Science lovers like me take particular delight when new scientific findings harmonize with ancient narratives. That’s just what happened last week, with the publication of three major genetic studies that showed a common African root for all living branches of the human family tree.
All non-Africans alive today descend from people who migrated out of Africa; in all likelihood, out of a single migration.
Humans love stories, and we particularly love stories about how we got here. Small children ask over and over again to hear about “a long time ago when I was little.” Families share their ancestors’ journeys. The television series, “Roots,” was a blockbuster in its time. Today family history websites are among the most popular on the Internet.
Like the Biblical stories of Adam and Eve, and Noah’s ark, many cultures have origin myths and legends in which all of humanity stems from a single long-ago source. The new DNA studies published in the journal, Nature, last week concurred with those narratives. It took the technology of genome sequencing, and an era of global communication, to provide the data beneath ancient wisdom: Humanity is a family tree whose many branches share one common root.
Three separate teams of geneticists — one from the University of Copenhagen, another from Harvard and a third from the Estonian Biocentre — collected DNA samples from populations around the world including from some small and isolated groups that had never been sampled before. The teams sequenced genomes from nearly 800 people drawn from hundreds of indigenous populations – from Australia and Papua New Guinea, and from the rest of the world, including Mayans, Bedouins, Sherpa, Cree Indians, Basques and others. These population groups are linguistically, culturally and anthropologically s diverse as can be. Nevertheless, the data show them all to be closely genetically related and to share a common African ancestry.
Although there were multiple waves of migration from Africa, the weight of the scientific evidence indicates that we can trace nearly all of our ancestry to one single migration.
In this historical moment – when America is afflicted with identity politics and a divisive Presidential contest, when tribalism tears at the fabric of so many societies, and the world is aflame with violent conflict – it is good to have science remind us of how much alike we are under the skin.
Deep within our cells, each one of us carries the evidence of our fundamental human relatedness, and the common background we share.
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