Knuckle-Walking Through the Neighborhood

National Geographic Image

I have just discovered where most of my ancestors came from, and I am pleased to announce that I am 1.5% Neanderthal.

I have long suspected that because I have been keeping a distant eye on my family, trying to assess what it is that has made us the distinguished gathering of--I was going to say, "f------ morons", but that title has already been awarded--so I shall say "contentious stone-throwers" that we are.

Mari and I, both, have spit into bottles for the sake of science, and had our ancestries explored. We chose different companies to do the analysis just to see what the different analyses do. Mari, for instance, learned that about 7.5% of her genes are shared with people in Ireland, which came almost as a surprise to a woman who has been leaning comfortably against her Norwegian ancestry.

She admitted she should have known. When first we married, we visited her father in Lake Mills, Iowa who, upon learning that I knew more Norwegian than he, dug out a book with his family history, written in an appropriately old-fashioned Norwegian. I did my best, and said that one of the earliest records of his family was of a band of fellows thrown out of the British Isles for stealing tubs of butter and lard. As I remember it, no mention of their ancestry was noted but, though they had to leave the butter and lard behind, they carried a load of genes to Norway with them.

I chose the National Geographic genographic project to analyze my ancestry. In addition to being able to trace maternal lineage, they also can trace male ancestry through the Y-chromosome that only men have. So I have a story that traces both where my mother's and my father's ancestors came from, and approximately when.

All of us, of course, absolutely every human being alive today, is descended from Africa, where human life first evolved. If human life on earth ever arose anywhere else on earth, nobody has ever found a shred of evidence for it. Period! So much for racial purity! So much for race as much more than a clumsy suggestion that some people, at the present time, resemble each other: isn't that a surprise?

I am going to post another blog entry with more details about that, but for now, I am just going to knuckle-walk through the neighborhood, and think about our family.

Comments

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