Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project

243 Pages·2006·1.79 MB·English

by  Spencer Wells

Copyright © 2007 National Geographic Society.
All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents
without permission is prohibited.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4262-0211-7
ISBN-10: 1-4262-0211-3
Wells, Spencer, 1969-
Deep ancestry: inside the Genographic Project : the landmark DNA
quest to decipher our distant past / by Spencer Wells.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7922-6215-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Genographic Project. 2. Human evolution. 3. DNA--Evolution. 4.
Human genetics. I. Title.
QH371W45 2006
599.93'5--dc22
2006021421
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To Kim McKay,
for asking the right question
ONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One The Block
Chapter Two Odine’s Story: The Exception
Chapter Three Margaret’s Story: The Hearth
Chapter Four Phil’s Story: The Ice
Chapter Five Virumandi’s Story: The Beach
Chapter Six Julius’s Story: The Cradle
Epilogue
Appendix: Haplogroup Descriptions
Glossary
Further Reading
About the Author
Author Acknowledgments and Illustration Credits
Index
NTRODUCTION
n June 26, 2000, two geneticists stood with President
Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House. It was the
end of a long journey for these two scientists as well as a
public show of unity after a hard-fought battle to stake claim
on the first complete sequence of the human genome—the
2.85 billion units that make up our genes. Francis Collins, a
physician and a devout Christian, had led the publicly
funded Human Genome Project. Craig Venter, taking his
cues from Silicon Valley and the tech boom of the 1990s,
had formed a private company to claim the same prize. Their
rivalry would accelerate the pace of work to such an extent
that the date of completion arrived a year earlier than
expected. It was a great day to be a scientist, and I
remember watching the event broadcast over the Internet
from my laboratory in Oxford, hanging on every word.
What the announcement that day meant to science paled
in comparison to what it will eventually mean to the public
at large. That is why the U.S. president, arguably the most
powerful man in the world at that time, was making the
announcement rather than a spokesperson from the National
Institutes of Health or the Department of Energy, which had
funded much of the 13-year project. As Clinton said, it was
the completion of “the most important, most wondrous map
ever produced by humankind.”
This moment in many ways marked the beginning of the
genomic era. Today the language of genetics has entered the
zeitgeist of the modern age. References to DNA are used to
sell everything from cars to computers. Genetics has become
a genie of sorts, promising to grant our wishes with the
magic spell of its hidden secrets. During the press
conference at the White House, Clinton joked about living to
150. With advances in genetics this may actually be possible
by the end of the 21st century, as our understanding of
human diseases and aging expands. Almost daily, geneticists
take incredible leaps forward in our understanding of
ourselves.
LOOKING BACK
While much of the world that day was peering into the
future, my colleagues and I were thinking about how this
amazing new technology could be used to explore the past.
Assembled in our small laboratory in Oxford were DNA
samples from all over the world, a library of genetic
information that we were using to deduce details about
human history over the past 50,000 years. Our work, like
that of most scientists, rested on the earlier achievements of
brilliant researchers from around the world. What we had
going for us was the benefit not only of their results but of
the incredible new machines and techniques that had been
developed for the Human Genome Project (HGP).
The HGP had begun slowly as an effort to map the
large-scale structure of the genome. Beginning with a
landmark meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1986, the
pace of work really gathered momentum in 1987 and 1988
when a 15-year plan was developed to undertake the
sequencing. A large part of the early effort was focused on
developing the technologies that were needed to plow
through the huge amount of information. The HGP was
gearing up to undertake something that many of us had only
dreamed about a few years before, and genetics was on
course to become “big science” in the way that
physics—with its particle accelerators and large,
international scientific consortia—had done decades before.
The pace of work was measured in the first few years of
the project, as new techniques were evaluated and scientific
methodologies were debated in scores of meetings and
conferences. By the late 1990s, though, most of the major
technical hurdles had been overcome, and spurred on in part
by Venter’s privately funded efforts, the HGP was cranking
out huge amounts of raw DNA sequence every day. The
HGP had become a massive DNA sequencing factory.
Technology was clearly no longer the limiting factor in
genetic research. Rather, it was access to the genetic “texts”
we were trying to read. For instance, in our global effort to
piece together genetic history, DNA samples donated by
people interested in their own ancestry were relatively easy
to obtain from places that had a well-developed scientific
infrastructure—Europe, the United States, and East Asia, for
instance—but that left out most of the world. What our field
of genetic anthropology needed was a truly global sampling
of humanity’s diversity. By analyzing samples from people
who have been living in the same place for a long period of
time, so-called indigenous people, it is possible to infer
details about the genetic patterns of their ancestors.
Furthermore, by making comparisons across many regions, it
is also possible to say something about the movements of
their ancestors thousands of years ago. But to do this with
any accuracy, it is necessary to look at many, many people
from around the world, particularly those living in relatively
isolated locations.
Unfortunately, we’re racing against the clock. The stories
carried in the DNA of indigenous people are being subsumed
into the cultural melting pot. People move for three reasons:
a lack of opportunities at home, the perception of better
opportunities elsewhere, or forced relocation. Many of the
world’s indigenous people are the poorest of the poor,
residing in already poor parts of the world. Their traditional
ways of life are threatened, and their children often leave
home to join the economic mainstream in regional capitals or
the growing megacities of the developing world. Once they
enter the melting pot, their DNA loses the geographic
context in which the genetic patterns create a clear trail.
The world is currently experiencing a cultural mass
extinction similar to the biodiversity crisis. One symptom is
the loss of languages. Linguists believe that as many as
15,000 languages may have been spoken in the year 1500, at
the start of the European “age of exploration.” Today only
6,000 spoken languages are left, and perhaps as many as 90
percent of these will be lost by the end of this century. We
are losing a language every two weeks through the same
migration process that is mixing the world’s genetic lineages.
While we hope that this will lead to a new sense of
interconnectedness among the world’s peoples, it also means
that the genetic trails we follow will become hopelessly
intertwined. When this happens we will no longer be able to
read the historical document encoded in our DNA.
It was with this sense of urgency that we launched the
Genographic Project in April 2005. A five-year, 40-million-
dollar research effort, it seeks to capture a genetic snapshot
of our species at this point in time, before the genetic trails
can no longer be followed. It is an ambitious, international
endeavor that promises to fill in the details of where we all
came from. It is an attempt to answer, using the tools of
genetics in concert with those of other historical fields such
as archaeology, linguistics, and paleoanthropology, that key
human question: Where do we come from? We hope that by
the end of the project we will have a much richer answer to
this question.
ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT