Curious About Your Genealogical Origins? UA Can Help Trace Them

Human history is unfolding one cheek swab at a time in a cluttered, windowless laboratory deep in the University of Arizona's Biological Sciences West Building.

Although geneticists and anthropologists long ago determined that we all have origins in Africa, there is much to be learned from our DNA about where we went from there.

A cast of about 30 undergraduate UA biology students, technicians and the lab manager deftly dance around one another in the cramped space, like waiters and chefs in a busy kitchen, processing the DNA to do just that ¡ª for participants in National Geographic Society's Genographic Project.

After extracting DNA from participants' samples and putting it into a usable form it is analyzed, using special software. The software looks for mutations, essentially "spelling errors" in DNA. These markers are repeated ¡ª along with others picked up later ¡ª in descendants' DNA, creating a trail.

For that reason, "deep time is easier to figure than recent," says project lead Matt Kaplan.

The lab, part of the UA Arizona Research Laboratories' Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory, has already processed more than 211,000 DNA samples for people who want to know whence they came. It's a gene research factory, a "high-throughput genomics operation," in genetic jargon.

Looked at another way, "It's, basically, a dating service for genealogists," says Kaplan. He's quick to point out that genealogy researchers only get access to data from participants who agree to release their information.

But, he says, many people do because it opens them up to getting even more information about their pasts as genealogists often connect their genetic information with others and create a more complete past.

Better yet, the "resolution" ¡ª the detail ¡ª of DNA-derived histories is increasing all the time as more people put their information into genealogical databases, says Kaplan.

Technological advances also make the information more telling. Kaplan says developments in genomics outstrip nearly every other branch of science.

"I have a friend, a researcher in the Netherlands, getting DNA from ice core samples from 10,000-year-old wooly mammoths. One year ago," admits Kaplan, "I would have said, 'Bullshit!' "

Stranger still, he says, the DNA didn't come from wooly mammoth tissue; it came from urine in the ice core. What this and other developments that increase the ability of researchers to retrieve DNA mean is that there will be more information to put into databases that can be linked to tell history ¡ª whether about wooly mammoths or humans.

Kaplan, a "lizard malaria guy," in terms of his academic passions, didn't think he would be interested in human origins.

"I didn't think I'd care at all," says Kaplan. Not so. Since working on the Genographic Project, Kaplan says he has looked into his own past, finding that he came from Eastern European Jewish roots and routes.

It was something much more than that for Arlynn Bottomley, a 54-year-old grandmother of two and mother of six who was born at St. Mary's Hospital in 1952 and adopted.

Bottomley says she went to a "loving home" but, even so, "there was always a sense of loss, of incompleteness, of not knowing anything about my family background. An uncle once told me I 'didn't count' ¡ because I was adopted."

She had tried, but learned nothing of her birth parents' or lineage because her records are sealed under Arizona law.

"The Genographic Project offered me a chance to know a little about my background, even though that background stretches back into the mists of prehistory and doesn't include the recent past."

She said the project gave her a "tenuous identity" but at least "made me feel I didn't just land here from outer space."

Bottomley, who now lives in California, says the project report on her maternal (mitochondrial) DNA revealed that she had a maternal ancestor who "150,000 years ago trod the African plains; 50,000 years ago my maternal ancestors migrated to Turkey, and eventually concentrated in the Caucasus, Russia and regions of the Baltic Sea. They were among the first Neolithic farmers. It's not quite the same as knowing your family background, but it's something."

It's hard to find a square foot of open space on the lab's long rows of countertop.

Robots hum and whir, extracting DNA from cheek swab samples sent in by people who buy the Genographic Project Participation Kit ($99.95).

Next month the lab is scheduled to move into the UA BIO5 Institute's new Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building.

Kaplan says the UA's involvement grew out of its earlier work on Family Tree DNA dot com ¡ª www.FamilyTreeDNA .com ¡ª a public genealogy project that predates National Geographic's project.

He says the funniest moment came several years ago after geneticists connected with the earlier project published a paper in a prestigious scientific journal that said Jews and Arabs were genetically indistinguishable.

Kaplan says "Saturday Night Live's" spoof news segment, "Update," reported the published findings and followed it with a deadpan related development that fighting in the Mideast had tripled following the announcement.

Tucsonan Doug Loy still has hope that the Genographic Project and genomics work in general may open people's eyes, make them question bigotry and xenophobia. "I think it is absolutely fantastic," says Loy, a UA associate professor of materials science engineering and chemistry. He has nothing to do with the project or DNA research, but says he was interested in learning about his past.

"There were always these familial myths about different histories, or background. I've heard many families say that they were part Cherokee."

Loy says if all the people in this country who claim to have Cherokee blood do, "There must be 100 million Cherokees."

In the case of his own family, he says there was also a belief that there was some "Black Irish," Moorish, blood in the past. He found that amusing because that branch of the family probably wasn't terribly enamored of having American Indian or African-American roots, yet they persisted in repeating this "dark secret" as gospel.

So, Loy bought a Genographic Project kit and learned that the family myths were "absolute rubbish." Like all others, if you go back far enough, there were African roots. He learned one of his paternal ancestors left what is now Kenya around 30,000 to 80,000 years ago, crossed Asia Minor, headed east to Kazakh-stan, north to the Urals and then into Europe.

"That was a surprise," Loy says of the indirect route. "I think it was a blast. I've talked quite a few people into doing it," says Loy.

Tucsonan Chris Asher, who was raised in Switzerland, says her Genographic Project report confirmed some hunches she had about her ancestors, but couldn't prove.

She suspected she had some ties to the Middle East, particularly Israel, and Italy. "I did archaeology in the Middle East, about 20 years ago," says Asher. "And every time I hit certain towns, like Jerusalem, you feel like you belong. And another place is Italy. I can go to Rome and feel at home. Don't ask me."

But, when she got her report she learned that she had ancestors who lived, or passed through, those areas. "A million dollars couldn't pay for the enjoyment I got out of it," Asher said of the Genographic Project report. "I'm in touch with a lot of people, way back relatives in Australia, in Scotland. "It's history." Her history.

What do you just make this stuff up as you go along? As the caveman says in the Geico commercials, "Do some research.":

Part 2: How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?

by Steve Sailer

UPI, May 8, 2002

How white are blacks? How black are whites?

Because African-Americans and European-Americans have been in contact, sometimes intimate, since 1619, these questions are central to Americans' collective self-understanding. In recent years, genetic techniques for accurately determining the answers have finally become available.

Molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver heads a group of nine population researchers at Penn State University who are going beyond the arbitrary "one drop of blood" rule to answer these ancient questions about the family trees of the typical American "black" and "white."

They have examined DNA samples from 3,000 individuals in 25 locations around America, mostly self-identified African-Americans, looking for the gene markers that tend to differ between Europeans and Africans.

Shriver pointed out that genetically tracking admixture is difficult because differences even between subraces, such as Scandinavian versus West African, account for only about ten percent of human genetic variation. "Thus, we are all more alike than we are different," he noted.

Besides illuminating American history, Shriver hopes to use his ability to determine racial admixture to locate genes associated with illnesses that affect one race more than the other -- such as diabetes, prostate cancer, and hypertension, which are more prevalent among African-Americans, and dementia and osteoporosis among whites.

The subject of black-white admixture is particularly complicated because, since the later 17th Century, Americans with virtually any visible sub-Saharan African ancestry (the so-called "one drop of blood") have been socially categorized as simply African. Only recently has society begun to tolerate individuals like Tiger Woods (who is one-half East Asian, one-quarter sub-Saharan African, one-eighth European, and one-eighth Native American) defining themselves as anything other than as African. Indeed, Woods was criticized by some African-Americans in 1997, following the first of his three Masters' victories, for not submitting to the "one drop" definition.

Is mixed race ancestry fairly typical for an American? In two ways, it is. First, more than 50 million whites, according to his analyses, have at least one black ancestor.

Another way to approach the question is to group together all the whites and blacks in America and calculate their mean degree of admixture. Shriver's data shows that on average, they would be about 12 or 13 percent African.

Yet, from another perspective, a sizable degree of racial mixing is highly unusual. There simply aren't many African-Americans or European-Americans who are mostly white but also substantially black. Shriver pointed out, "There is a very small degree of overlap in the population distributions." In America, most of the whites are extremely European and most of the blacks are quite African.

Despite the notorious arbitrariness of the "one drop" rule, the actual American population conforms to its strictures surprisingly closely.

Granted, the "one drop" rule would be laughed out of existence if anyone attempted to impose it on a land with a more genetically blended population, such as Puerto Rico (which Shriver has begun to study). Yet, it appears possible that the rule survives in the U.S. because it's not too wildly inaccurate. Only a small fraction of the population is more than half, but less than 90 percent European.

Among self-identified whites in Shriver's sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That's the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30 percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.

In contrast, African-Americans are much more racially mixed than European-Americans. Yet, Shriver's study shows that they are less European that was previously believed.

Earlier, cruder studies, done before direct genetic testing was feasible, suggested that African-Americans were 25 or even 30 percent white. Shriver's project is not complete, but with data from 25 sites already in, he is coming up with 17-18 percent white ancestry among African-Americans. That's the equivalent of 106 of those 128 of your ancestors from seven generations ago having been Africans and 22 Europeans.

According to Shriver, only about 10 percent of African-Americans are over 50 percent white.

This genetic database is restricted to adults. Black-white married couples quadrupled in number between the 1960 Census and 1990 Census, so the admixture rates among children are no doubt higher than among adults.

Political conservatives have taken to denouncing the "one drop" rule -- George Will recently called it "Probably the most pernicious idea ever to gain general acceptance in America" -- perhaps because it is used to determine who qualifies for affirmative action for blacks. Many opponents of racial preferences now argue that it is absurd to award benefits based on this arbitrary definition. This view is embodied in Ward Connerly's upcoming Racial Privacy Initiative, which would partially ban the state of California from demanding citizens categorize themselves by race.

The number of mostly white but a little-bit-black young people -- the kind who cause confusion for affirmative action classification schemes -- is growing as interracial marriage becomes more popular. On the other hand, as Shriver's data shows, there aren't yet all that many adults who fall genetically in the "gray zone" between the races. Perhaps at present the "one drop" rule, for all its theoretical folly, still is indeed good enough for government work -- assuming that government work should include racial preferences, which are now illegal in California.

The admixture rates vary by region. The African-American populations with the highest average numbers of white ancestors found so far are those in California and Seattle. They average a little over one-quarter European ancestry.

In contrast, according to a recent article published by Shriver's team in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the Gullahs of the long-isolated Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, who are famous for speaking a pleasantly African-sounding dialect, are only 3-4 percent white.

In the rest of the rural South, African-Americans tend to be not as black as the Gullahs, but still blacker than the national average. Shriver's team found that the white admixture percentage in four Lowland farm counties in South Carolina was 12 percent.

Cities, whether Northern or Southern, tend to be about average. In terms of white ancestry among African-Americans, New York is a little above the mean, while Philadelphia is a little below. Jackson, Miss., is near the norm.

The African-Americans of New Orleans average 22 percent white. This fairly high number reflects the influence of Spanish and French mores in Louisiana. Latin cultures have no "one drop" rule, so intermarriage was somewhat more socially acceptable there.

Advocates of the growing popular idea that race is merely a "social construct" with no biological reality point to the artificiality of the "one drop" rule as evidence for their view. Yet, it's possible that the "one drop" rule itself helped to construct the genetic reality that Shriver has uncovered.

Latin cultures, which lack the one drop rule, create more evenly blended populations, as Shriver has helped document among Mexican-Americans. He and his colleagues found that Hispanics in certain New Mexico and Colorado locales averaged 58 percent white ancestry, 39 percent New World Indian, and three percent African.

In contrast to the "bimodal distribution" of blacks and whites in America, Mexican-Americans clustered around their average admixture level of 58 percent European.

For centuries, however, American whites defined anyone with visible black ancestry as ineligible to marry a white. (It wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court overturned the "anti-miscegenation" laws that were then still in force in 19 states.) This meant that mixed race people could seldom marry white people.

Unless, that is, they were white-looking enough to pass for white, and were willing to pull up their roots and move to a different part of the country where they could assume a white identity. This happened not infrequently in American history. For instance, one of the slave Sally Hemmings' one-eighth black sons (who, according to geneticists, was fathered by either Thomas Jefferson or one of his relations) moved to Madison, Wis., after he was freed and founded a family of socially identified whites. Nonetheless, Shriver's data suggests that well over 90 percent of the African genes in Americans are still found in people who call themselves black.

Over the generations, mixed-race lineages would tend to either pass into the white population and become more white with each generation's marriage to a white person, or stay in the African-American population. If the latter, the families would normally become more genetically African over time as their offspring married African-Americans.

Thus, the "one drop" rule helped make African-Americans and European-Americans into two social groups whose members -- despite sometimes being highly varied in ancestry -- are perhaps more distinct on average in their family trees than the arbitrariness of the "one drop" would lead you to initially assume.

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