maternal lineage through a mitochondrial DNA analysis.
But before pursuing that line, I'm thinking that it may be fun to do one of the near-term DNA checks.
This is more fun than I would ever have believed. When it strikes you that your ancestors don't just go back tens, but hundreds and thousands of years, that your true roots are enormously deep, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
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