Last Thursday night,while my 14 year old daughter fiddled at the computer and my wife wandered aimlessly about the house, I sat down and began watching the screener for a new National Geographic Channel documentary. Before long they were both at my side, enthralled at the amazing journey of man as layed out in The Human Family Tree.
Using genetic data collected “on a single day on a single street” in New York City, Dr.Spencer Wells, the Project Director of the Genographic Project, launched us on an amazing voyage of exploration to the roots of human diversity. By finding markers on the DNA collected in New York and comparing it to the data collected from indigenous populations around the world, the amazing paths of human migration were revealed. Dr. Wells explains how these markers originate:
“Markers are tiny changes – or “typos” – in your genetic code that occur from time to time as DNA is being copied to pass on from one generation to the next. When these are passed on through the generations, they become markers of descent – if you share a marker with someone, you share an ancestor, or a person in the past who first had that change in their DNA. We zoom in on these markers using sensitive biochemical techniques, using them to assign people to their position in the human family tree.”
And what did the research reveal about our origins? The DNA trail confirms what anthropologists and paleontologists have long suggested, that everyone alive today can trace their roots back to East Africa. The modern day representatives of our relatives on the human family tree are the Hadzabe who live near Tanzania’s Serengeti. They live about 1500 miles north of the San, the population they split from about 150,000 years ago. All modern humans – European, Asian, Australasian, Amerindian – no matter what their background -will find their deep-rooted origins with these people in Africa.
The documentary proceeds by following the lineage of seven people from New York and how they relate to the early migration patterns of man. Each discovers just how connected we all are, often in unexpected and surprising ways. The residents of Queens represent a small sample of the diversity of the human species. What is amazing is that all this apparent variability has taken place in the last 60 000 years, when man first left Africa on the human journey around the world.
Don’t miss The Human Family Tree, this Sunday, August 30 at 7 PM ET/ 9 PM MT, on the National Geographic Channel.
And on the web:
- Meet the participants featured in Human Family Tree.
- Meet Spencer Wells, Director of the Genographic Project.
- Learn more about the Genographic Project, and get the latest updates from the Project Team.
- Check out the Time Line of Human Migration and interact with the Atlas of the Human Journey.
- Get the facts about our ancient ancestors.
