Great Throughts Treasury

"Because these participation kits are totally anonymous, there's no way anyone can find out anything about your history except you. Once the results are ready, you can access the Web site (www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic) for extensive details about genetics, archaeology, history, and the context for genetic variation. Your sample, if you choose, can be put into our database, so that it adds to this increasing data set about genetic variation all over the world. But when you purchase your cheek-swab kit, you're also funding research, and part of the money will be channeled back to taking samples from the 100,000 people."

"DNA is a tool to unlock details about your ancestry, so the idea is we approach the study of human diversity as a genealogical problem. If you?ve ever constructed a family tree, the way you do that is you start in the present and you work your way back into the past, adding ever-more-distant relationships. At some point, everybody who?s doing that reaches what the genealogists call a brick wall, and that?s a point beyond which we can?t say anything about our history and we simply enter this dark and mysterious realm where we kind of guess that we might be related to people. It turns out we?re carrying a DNA thread that goes back through all the generations that preceded us that allows us to see back to the very earliest days of our species, and so that?s what DNA does. We pass on information every generation; we have our DNA that we got from our parents, that got it from their parents, all the way back to the very first parents."

"But the question of how we migrated around the planet, how we populated the world, in effect, is still an open one."

"And the goal is to sample DNA from people all over the world, both indigenous populations and the general public."

"Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes."

"DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back."

"Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa."

"Genetics, I think, resoundingly has answered the question of where we ultimately came from, we came out of Africa. And we came out quite recently, within the last 50 or 60 thousand years."

"His skin was probably not that dark, nor was he that muscular."

"I direct a project at ?National Geographic,? which is a research partnership between ?National Geographic? and IBM. It?s called the Genographic Project. We are sampling DNA from hundreds of thousands of people around the world to figure out how these patterns of diversity arose and how our species emerged from an African homeland in the last 50,000 to 60,000 years to populate the entire plant. So we?re asking members of the general public ? this is all nonprofit ? to order one of these kits if they?re interested in becoming a part of the project. So far, about 350,000 people have done that. So you swab your cheek, send off your DNA sample to the lab and a few weeks later you get it back on a website, totally anonymously, and see how you fit into this emerging family tree."

"If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda ? the great chain of being linked together through DNA."

"IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected."

"I don?t think we?re on the verge of extinction, but I think we?re at a crisis point and I think that we are living unsustainably. If you listen to the United Nations, which I think they?re probably the best source, the world population is going to approach nine billion or even 10 billion by the middle of this century. Are we capable of supporting that many people on the planet? Yes, I think so, but not living in the way we in the United States and Western Europeans even do. Nine billion people driving SUVs is not a good idea. So I think there?s going to have to be a profound shift in the way we relate to nature and to each other over the next few generations."

"Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have."

"I think there?s something inherent in humans that, yes, makes us want to migrate, but also to have that connection to place, even though we?re moving. I think there is something of a wanderlust in our DNA, something that makes us want to explore a little bit further, but at the same time we want to actually be in the place. The way we travel today, you?re not in the place. There?s never any ?there? there."

"In every case of language death, we lose a part of our cultural history. Particularly when the language in question has not been studied and recorded ? which is the case for most of the world?s languages ? we have lost an irretrievable snapshot of our past."

"It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live."

"If we imagine the genetic relationships among modern mitochondrial diversity as a large oak tree - then the root the trunk and the branches closest to the ground, are all found in Africans. These branches sprouted first. As we move further up the trunk, branches start to appear that are found in non-Africans. These formed later. How far up do we have to go before we find non-Africans? The answer is - pretty high. If the tree started growing 150k~, the age of the root, then the first non-African branches do not pre-date 60ky. Most of human evolution has been spent in Africa, so it makes sense that there is greater diversity there. Most of the branches on the tree are found only in Africa."

"It was tough going. His world was in the grips of the last Ice Age. In Southern Africa it was drier than now, water was difficult to obtain and so were animals."

"Molecules are, in effect, time capsules left in our genomes by our ancestors. All we have to do is learn to read them."

"So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it -- the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology."

"The Eurasian interior was a fairly brutal school for our ancestors. Advanced problem-solving skills would have been critical to their survival, which helps us to understand why it was only after the Great Leap Forward in intellectual capacity that humans were ready to colonize most of the world. During their sojourn on the steppes, modern humans developed highly specialized toolkits...The problem-solving intelligence that would have allowed Upper Paleolithic people to live in the harsh northern Eurasian steppes and hunt enormous game illustrates something that could called the 'will to kill.'"

"Stones and bones inform our knowledge of the past, but they cannot tell us about our genealogy ? only genes can do this."

"Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic."

"So it really is a synthetic effort to understand our common past."

"The project is to focus on reconstructing how humans moved around the world, to tell of their migratory routes,"

"One of the most compelling things about being on an archaeological dig is the sense that you are actually seeing and handling implements that were last touched by human hands hundreds or thousands of years ago."

"The tragedy of deforestation is that it is all too easy, in the space of a few years, to reduce a teeming ecosystem to a lifeless desert."

"The pieces of DNA you find in the Y-chromosome don't go through the same shuffling process that other DNA undergoes, so it is easier to trace."

"This is a giant leap forward for field expeditions everywhere."

"Today we are in many ways the same Paleolithic species that left Africa only 2,000 generations ago, with the same drives and foibles."

"We are the end result of over a billion years of evolutionary tinkering, and our genes carry the seams and spot-welds that reveal the story."

"We all have an African great-great? grandmother who lived approximately 150,000 years ago."

"We are going through a process of mass cultural extinction."

"We believe that some of Adam's characteristics can still be seen in Southern Africa but we need to find out what they are,"

"We developed farming, the dawn of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Several places around the world, in the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent we?ve all learned about in school and in southeast Asia and China rice agriculture, corn agriculture in Mojacar and southern Mexico, and the question is why did it happen then? It turns out that there were climactic reasons, climactic shifts that were going on, something called the Younger Dryas, that put a lot of pressure on the early populations and we needed to develop agriculture in order to survive. It made sense at the time. It allowed people to increase, the population to increase in size, but as they increased in size it created complexities ? social complexities, also food complexities. So we had a complete shift in the sort of diet that we were eating. If you go back to the time when we were all living as hunter-gatherers, which we were for most of our history, millions of years as hominids, we were subsisting on hundreds of different plant species, lots of different animal species. When we settle down and become farmers we start to focus in on just a few grain species and relatively high glycemic index, as we say these days, and so a lot of carbohydrates. That had a profound effect on our biology and we?re still adapting to those changes as a result."

"We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it."

"We want everybody to have a chance to participate in this, because it is really the story of all of us, that's what we are trying to figure out."

"We're taking this directly to the people. Because in addition to doing this work with indigenous populations, we're going to be offering for sale to the public, in the developed world mostly, the opportunity to do this cheek-swab test to see how they fit into the family tree."

"What the genetic data has shown resoundingly is that we all trace back to an African ancestry very, very recently ? within the last 50,000 to 60,000 years. That?s only about 2,000 human generations, so within that very short span of time in a broad, evolutionary sense, we have expanded around the world and produced all the diversity we see today. So that?s really the thing that just I find most amazing. It blows me away."

"With the Toubou we are hoping to find out who were the first people to settle in the Sahara."

"What if I told you every single person in America - every single person on Earth - is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone's cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it."

"Without natural selection we would still be very similar to the relatively unsophisticated ape-like ancestor we would encounter if we could go back in time 5 million years or so."

"You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species"

"You and I, in fact everyone all over the world, we?re literally African under the skin; brothers and sisters separated by a mere two thousand generations. Old-fashioned concepts of race are not only socially divisive, but scientifically wrong."