I saw this on cable news and it's fascinating.

I watched the cable news segment as they traced the genetic line
of the news anchorman's lineage, with genetic marker stops in
various countries and regions, from the source in Africa 60,000
years ago, to today. It blows white supremacy away too. :-) We
all started in Africa!

If you have the money to spare you should do it:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0413_050413
_genographic.html

Global Gene Project to Trace Humanity's Migrations
Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News
April 13, 2005

New DNA studies suggest that all humans descended from a single
African ancestor who lived some 60,000 years ago. To uncover the
paths that lead from him to every living human, the National
Geographic Society today launched the Genographic Project at its
Washington, D.C., headquarters.

The project is a five-year endeavor undertaken as a partnership
between IBM and National Geographic. It will combine population
genetics and molecular biology to trace the migration of humans
from the time we first left Africa, 50,000 to 60,000 years ago,
to the places where we live today.

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Ten research centers around the world will receive funding from
the Waitt Family Foundation to collect and analyze blood samples
from indigenous populations (such as aboriginal groups), many in
remote areas. The Genographic Project hopes to collect more than
a hundred thousand DNA samples to create the largest gene bank in
the world. Members of the public are also being invited to
participate.

"Our DNA tells a fascinating story of the human journey: how we
are all related and how our ancestors got to where we are
today," said American geneticist and anthropologist Spencer
Wells, the project leader. "This project will show us some of the
routes early humans followed to populate the globe and paint a
picture of the genetic tapestry that connects us all."

Wells, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, feels a
certain sense of urgency. Wars, environmental disasters, and
increasing globalization are causing more people to move, and the
world is gradually becoming less culturally and genetically
diverse.

"We need to take a genetic snapshot of who we are as a species
before the geographic and cultural context are lost in the
melting pot," Wells said. He cites language as a measure of the
disappearance of cultures. "There are around 6,000 languages
spoken in the world today, and by the end of the century, between
half and 90 percent of those are going to be gone."

IBM, as the technology partner of the project, will participate
in collecting the data, storing it, and analyzing it.

"We have some indications, from prior studies about the migration
of people, how the diversity and similarity that we see in
peoples of the world might have happened in the last 50,000 to
10,000 years," said Ajay Royyuru, a senior manager of IBM's
Computational Biology Center. "But what is missing is the detail,
the ability for everyone on the planet to be able to see,
understand, exactly how they got to be where they are."

Tracking Genetic Markers

Each human parent contributes half of a child's DNA, which
combines with the other parent's DNA to form a new genetic
combination. This so-called recombination gives each of us a
unique set of attributes: hair, eye, and skin color; athleticism
or lack thereof; susceptibility to certain diseases; and so on.

However, the chunk of DNA known as the y chromosome, which only
males possess, is passed from father to son without recombining.
The y chromosome, therefore, remains basically unchanged through
generations, except for random mutations. Similarly, women pass
mitochondrial DNA, which also does not recombine, on to both
their sons and daughters.

Random mutations to DNA, which happen naturally and are usually
harmless, are called markers. Once a marker has been identified,
geneticists can go back in time and trace it to the point at
which it first occurred. This way, they are able to determine
when and where a new lineage began.

If they can be traced to a particular region, these lineages can
be used to track prehistoric migration patterns. However,
indigenous identities are being lost as more and more people move
from their ancestral villages.

"And when they do [leave], their kids [absorb] the dominant
culture in that [new] city and lose touch with the old ways,"
Wells said. "So what we lose is the context in which their
genetic diversity arose. The genes are still going to be there,
but without the geographical context, we can't infer anything
historical from the genetic data."

Battur Tumer, a descendant of Genghis Khan and one of the
participants at the project launch today in Washington, D.C.,
exemplifies the importance of finding indigenous populations in
their ancestral lands.

Wells's team collected y chromosome data in a region of Asia once
ruled by the 13th-century Mongolian warrior. Their analysis
identified a marker that originated about a thousand years ago
and was carried by about 8 percent of the men living in the
region. The marker was found in only one population outside of
Asia—the Hazaras tribe in Pakistan. The Hazaras have a long oral
tradition that says they're Khan's direct descendants.

Tying the marker to a geographic location and looking at the
region's history—Genghis Khan's armies often raped the women of
vanquished villages, and his descendants later expanded the
empire—suggests that today roughly 16 million men carry a genetic
mutation that probably originated with Khan's great-great-
grandfather.

The spread of that particular mutation was the result of a
cultural artifact—military success combined with a culture in
which men could have many wives and concubines—but it exemplifies
much of the impetus of the Genographic Project.

"The shared marker was identified because a focused effort was
made to sample specific populations, going after populations like
the Hazara, who have this oral history and want to test it to see
if it's true," Wells said.

"In addition, the people in the region had lived there for
centuries, and enough samples were collected to do an analysis.
The indigenous groups participated because the wanted their
stories told."

Public Participation

The Genographic Project is designed to tell everyone's story,
though, not just the stories of indigenous cultures. What is
unique about this project is the extent to which it relies on
public participation.

"Most research happens through the hands of researchers, and the
public at large gets to hear about it and learn about it on
occasion, but there isn't a way for them to participate. This
project is actually inviting individuals all over the world to be
sort of associate researchers," Royyuru said. "Success is
actually going to be determined by how many and how diverse the
people are that participate, which is a fascinating thing."

The DNA data being collected places a person in a "haplogroup"—a
lineage or branch on the human family tree that is defined by a
set of genetic markers. Haplogroup R, for instance, is identified
by a y chromosome mutation known as M173. Roughly 70 percent of
English men have this lineage, 95 percent of Spanish men, and 95
percent of Irish men.

"The reason a lot of western Europeans have it is because it
defines an expansion in the end of the last ice age as people
moved north out of Iberia [ancient Spain]," Wells said. "The cool
thing is that the penultimate marker—if you go back one step from
M173—is M45, which arose in Central Asia, so it tells you about
this journey your ancestors took through the steppes of Central
Asia hunting mammoths and so on. Before that they were down in
the Middle East."

The Middle Eastern marker, M89, represents a wave of migration
out of Africa that occurred around 45,000 years ago. The
Haplogroup R lineage ultimately traces all the way back to marker
M168.

"Every non-African has M168, which appeared in eastern Africa
around 60,000 years ago," Wells said.

"Some geographies have been better studied than others," Royyuru
said. "In Europe we have a much better understanding of the
genotypic diversity that exists and how that population happens
to be so diverse—who came from where at what point in time. That
is not the case with a large majority of Asia and Africa. There
is certainly some understanding of the possible waves of
migration and the routes that people might have traveled to
populate North and South America, but even those are not
definitive."

Should you want to get an idea of your own origins, National
Geographic is selling kits that allow an individual to take a
cheek swab, send it to a laboratory in Arizona, and then track
the information on the Genographic Project Web site.

The kits will sell for U.S. $99.95 plus shipping and handling.
The net proceeds from sales of the kits will fund additional
research and the Legacy Project, which will aid indigenous
cultures.

Legacy and Controversy

"The three main pillars of the project are field research, public
participation and communication, and the Legacy Project," Wells
said. "We see this as a collaborative effort with the indigenous
populations."

The Legacy Project will provide indigenous groups participating
in the Genographic Project with direct help through development
projects, education, and public-awareness campaigns aimed at
preserving traditional cultures.

The idea of creating the world's largest DNA database and
collecting blood samples from indigenous groups could raise
objections.

Genographic was specifically designed to dispel many of these
concerns. The kits are designed so that there's no way to tie a
kit's identification number to a specific individual.

Wells emphasizes the public nature of the project.

"We want this to be a very open project. We want to tell the
public what it is we're doing, the goals, the methods, and we
want to explain the results," Wells said. "We're not doing
anything medically relevant, not patenting anything," he added.

"We see this as information that's part of the [common heritage]
of our species. It's going to be released into the public domain,
and people can go back and reanalyze it and query it and learn
about it. We're hoping to create a virtual museum of human
history."
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The project itself is at
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html