you
we have a huge amount of diversity
inherently
that is what defines us as a species
when we lose an insight into our culture
we lose a piece of what it means to be
Ewing Wow so it was about six and a half
years ago that we launched Genographic
on this very stage and it’s been a wild
ride we’ve discovered some amazing
things some things we didn’t necessarily
want to discover along the way but it
has certainly been an adventure and an
exploration in the best tradition of
National Geographic and it’s great to be
able to tell you about some of the
things that we have found along the way
we are an incredibly successful species
you know numerically certainly speaking
the world had its 7 billionth inhabitant
born on our way to perhaps nine and a
half billion by the middle of this
century we have a huge amount of
diversity as a species we travel the
world walk down the street in a major
city like Washington or New York and we
see people who seem to be so different
from each other and from ourselves we as
population geneticists are trying to
address the question of well you know
what is it that led to us being so
successful and how do we explain these
patterns of diversity that we see when
we look around the world are we in fact
all related to each other and if so how
closely and the other question is one of
journey if we do spring from a common
source as a species how do we come to
occupy every corner of the globe in the
process generating these patterns of
diversity that we see today in all 7
billion of us and growing well
historically these questions have been
approached through the study of stones
and bones often the field of
paleoanthropology and of course
archaeology it’s sister science going
out digging things up out of the ground
and guessing at how they may relate to
individuals living in the present the
problem is I would like to suggest as a
geneticist while the field of
paleoanthropology in the field of
archaeology as well give us certain
insights into our past possibilities
about origins and journeys of the people
alive today they don’t give us the
probabilities about direct lines of
descent that we really want
possibilities about our ancestry but not
the probabilities that we’re looking for
as scientists we as geneticists take a
slightly different approach we start in
the present we work our way back into
the past we take a genealogical approach
it’s in effect like building a family
tree a family tree for everybody alive
today
now genealogy is currently the second
most popular hobby in the United States
after gardening and I think it’s poised
to overtake gardening very soon now the
problem is everybody who’s ever tried to
construct a family tree eventually hits
what we call a brick wall in the
genealogical community a point beyond
which there is no written record and
beyond that point we simply enter this
dark and mysterious realm we call
history and ultimately prehistory but it
turns out there is a written document in
effect that we’re all carrying around
inside of ourselves in our DNA inside of
nearly every cell in our body DNA that
we’ve inherited from those parents
grandparents great-grandparents and so
on and this trace is an unbroken line of
descent going back in time this is what
allows us to trace back to the very
earliest days of our species allowing
this global genealogical approach to the
study of human history now a quick
primer on DNA for those of you in the
audience who have not taken Molecular
Genetics recently so think about it like
copying a text a book so imagine a long
book Tolstoy’s war and peace but then
multiply it by a thousand got a thousand
volumes of that that you’ve got a copy
we’ve got to do it in eight hours which
is how long it takes one of your cells
to copy the genome and so you’re
drinking a lot of coffee and you’re
reading very carefully and going back
and forth and checking double-checking
but inevitably what is going to happen
as you’re going through this process we
make a typo yeah you’re going to make
mistake
that happens at the DNA level as well at
a low but measurable rate of around a
hundred mistakes typos mutations as we
call them in genetics per generation so
every time you pass on your genome to
the next generation about a hundred
changes have occurred at random in your
DNA they get passed on and as these
mutations or markers get passed on
through the generations they become
kurz of dissent actually define lineages
so if you look down a few generations in
the future if you share one of these
novel markers with another person that
means you share an ancestor in the past
the person who first had that change in
their DNA and that’s how we connect
people up into ever deeper branches of
the human family tree so by looking at
people from all over the world asking in
effect a very open-ended scientific
question what is the pattern of human
variation that we see today globally
looking in particular at two pieces of
DNA that are proven to be incredibly
valuable in the study of human origins
in migrations mitochondrial DNA mtDNA
which traces a purely matter in a line
of descent women pass it on to their
children everybody has it but only women
pass it on so if you have mitochondrial
DNA which everyone in the room does you
got it from your mom and she got it from
her mom and she got it from her mom so
it tells you about your mother’s
mother’s mother’s mother’s mother back
to the very first mother there is an
equivalent piece of DNA on the male side
in fact the chunk of DNA the little
chromosome as we call it the Y
chromosome that makes men men but
basically it traces a purely pattern a
line of descent an unbroken line of
descent going back in time sons
inherited from their fathers they got it
from their fathers and so on
the y chromosome by looking at the
pattern of these genetic variants these
random changes that have occurred over
time on both of these lineages we can
construct family trees for everybody
alive today the deepest branches the
longest branches in these family trees
for both mitochondrial DNA and the Y
chromosome are found in Africa because
the branch length is proportional to the
amount of time you’ve been accumulating
diversity what that means is that
Africans had been accumulating diversity
for longer now this is something that
even Darwin wrote about over a century
ago in his book The Descent of Man
probably his second most famous after
the Origin of Species he speculated on
an African origin for humans but he was
talking about a common origin with our
ape cousins and of course he’s talking
millions of years ago we now know of
course that Apes do appear in the fossil
record around 23 million years ago
Africa and apes started to leave around
16 to 18 million years ago and so what
would have been taught to you in
Physical Anthropology courses until as
recently as a generation ago is that
some ape-like ancestor an ape-man
perhaps a hominid species perhaps Homo
erectus would have left Africa millions
of years ago migrated out to the far
corners of the earth and then diverged
into separate human races or groups
deep-seated biological differences now
while we’re still confirming this idea
of an African origin of humanity the
difference is the dates we can actually
estimate the age of this most recent
common African ancestor and it’s nowhere
near a million years ago even the most
recent common ancestor of everyone alive
today is a man who walked the savannas
of East Africa as recently as 60,000
years ago only about 2,000 human
generations it’s the blink of an eye
in an evolutionary sense it’s only in
the past 2,000 generations that a small
group of Africans has left that
continent to go out and populate the
rest of the world scattering to the wind
spreading their seed foreign wipe
colonizing the far-flung corners of the
world the evidence is that there was an
early coastal migration leaving Africa
via the Horn of Africa as it’s called
across the bubble man dub straight
moving down through southern India down
into Southeast Asia reaching Australia
by run fifty thousand years ago a
slightly later migration by the Middle
East forty-five to fifty thousand years
ago perhaps following the grasslands
that existed that at that time into
Central Asia moving westward into Europe
thirty five to forty thousand years ago
a small group heading into the worst
part of the last ice age the last
glacial maximum up into northeastern
Siberia and fifteen to twenty thousand
years ago crossing a short lived land
bridge into the Americas populating the
new world the great Paleolithic
wanderings of our species and it’s an
incredible story it’s a story that I
told in part in a film that we made
several years ago for National
Geographic and for PBS called the
journey of man which many of you might
have seen and this was the impetus
behind the Genographic project as we
were finishing up the filmmaking process
I had the opportunity to start talking
to people here at
geographic and they said to me several
years ago this is really cool stuff if
you could do anything next in your field
what’s the big question you’d like to
ask what what what big thing would you
like to do if you could do anything
which is kind of a cool question to be
asked by National Geographic and I said
well what we’re looking at in this map
that we have created is a very broad
brush view of the patterns of human
migration have we moved around the world
based on a few thousand people studied
for a handful of genetic markers we need
to increase that sample size by an order
of magnitude or more because a few
thousand people out of a world
population of as I said before now seven
billion is not a very good sample size
and that was the initial idea behind the
Genographic project which we launched in
April of 2005 now it was a new way of
organizing a scientific project at its
core of course is the field research our
scientific team that we’ve assembled
working with indigenous people living in
their particular region North America
South America sub-saharan Africa and so
on now why indigenous people the vast
majority the world has moved around
relatively recently these recent
migration patterns of the last few
hundred years
and that’s obscuring these deeper
patterns which is what we really want to
get out how we populated the world
things that were happening thousands of
years ago tens of thousands even
hundreds of thousands of years ago what
we need ideally is people who have been
living in the same places for that
length of time people who retain that
genetic link to their ancestors DNA
their ancestors genetic pattern that
geographic context for the DNA patterns
so our core scientific team is focusing
on that but we wanted it to be the story
of all of us the entire human species
now we can’t afford a sequence
everybody’s DNA unfortunately be a
little too expensive so we offer the
opportunity for members of the general
public to purchase a kit swab your own
cheek send it off to the laboratory get
the DNA markers tested and get your
results back on a website telling you
something about your place in the grand
human story the human journey a way to
find out something about yourself but
also to become part of a real-time
research project
novel way of approaching this moreover
by doing that this is all non profit you
not only help to fund the research that
we’re doing out in the field with the
indigenous groups but also the third
component of the project the Legacy Fund
this is a way to give something tangible
back to indigenous and traditional
peoples around the world many of whom
are living on the edge leading very
marginalized lives in already very poor
places often forced to leave behind
their ancient homelands move to a
growing mega city think of Sao Paulo or
Mumbai they enter the melting pot their
kids start speaking the dominant
language and within a generation or two
that culture is pretty much doomed to
extinction linguists tell us that
they’re around 6,000 languages or so
spoken around the world today but also
we’re losing a language every two weeks
due to this process that I described and
through the legacy grants we want to do
something to raise awareness about this
issue of cultural extinction or
endangerment raise awareness about it
and in some cases perhaps just slow it
or even to halt it now how are we doing
just from a numbers perspective on the
indigenous and traditional sampling side
we’ve sampled over a thousand
populations around the world which is a
pretty good sampling of the world’s
population numbers we’ve sampled we
believe a pretty good subset of those
about seventy-five thousand little over
seventy five thousand indigenous and
traditional participants have joined the
project since we launched and the
sampling is still ongoing some of it
will still be ongoing next year but
really we feel that we actually have
captured a pretty good snapshot of who
we are as a species from a diversity
standpoint on the public participation
front over four hundred and fifteen
thousand kits sold to people in living
in more than 130 countries this is
actually much better than we ever
expected to do and we launched the
project more than half of these people
have actually consented to allow their
data to be used in the scientific
studies and we are actually using it
I’ll talk about an example in just a
second but also of course raising a fair
amount of funding for the other work
that we’re doing out in the field and
also the legacy grants these are
projects that are led by the indigenous
and traditional communities things that
they’re interested in doing to preserve
their own cultures just to highlight a
few the yagan OB language the AG note
people who live in northern tajikistan
historically in the zeref shan river
valley
about 1,500 speakers of this language
most of them have been moved to the
capital of Tajikistan dushawn Bay and
they’re the kids are learning to speak
Taji the main language and Russian
rather than their original language
yaghnobi and of course the language
inevitably is doomed to extinction of
this process continues over a couple of
generations now why is this language
spoken by 1500 people in some remote
part of Central Asia important well
because the AG nubbie language
represents the last living remnant of
ancient Sogdian which was once the
lingua franca of the Silk Road if you
had been trading goods 1,500 2,000 years
ago anywhere between the Caspian Sea in
the ancient Chinese capital of Xian you
would have been speaking their language
so when that language goes extinct we
lose an important insight into that that
little corner of human history and an
interesting project in the Andes
Mountains in Ecuador with the Schwar
people well this is a study where
they’re trying to preserve their
knowledge of traditional plants and how
they use them in their culture think
about the pharmaceuticals you might be
prescribed by your physician about 30 40
percent of them ultimately traced back
to plant sources and we know about a lot
of those plant sources because of
accumulated traditional knowledge over
many generations so when we lose that
accumulated knowledge how many potential
treatments cures for cancer AIDS other
things might we be missing out on we
don’t know but it’s important to
preserve this knowledge that thousands
of years of experimentation trial and
error that’s led to all this amazing
cultural knowledge and diversity that
defines us today
now I’m often asked by my colleagues in
the genetics community get the unders I
understand why you’re doing this work
with the indigenous and traditional
peoples that makes sense scientifically
but you talk about the idea that members
of the general public can become a part
of the scientific process they can
furnish their data to scientific
analyses consent to it and so on is it
really useful these data are incredibly
useful there’s a lot of information in
them this is a great example that came
to light by accident and this is another
example of citizen science and something
that we’d really like to explore in more
depth moving forward this
insight came from a woman who wrote to
the project couple years ago said love
what you’re doing however in my case you
appear to have gotten it wrong and you
need to retest me she said you told me
that I have a mitochondrial lineage that
comes from Central Asia or Siberia I can
tell you for a fact I can show you
church records going back to the 16th
century that my family came from a
little village just outside of Budapest
and so clearly got it wrong I can’t be
Asian I’ve got to be European
please retest me sincerely thank you
very much etc okay so I read this and I
got really excited about it not again
because I like to retest but because the
Hungarians are fascinating population
within Europe if you know anything about
Hungarian linguistics the Hungarian
language magyar is an outlier within the
general pattern of European languages
the Hungarian language is an outlier
within this broader spectrum of what we
call indo-european languages Hungarian
is most closely related to languages
spoken up here in the eastern part of
Scandinavia so finish and and the Sami
language spoken by the the Lapps then
call themselves the Sami people the
center of diversity for this linguistic
group is east of the Ural Mountains over
in Siberia and this makes sense given
what we know about Hungarian history we
have written records telling us that
about a thousand years ago some group of
Huns Hungarians ancient Hungarians
migrated from somewhere further east we
don’t know where over here into the
Central European Plain and they settled
down then they brought with them their
unique language and their love of
chicken paprikash and so on and gave
rise to the Hungarian people and based
on this woman writing and we started to
look at the data that we had in our
database from the public participants
when about 2300 people who had Hungarian
ancestry and it turns out that about 2
or 3 percent of them are carrying
lineages that we think of as being
typically Asian outliers within the
European gene pool and both the male and
female sides so the power of huge
amounts of data is that we’re starting
to see evidence for some of these recent
recent migration events where perhaps
there hasn’t been a huge genetic impact
but there is something that’s detectable
as you start to look at thousands of
samples the power of huge amounts of
data
we’re dealing here with 200,000 years of
human history data from nearly half a
million people and growing blowing into
over a thousand populations more than
130 countries how do you start to
coalesce that into no understandable
patterns it’s not an easy thing to do so
one of the things we have started to do
is think about the themes that are
emerging as we look across centers and
there are a couple of things that really
kind of stand out the first is the
tremendous impact that climate
particularly climatic shifts have had on
human migration patterns as the
climatological record paleo
climatological record the ancient
climatological record has improved over
the last few years and we’ve started to
correlate that with the genetic patterns
we’re starting to notice some
fascinating correspondences there the
most obvious was this idea that people
migrated from Siberia into North America
at a period in time when the sea levels
were actually lower during the last
glacial maximum the worst part of the
last ice age huge ice sheets covering
much of the northern hemisphere the sea
levels were over 300 feet lower and
because of that a little land Ridge was
exposed between Siberia and Alaska
allowing people to literally walk across
and so you know that makes sense but
other things we’re seeing are perhaps
not so obvious so if we think about the
impact of the ice age the same I should
I say to the last glacial maximum in
Europe we’ve still got these huge ice
sheets up here to the north people can’t
live on the ice and so people were
forced down into what we call refugia in
the southern part of Europe they took
refuge from this this harsh weather in
the north and as the ice sheets started
to retreat after about fifteen thousand
years ago when the last ice age ended
these areas which had been covered in
ice are suddenly open for recolonization
and we see populations migrating up from
the south from the Franco Cantabrian
refugium which is down here in Spain and
southwestern France and the refugium
down here in the Balkans to repopulating
their corresponding parts of Europe so
climate change driving these genetic
patterns that we see today very clear
divisions within the European gene pool
based on this ancient climatological
history so climate appears to be you
know emerging as one of these key
motivators in human migration patterns
over the years something that we’re
seeing time and time again as we look
around the world in so many populations
is the tremendous importance of what has
been called by archaeologists Gordon
Child in particular who coined the term
the Neolithic Revolution when we settle
down around ten thousand years ago and
became farmers rather than
hunter-gatherers people settle down and
started to grow their own food a
steadier supply of particularly the
grains that made up the the major part
of the the diet and in several regions
around the world and by doing that they
gained control of their food supply and
controlled how much food they could grow
so the population could literally take
off you have more kids you grow more
food and that’s when we see the real
explosion the Neolithic explosion
leading from a total world population
size around 10,000 years ago only
perhaps five million people or so know
exactly but we’re guessing it’s a few
million to as I said seven billion today
so one of the the areas of the world
that we know the best in terms of this
Neolithic transition is Western Eurasia
and we all have learned about the
Fertile Crescent where agriculture wheat
and barley agriculture developed in the
Middle East around ten thousand years
ago and the idea that this novel
innovation started to spread out into
other places including into Europe now
there’s been a big debate in
archeological circles about the way in
which this happened but we have actually
a team of people on the Genographic
research side who has been looking at
archaeological material it turns out you
can get ancient DNA DNA out of ancient
remains now there’s a site in central
Germany that has been ad Arenberg that’s
been particularly well documented in the
archaeological record and they’ve been
looking at samples from ancient material
just before the spread of Agriculture
what we call the Musa lithic culture the
hunter-gatherer culture that immediately
preceded the farmers and people just
after that transition to the very
earliest Neolithic farming communities
one of the things they’ve asked is well
okay if we sample this DNA sequence the
mitochondrial DNA burs what we tend to
get out of ancient material most
frequently and ask where is you know
where in the world is it most closely
related to which populations it turns
out that it’s not most closely related
to groups that are living in that same
area today
in modern Germany it’s most closely
related to populations found in the
northern part of the Fertile Crescent
implying that the early Neolithic
farmers who moved into Germany literally
did come out of the Middle East it
wasn’t simply a case of local Germans
deciding that they wanted to grow crops
– you actually had the immigration of
people from the Middle East literally
replacing the groups that were there
before it’s a fascinating way of
approaching the study of human history
because we as people who study primarily
modern human lineages are getting only a
glimpse of the actual process that went
on to create that so it’s a huge
addition to our understanding of the
past
you
we have a huge amount of diversity
inherently
that is what defines us as a species
when we lose an insight into our culture
we lose a piece of what it means to be
Ewing Wow so it was about six and a half
years ago that we launched Genographic
on this very stage and it’s been a wild
ride we’ve discovered some amazing
things some things we didn’t necessarily
want to discover along the way but it
has certainly been an adventure and an
exploration in the best tradition of
National Geographic and it’s great to be
able to tell you about some of the
things that we have found along the way
we are an incredibly successful species
you know numerically certainly speaking
the world had its 7 billionth inhabitant
born on our way to perhaps nine and a
half billion by the middle of this
century we have a huge amount of
diversity as a species we travel the
world walk down the street in a major
city like Washington or New York and we
see people who seem to be so different
from each other and from ourselves we as
population geneticists are trying to
address the question of well you know
what is it that led to us being so
successful and how do we explain these
patterns of diversity that we see when
we look around the world are we in fact
all related to each other and if so how
closely and the other question is one of
journey if we do spring from a common
source as a species how do we come to
occupy every corner of the globe in the
process generating these patterns of
diversity that we see today in all 7
billion of us and growing well
historically these questions have been
approached through the study of stones
and bones often the field of
paleoanthropology and of course
archaeology it’s sister science going
out digging things up out of the ground
and guessing at how they may relate to
individuals living in the present the
problem is I would like to suggest as a
geneticist while the field of
paleoanthropology in the field of
archaeology as well give us certain
insights into our past possibilities
about origins and journeys of the people
alive today they don’t give us the
probabilities about direct lines of
descent that we really want
possibilities about our ancestry but not
the probabilities that we’re looking for
as scientists we as geneticists take a
slightly different approach we start in
the present we work our way back into
the past we take a genealogical approach
it’s in effect like building a family
tree a family tree for everybody alive
today
now genealogy is currently the second
most popular hobby in the United States
after gardening and I think it’s poised
to overtake gardening very soon now the
problem is everybody who’s ever tried to
construct a family tree eventually hits
what we call a brick wall in the
genealogical community a point beyond
which there is no written record and
beyond that point we simply enter this
dark and mysterious realm we call
history and ultimately prehistory but it
turns out there is a written document in
effect that we’re all carrying around
inside of ourselves in our DNA inside of
nearly every cell in our body DNA that
we’ve inherited from those parents
grandparents great-grandparents and so
on and this trace is an unbroken line of
descent going back in time this is what
allows us to trace back to the very
earliest days of our species allowing
this global genealogical approach to the
study of human history now a quick
primer on DNA for those of you in the
audience who have not taken Molecular
Genetics recently so think about it like
copying a text a book so imagine a long
book Tolstoy’s war and peace but then
multiply it by a thousand got a thousand
volumes of that that you’ve got a copy
we’ve got to do it in eight hours which
is how long it takes one of your cells
to copy the genome and so you’re
drinking a lot of coffee and you’re
reading very carefully and going back
and forth and checking double-checking
but inevitably what is going to happen
as you’re going through this process we
make a typo yeah you’re going to make
mistake
that happens at the DNA level as well at
a low but measurable rate of around a
hundred mistakes typos mutations as we
call them in genetics per generation so
every time you pass on your genome to
the next generation about a hundred
changes have occurred at random in your
DNA they get passed on and as these
mutations or markers get passed on
through the generations they become
kurz of dissent actually define lineages
so if you look down a few generations in
the future if you share one of these
novel markers with another person that
means you share an ancestor in the past
the person who first had that change in
their DNA and that’s how we connect
people up into ever deeper branches of
the human family tree so by looking at
people from all over the world asking in
effect a very open-ended scientific
question what is the pattern of human
variation that we see today globally
looking in particular at two pieces of
DNA that are proven to be incredibly
valuable in the study of human origins
in migrations mitochondrial DNA mtDNA
which traces a purely matter in a line
of descent women pass it on to their
children everybody has it but only women
pass it on so if you have mitochondrial
DNA which everyone in the room does you
got it from your mom and she got it from
her mom and she got it from her mom so
it tells you about your mother’s
mother’s mother’s mother’s mother back
to the very first mother there is an
equivalent piece of DNA on the male side
in fact the chunk of DNA the little
chromosome as we call it the Y
chromosome that makes men men but
basically it traces a purely pattern a
line of descent an unbroken line of
descent going back in time sons
inherited from their fathers they got it
from their fathers and so on
the y chromosome by looking at the
pattern of these genetic variants these
random changes that have occurred over
time on both of these lineages we can
construct family trees for everybody
alive today the deepest branches the
longest branches in these family trees
for both mitochondrial DNA and the Y
chromosome are found in Africa because
the branch length is proportional to the
amount of time you’ve been accumulating
diversity what that means is that
Africans had been accumulating diversity
for longer now this is something that
even Darwin wrote about over a century
ago in his book The Descent of Man
probably his second most famous after
the Origin of Species he speculated on
an African origin for humans but he was
talking about a common origin with our
ape cousins and of course he’s talking
millions of years ago we now know of
course that Apes do appear in the fossil
record around 23 million years ago
Africa and apes started to leave around
16 to 18 million years ago and so what
would have been taught to you in
Physical Anthropology courses until as
recently as a generation ago is that
some ape-like ancestor an ape-man
perhaps a hominid species perhaps Homo
erectus would have left Africa millions
of years ago migrated out to the far
corners of the earth and then diverged
into separate human races or groups
deep-seated biological differences now
while we’re still confirming this idea
of an African origin of humanity the
difference is the dates we can actually
estimate the age of this most recent
common African ancestor and it’s nowhere
near a million years ago even the most
recent common ancestor of everyone alive
today is a man who walked the savannas
of East Africa as recently as 60,000
years ago only about 2,000 human
generations it’s the blink of an eye
in an evolutionary sense it’s only in
the past 2,000 generations that a small
group of Africans has left that
continent to go out and populate the
rest of the world scattering to the wind
spreading their seed foreign wipe
colonizing the far-flung corners of the
world the evidence is that there was an
early coastal migration leaving Africa
via the Horn of Africa as it’s called
across the bubble man dub straight
moving down through southern India down
into Southeast Asia reaching Australia
by run fifty thousand years ago a
slightly later migration by the Middle
East forty-five to fifty thousand years
ago perhaps following the grasslands
that existed that at that time into
Central Asia moving westward into Europe
thirty five to forty thousand years ago
a small group heading into the worst
part of the last ice age the last
glacial maximum up into northeastern
Siberia and fifteen to twenty thousand
years ago crossing a short lived land
bridge into the Americas populating the
new world the great Paleolithic
wanderings of our species and it’s an
incredible story it’s a story that I
told in part in a film that we made
several years ago for National
Geographic and for PBS called the
journey of man which many of you might
have seen and this was the impetus
behind the Genographic project as we
were finishing up the filmmaking process
I had the opportunity to start talking
to people here at
geographic and they said to me several
years ago this is really cool stuff if
you could do anything next in your field
what’s the big question you’d like to
ask what what what big thing would you
like to do if you could do anything
which is kind of a cool question to be
asked by National Geographic and I said
well what we’re looking at in this map
that we have created is a very broad
brush view of the patterns of human
migration have we moved around the world
based on a few thousand people studied
for a handful of genetic markers we need
to increase that sample size by an order
of magnitude or more because a few
thousand people out of a world
population of as I said before now seven
billion is not a very good sample size
and that was the initial idea behind the
Genographic project which we launched in
April of 2005 now it was a new way of
organizing a scientific project at its
core of course is the field research our
scientific team that we’ve assembled
working with indigenous people living in
their particular region North America
South America sub-saharan Africa and so
on now why indigenous people the vast
majority the world has moved around
relatively recently these recent
migration patterns of the last few
hundred years
and that’s obscuring these deeper
patterns which is what we really want to
get out how we populated the world
things that were happening thousands of
years ago tens of thousands even
hundreds of thousands of years ago what
we need ideally is people who have been
living in the same places for that
length of time people who retain that
genetic link to their ancestors DNA
their ancestors genetic pattern that
geographic context for the DNA patterns
so our core scientific team is focusing
on that but we wanted it to be the story
of all of us the entire human species
now we can’t afford a sequence
everybody’s DNA unfortunately be a
little too expensive so we offer the
opportunity for members of the general
public to purchase a kit swab your own
cheek send it off to the laboratory get
the DNA markers tested and get your
results back on a website telling you
something about your place in the grand
human story the human journey a way to
find out something about yourself but
also to become part of a real-time
research project
novel way of approaching this moreover
by doing that this is all non profit you
not only help to fund the research that
we’re doing out in the field with the
indigenous groups but also the third
component of the project the Legacy Fund
this is a way to give something tangible
back to indigenous and traditional
peoples around the world many of whom
are living on the edge leading very
marginalized lives in already very poor
places often forced to leave behind
their ancient homelands move to a
growing mega city think of Sao Paulo or
Mumbai they enter the melting pot their
kids start speaking the dominant
language and within a generation or two
that culture is pretty much doomed to
extinction linguists tell us that
they’re around 6,000 languages or so
spoken around the world today but also
we’re losing a language every two weeks
due to this process that I described and
through the legacy grants we want to do
something to raise awareness about this
issue of cultural extinction or
endangerment raise awareness about it
and in some cases perhaps just slow it
or even to halt it now how are we doing
just from a numbers perspective on the
indigenous and traditional sampling side
we’ve sampled over a thousand
populations around the world which is a
pretty good sampling of the world’s
population numbers we’ve sampled we
believe a pretty good subset of those
about seventy-five thousand little over
seventy five thousand indigenous and
traditional participants have joined the
project since we launched and the
sampling is still ongoing some of it
will still be ongoing next year but
really we feel that we actually have
captured a pretty good snapshot of who
we are as a species from a diversity
standpoint on the public participation
front over four hundred and fifteen
thousand kits sold to people in living
in more than 130 countries this is
actually much better than we ever
expected to do and we launched the
project more than half of these people
have actually consented to allow their
data to be used in the scientific
studies and we are actually using it
I’ll talk about an example in just a
second but also of course raising a fair
amount of funding for the other work
that we’re doing out in the field and
also the legacy grants these are
projects that are led by the indigenous
and traditional communities things that
they’re interested in doing to preserve
their own cultures just to highlight a
few the yagan OB language the AG note
people who live in northern tajikistan
historically in the zeref shan river
valley
about 1,500 speakers of this language
most of them have been moved to the
capital of Tajikistan dushawn Bay and
they’re the kids are learning to speak
Taji the main language and Russian
rather than their original language
yaghnobi and of course the language
inevitably is doomed to extinction of
this process continues over a couple of
generations now why is this language
spoken by 1500 people in some remote
part of Central Asia important well
because the AG nubbie language
represents the last living remnant of
ancient Sogdian which was once the
lingua franca of the Silk Road if you
had been trading goods 1,500 2,000 years
ago anywhere between the Caspian Sea in
the ancient Chinese capital of Xian you
would have been speaking their language
so when that language goes extinct we
lose an important insight into that that
little corner of human history and an
interesting project in the Andes
Mountains in Ecuador with the Schwar
people well this is a study where
they’re trying to preserve their
knowledge of traditional plants and how
they use them in their culture think
about the pharmaceuticals you might be
prescribed by your physician about 30 40
percent of them ultimately traced back
to plant sources and we know about a lot
of those plant sources because of
accumulated traditional knowledge over
many generations so when we lose that
accumulated knowledge how many potential
treatments cures for cancer AIDS other
things might we be missing out on we
don’t know but it’s important to
preserve this knowledge that thousands
of years of experimentation trial and
error that’s led to all this amazing
cultural knowledge and diversity that
defines us today
now I’m often asked by my colleagues in
the genetics community get the unders I
understand why you’re doing this work
with the indigenous and traditional
peoples that makes sense scientifically
but you talk about the idea that members
of the general public can become a part
of the scientific process they can
furnish their data to scientific
analyses consent to it and so on is it
really useful these data are incredibly
useful there’s a lot of information in
them this is a great example that came
to light by accident and this is another
example of citizen science and something
that we’d really like to explore in more
depth moving forward this
insight came from a woman who wrote to
the project couple years ago said love
what you’re doing however in my case you
appear to have gotten it wrong and you
need to retest me she said you told me
that I have a mitochondrial lineage that
comes from Central Asia or Siberia I can
tell you for a fact I can show you
church records going back to the 16th
century that my family came from a
little village just outside of Budapest
and so clearly got it wrong I can’t be
Asian I’ve got to be European
please retest me sincerely thank you
very much etc okay so I read this and I
got really excited about it not again
because I like to retest but because the
Hungarians are fascinating population
within Europe if you know anything about
Hungarian linguistics the Hungarian
language magyar is an outlier within the
general pattern of European languages
the Hungarian language is an outlier
within this broader spectrum of what we
call indo-european languages Hungarian
is most closely related to languages
spoken up here in the eastern part of
Scandinavia so finish and and the Sami
language spoken by the the Lapps then
call themselves the Sami people the
center of diversity for this linguistic
group is east of the Ural Mountains over
in Siberia and this makes sense given
what we know about Hungarian history we
have written records telling us that
about a thousand years ago some group of
Huns Hungarians ancient Hungarians
migrated from somewhere further east we
don’t know where over here into the
Central European Plain and they settled
down then they brought with them their
unique language and their love of
chicken paprikash and so on and gave
rise to the Hungarian people and based
on this woman writing and we started to
look at the data that we had in our
database from the public participants
when about 2300 people who had Hungarian
ancestry and it turns out that about 2
or 3 percent of them are carrying
lineages that we think of as being
typically Asian outliers within the
European gene pool and both the male and
female sides so the power of huge
amounts of data is that we’re starting
to see evidence for some of these recent
recent migration events where perhaps
there hasn’t been a huge genetic impact
but there is something that’s detectable
as you start to look at thousands of
samples the power of huge amounts of
data
we’re dealing here with 200,000 years of
human history data from nearly half a
million people and growing blowing into
over a thousand populations more than
130 countries how do you start to
coalesce that into no understandable
patterns it’s not an easy thing to do so
one of the things we have started to do
is think about the themes that are
emerging as we look across centers and
there are a couple of things that really
kind of stand out the first is the
tremendous impact that climate
particularly climatic shifts have had on
human migration patterns as the
climatological record paleo
climatological record the ancient
climatological record has improved over
the last few years and we’ve started to
correlate that with the genetic patterns
we’re starting to notice some
fascinating correspondences there the
most obvious was this idea that people
migrated from Siberia into North America
at a period in time when the sea levels
were actually lower during the last
glacial maximum the worst part of the
last ice age huge ice sheets covering
much of the northern hemisphere the sea
levels were over 300 feet lower and
because of that a little land Ridge was
exposed between Siberia and Alaska
allowing people to literally walk across
and so you know that makes sense but
other things we’re seeing are perhaps
not so obvious so if we think about the
impact of the ice age the same I should
I say to the last glacial maximum in
Europe we’ve still got these huge ice
sheets up here to the north people can’t
live on the ice and so people were
forced down into what we call refugia in
the southern part of Europe they took
refuge from this this harsh weather in
the north and as the ice sheets started
to retreat after about fifteen thousand
years ago when the last ice age ended
these areas which had been covered in
ice are suddenly open for recolonization
and we see populations migrating up from
the south from the Franco Cantabrian
refugium which is down here in Spain and
southwestern France and the refugium
down here in the Balkans to repopulating
their corresponding parts of Europe so
climate change driving these genetic
patterns that we see today very clear
divisions within the European gene pool
based on this ancient climatological
history so climate appears to be you
know emerging as one of these key
motivators in human migration patterns
over the years something that we’re
seeing time and time again as we look
around the world in so many populations
is the tremendous importance of what has
been called by archaeologists Gordon
Child in particular who coined the term
the Neolithic Revolution when we settle
down around ten thousand years ago and
became farmers rather than
hunter-gatherers people settle down and
started to grow their own food a
steadier supply of particularly the
grains that made up the the major part
of the the diet and in several regions
around the world and by doing that they
gained control of their food supply and
controlled how much food they could grow
so the population could literally take
off you have more kids you grow more
food and that’s when we see the real
explosion the Neolithic explosion
leading from a total world population
size around 10,000 years ago only
perhaps five million people or so know
exactly but we’re guessing it’s a few
million to as I said seven billion today
so one of the the areas of the world
that we know the best in terms of this
Neolithic transition is Western Eurasia
and we all have learned about the
Fertile Crescent where agriculture wheat
and barley agriculture developed in the
Middle East around ten thousand years
ago and the idea that this novel
innovation started to spread out into
other places including into Europe now
there’s been a big debate in
archeological circles about the way in
which this happened but we have actually
a team of people on the Genographic
research side who has been looking at
archaeological material it turns out you
can get ancient DNA DNA out of ancient
remains now there’s a site in central
Germany that has been ad Arenberg that’s
been particularly well documented in the
archaeological record and they’ve been
looking at samples from ancient material
just before the spread of Agriculture
what we call the Musa lithic culture the
hunter-gatherer culture that immediately
preceded the farmers and people just
after that transition to the very
earliest Neolithic farming communities
one of the things they’ve asked is well
okay if we sample this DNA sequence the
mitochondrial DNA burs what we tend to
get out of ancient material most
frequently and ask where is you know
where in the world is it most closely
related to which populations it turns
out that it’s not most closely related
to groups that are living in that same
area today
in modern Germany it’s most closely
related to populations found in the
northern part of the Fertile Crescent
implying that the early Neolithic
farmers who moved into Germany literally
did come out of the Middle East it
wasn’t simply a case of local Germans
deciding that they wanted to grow crops
– you actually had the immigration of
people from the Middle East literally
replacing the groups that were there
before it’s a fascinating way of
approaching the study of human history
because we as people who study primarily
modern human lineages are getting only a
glimpse of the actual process that went
on to create that so it’s a huge
addition to our understanding of the
past
you
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