Genographic Project

I don't know if any of you have heard of this, but it looks interesting.

I was given a kit for participation as a gift. It take two or three months to get the results, but I will share them with you when it's done.

The book I just finished -- The Short History of Nearly Everything -- talked about the lack of genetic diversity in humankind. Apparently chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, almost every species on earth displays more genetic diversity, individual-to-individual, than we do.

Speculation is during the last ice age, 200,000 years ago, humankind died out. Essentially we went extinct. By some fluke approximately 200 individuals survived, and from that small gene pool we are all descended.

Anyway, that's the theory.

There are differing opinions on the timing and extent of the human species great decline. I have heard numbers from less than 1,000 to maybe 10,000 remaining. The time is more commonly assumed to be around 70,000 years ago. In any case, we came perilously close to extinction.
It is also thought by many scientists that we all have one common female ancestor. She is referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. In addition, it is proposed that we all have one common male ancestor, referred to as Y-chromosomal Adam. (They did not live at the same time and were not a mating pair.)

Wikipedia wrote:

Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived between 99,000 and 200,000 years ago,[3][4][5] most likely in East Africa,[6] when Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern humans) were developing as a population distinct from other human sub-species.

Wikipedia wrote:

One misconception surrounding mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her, she must have been the only woman alive at the time.[8][33] However, nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women living during Eve's time have descendants alive today [presumably male?], but at some point in the past each of their lines of descent did not produce a female who reproduced, thereby breaking the mitochondrial DNA lines of descent.[citation needed]

Wikipedia wrote:

All humans alive today share a surprisingly recent common ancestor, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents.[36]
The Identical ancestors point. Just a few thousand years before the most recent single ancestor shared by all living humans was the time at which all humans who were then alive either left no descendants alive today or were common ancestors to all humans alive today. In other words, "each present-day human has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors" alive at the "Identical ancestors point" in time. This is far more recent than Mitochondrial Eve.[36]

Fascinating.

Got my first email update from Genographic. The sample is now in the lab. Not exciting, but at least I now know that they got the damn thing.
Next step is isolating the DNA.

_Howard wrote:

Got my first email update from Genographic. The sample is now in the lab. Not exciting, but at least I now know that they got the damn thing.
Next step is isolating the DNA.

If jack-booted DNA police bang on your door, don't answer.

They have isolated the DAN from the  gunk I swabbed from inside my cheeks. Next step is analyzing the4 DNA to find out where my ancestors were.

Side note: On television, you see cops taking cheek swabs (sometimes from a crowd inside a bar) using a giant Q-tip and a one-second swipe inside the mouth. The Genographic Project sends two small brushes. The instructions are to swab inside one cheek for 45 seconds, and then the other cheek for 45 seconds using a separate brush for each cheek. They also stipulate that you wait for at least one hour after eating, drinking, smoking, chewing gum, etc., before taking the swabs.

And on TV the DNA results come back in minutes, rather than weeks.

On TV, the laws of physics don't apply.

They're moving faster that expected. QA Time.

Quote :

Quality Control

Your DNA analysis has been completed and we are now performing an important quality control step to ensure your results are correct. During this stage, a laboratory staff member reviews the data for accuracy and checks for potential issues with DNA quality. Any samples with potential problems are flagged and rerun through the entire process. The software-generated results are then combined to produce the finalized data. Once your results have been verified, they will be uploaded for you to see.

Send In The Clones!

Well, I finally got the results of the DNA analysis. It was delayed because they were unable to get sufficient DNA from the first sample they tested and had to start over with the second sample.

I have only briefly looked at the report, but here's what I've learned so far.

I am 1.5 percent Neanderthal and 0.7 percent Denisovan. That is actually a little bit under the average.

My maternal haplogroup is shared by only 0.1 percent of the 705,343 participants in the study.

My paternal haplogroup is shared by 4.4 percent of the participants.

I guess this all means something, but I have no idea what. Rare bird, perhaps?

Not a descendent of Genghis Khan, apparently.

How did you deduce that?

Hmm. One of my haplogroups was in Southeast Asia 42,000 years ago.
What goes around comes around, I guess.

I've never understood the whole second cousin, third cousin, etc thing. But I hear that if you take it out as far as tenth cousin, you almost certainly include everyone on the planet. We're all related, albeit somewhat distantly.

That is true for most people.

There are isolated pockets -- the Uyghers for instance -- who have not interbred for millennia.

Glad to hear Howard is part Neandertal. That explains a lot.

The average Neanderthal component is a little over 2%, so I am a little short there. The average Denisovan component is a little under 2%, so I'm short there, also.

Still, it must be nice when shopping for sunglasses.

Just clip 'em to your unibrow.

Statistically speaking, odds are that you have one-third more Neanderthal DNA than I have.

Have you found a good cream for your knuckles?

I have found that Cream of Monkey soup is also a fine hand cream.

richard09 wrote:

I've never understood the whole second cousin, third cousin, etc thing. But I hear that if you take it out as far as tenth cousin, you almost certainly include everyone on the planet. We're all related, albeit somewhat distantly.

We are all distantly related, but far more distantly than tenth cousins.

The whole Nth cousin business can be a little confusing. An easy way to understand it is that cousins are people with different parents but the same grandparents. Second cousins are people with different parents but with the same great-grandparents. And so on. Don't get started on the "Nth-removed" cousins or you might go nuts.

So you can see than first- to tenth-cousins is only ten generations of a family. Not near enough to encompass the whole of human population.

_Howard wrote:

Not near enough to encompass the whole of human population.

Or Neandertal either.

Just can't let that go, huh?

Neanderthals were human.

Or maybe I should say, Neanderthals are human.