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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Genographically Yours

A while back I blogged about surfing the timeline and how I struggle to get my head around the fact that as I age, I take the place that people before me held and younger people take the place where I once was and like a conveyer belt life moves on.

Total mindfuck.

My friends Petra and Adam (siblings) gave me a gift of a National Geographic Project Kit. The Genographic Project is a project that uses DNA analysis techniques to map the migratory patterns of human beings over the past 60,000 years. It's pretty fascinating. According to their website, "Where do you really come from? And how did you get to where you live today? DNA studies suggest that all humans today descend from a group of African ancestors who—about 60,000 years ago—began a remarkable journey."

I dutifully swabbed my cheek (rubbing so vigorously that I made the inside of my cheek bleed) and sent off my samples. Results came in today, I've posted them for anyone that feels the interest in reading but here's the thing that totally adds to the mindfuck of the conveyer-belt-timeline; 43,654 years ago this guy (or girl) was somewhere on the earth, doing god knows what but nevertheless someone that happened to be an ancestor of mine. His (or her) actions lead to me being here. The same is said of another he or she 12,530 years ago. I know for sure that approximately 36 and a half years ago one Joan Susan Reiter and Joss Reiter caused my existence. Seriously, it's all just too much to think about.

RESULTS




Your Y-chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup J2 (M172).

The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men, M168, and follow your lineage to present day, ending with M172, the defining marker of haplogroup J2.

If you look at the map highlighting your ancestors' route, you will see that members of haplogroup J2 carry the following Y-chromosome markers:

M168 > P143 > M89 > L15 > P123 > M304 > M172

(Less is known about some markers than others. What is known about your journey is reflected below.)

Today, descendants of this line appear in the highest frequencies in the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia, and at a much lower frequency in Europe, where it is observed exclusively in the Mediterranean area. Approximately 20 percent of the males in southern Italy carry the marker, along with ten percent of men in southern Spain.

What's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker?

Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation.

Unchanged, that is unless a mutation—a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change—occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years.

In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others.

When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.

A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path your ancestors took as they moved out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't have enough data yet.

One of the goals of the five-year Genographic Project is to build a large enough database of anthropological genetic data to answer some of these questions. To achieve this, project team members are traveling to all corners of the world to collect more than 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous populations. In addition, we encourage you to contribute your anonymous results to the project database, helping our geneticists reveal more of the answers to our ancient past.

Keep checking these pages; as more information is received, more may be learned about your own genetic history.

Your Ancestral Journey: What We Know Now

M168: Your Earliest Ancestor

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Roughly 50,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Africa

Climate: Temporary retreat of Ice Age; Africa moves from drought to warmer temperatures and moister conditions

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 10,000

Tools and Skills: Stone tools; earliest evidence of art and advanced conceptual skills

Skeletal and archaeological evidence suggest that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and began moving out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

But why would man have first ventured out of the familiar African hunting grounds and into unexplored lands? It is likely that a fluctuation in climate may have provided the impetus for your ancestors' exodus out of Africa.

The African ice age was characterized by drought rather than by cold. It was around 50,000 years ago that the ice sheets of northern Europe began to melt, introducing a period of warmer temperatures and moister climate in Africa. Parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to a savanna, the animals hunted by your ancestors expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Your nomadic ancestors followed the good weather and the animals they hunted, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined.

In addition to a favorable change in climate, around this same time there was a great leap forward in modern humans' intellectual capacity. Many scientists believe that the emergence of language gave us a huge advantage over other early human species. Improved tools and weapons, the ability to plan ahead and cooperate with one another, and an increased capacity to exploit resources in ways we hadn't been able to earlier, all allowed modern humans to rapidly migrate to new territories, exploit new resources, and replace other hominids.

M89: Moving Through the Middle East

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 45,000 years ago

Place: Northern Africa or the Middle East

Climate: Middle East: Semi-arid grass plains

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Tens of thousands

Tools and Skills: Stone, ivory, wood tools

The next male ancestor in your ancestral lineage is the man who gave rise to M89, a marker found in 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans. This man was born around 45,000 years ago in northern Africa or the Middle East.

The first people to leave Africa likely followed a coastal route that eventually ended in Australia. Your ancestors followed the expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East and beyond, and were part of the second great wave of migration out of Africa.

Beginning about 40,000 years ago, the climate shifted once again and became colder and more arid. Drought hit Africa and the grasslands reverted to desert, and for the next 20,000 years, the Saharan Gateway was effectively closed. With the desert impassable, your ancestors had two options: remain in the Middle East, or move on. Retreat back to the home continent was not an option.

While many of the descendants of M89 remained in the Middle East, others continued to follow the great herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game through what is now modern-day Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia.

These semi-arid grass-covered plains formed an ancient "superhighway" stretching from eastern France to Korea. Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

M304: The Spread of Agriculture

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence:15,000 to 10,000 years ago

Place of origin: Fertile Crescent

Climate: Ice Age ending

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Millions

Language: Unknown—earliest evidence of modern language families

Tools and Skills: Neolithic Revolution

The patriarch of M304 was a descendant of the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. He was born between 15,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a region that extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers form an extremely rich floodplain. Today the region includes all or part of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

The descendants of this man played a crucial role in modern human development. They pioneered the first Neolithic Revolution, the point at which humans changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturists. The end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago, and the subsequent shift in climate to one more conducive to plant production, probably helped spur the discovery of how to grow food.

Control over their food supply marks a major turning point for the human species: the beginning of civilization. Occupying a single territory required more complex social organization, moving from the kinship ties of a small tribe to the more elaborate relations of a larger community. It spurred trade, writing, and calendars, and pioneered the rise of modern sedentary communities and cities.

The M304 marker appears at its highest frequencies in the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia. In Europe, it is seen only in the Mediterranean region.

M172: Toward the Mediterranean

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 10,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Fertile Crescent

Climate: Ice Age ending

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: A few million

Language: Unknown

Tools and Skills: Neolithic

Your ancestors left a physical footprint that matches their genetic journey. Artifacts from ancient towns such as Jericho, also known as Tell el-Sultan, a site close to present day Jerusalem, provide evidence of permanent human settlements to around 8500 B.C. The sites also suggest the transition from hunter-gatherer to settled life occurred relatively suddenly.

The M172 marker defines a major subset of M304, which arose from the M89 lineage. It is found today in North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe. In southern Italy it occurs at frequencies of 20 percent, and in southern Spain, 10 percent of the population carries this marker. Both M304 and its subgroup M172 are found at a combined frequency of around 30 percent amongst Jewish individuals.

The early farming successes of these lineages spawned population booms and encouraged migration throughout much of the Mediterranean world.

This is where your genetic trail, as we know it today ends. However, be sure to revisit these pages. As additional data are collected and analyzed, more will be learned about your place in the history of the men and women who first populated the Earth. We will be updating these stories throughout the life of the project.



Tuesday, July 6, 2010

When Grampa Killed Grandma

It's been a while since I blogged and I keep on thinking I should be writing more often because the intention of this blog was to keep a record of my life since leaving big bad South Africa but then I think that there is nothing that interesting to say. Life has become pretty routine. We are fast approaching our 2 year anniversary in Toronto and it sometimes feels like we have been here forever. I desperately miss my friends and family but there are days now when I am sitting around a table eating dinner with friends, drinking copious amounts of wine and I suddenly stop and think to myself "wow.....these are my friends too". We've even made some enemies, well I couldn't quite call them that, but I would say that friendships have ended. Now that's when you know you are settled in!

It's summer in Toronto and I never thought I would experience this kind of heat in Canada. My friend Jen warned me about this before I even arrived and I thought to myself that it cant be hotter than the Highveld heat in South Africa. Boy was I mistaken, temperatures this past week have hit the 40s (Celsius) with the humidity. It's unbearable, it feels tropical and the only place I want to be is in a horizontal position next to a pool. We have resisted putting on the central air but even the poor dogs weren't coping so now we are satisfactorily cooled indoors. Keith is loving it, spending his time on the lake in the evenings sailing with his friend Dom and I venture out every now and then for a schvitz!

We have been following the FIFA World Cup back in South Africa and I am very proud to see what a positive impact has been made by the country. We are proudly flying the South African flag outside our house.

Of course life in Lawrence's house isn't much fun if there isn't any drama so here is today's story. As most of you know Keith likes to fix up houses and has been doing this for a number of years. This has meant us moving at least every 18 months or so and I was under no illusion that what happened in South Africa, would happen in Canada. We'd been living here for just over 18 months and Keith was getting bored so it became time to sell and move on. I cant say I was truly happy about this as I really love living on this street where we have made the majority of our friends. We listed the house in the winter but didn't get any offers so we took it off the market. At the time we had bought something else that was conditional on the sale of our house and naturally that fell through. I wasn't too unhappy about the whole situation. We listed the house again in the Spring and this time not only did it sell within 10 days, it sold for the asking price which is pretty good for these times. We then went into a flat panic to find something else because we only had 60 days before closing. Keith must have looked at about 30 properties and nothing caught our eye. We thought this would be an opportunity to try out a new neighborhood but each time kept coming back to Cabbagetown where we are settled and happy to the point that we are on a first name basis with Mark the Butcher, Domingo the Green Grocer and even Andy, the Postman! We put in an offer here, another one there, got rejected, went back and so it went but no exciting sales. Finally a house came on the market very close to where we live and we grabbed it. We thought all was said and done and Keith immediately got online and started ordering chandeliers and other necessities for the new house. And then it all fell apart......

We got a call about three weeks ago that the purchaser of our house had lost his job (he was fired) and now informed us that he would not be buying our house anymore and we could return his deposit to x address. We politely informed him that we had a firm and binding Agreement and that we would be doing no such thing. Boy, did the fun then start. I wish I could publish some of the emails he has sent that have gone from begging and pleading, to vicious, to offensive to bordering on the insane. Alas, these are possibly soon to be used in litigation and can't compromise us winning vast amounts of money in damages because if he doesn't buy our house, we don't buy the one we purchased and if we sue him, the person we bought from sues us. Could it be any messier? I won't say much more except for the fact that we are due to move in a week and are nowhere near a resolution (at the time of writing this), blood pressures are high, anxiety is causing major strain and this is not something I would wish on anyone. It happens rarely, and it happened to happen to us! It sucks.

My mother is up to her usual tricks which means that she is costing me money once again and I complained to a friend today over coffee about the constant drama. I have a long-time friend who has all his/her siblings alive and well, as well as parents, a grandparent or two, children, jobs, a house, cars....and rarely seems to ever suffer any drama. For just a moment, I wouldn't mind a little of that. My friend responded that it aint always so peachy on the inside and went on to relate a story of a family much like that, with little drama or problems and the seemingly perfect life. This was until Grandpa murdered Grandma, went to jail and proceeded to set himself alight at Grandma's grave when he was paroled. I know there is more to this story, and I know it is tragic but I burst into laughter in the middle of Starbucks. I guess I'll keep my life just as it is. If my mother murders anyone at Sandringham Gardens Ill be sure to let you know.

I think that's it for now. I'll try be better at updating more often.

Adios