"Science & Spirit" January February 2002
Who are We? 

Not who we think we are. The new field of genetic anthropology traces our origins to places we never knew we'd
been. What it divulges shocks, perturbs, and sometimes comforts. 

by Jill Neimark 

The Secrets of Blood
Priests, Slaves, and Rebels
The Crimes of Culture
Race, Genome, and God 

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 Joan Didion said it best: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. And the
most tantalizing story of all the one we tell and retell is that of our origins.

We find that story in the heavens tales of Orion and Hydra and Hercules, or Hubble s picture of the birth of
the universe. We stalk that story on Earth the path ice carved as it flowed south and killed species and
reshaped the land, fossils that link tiny birds to enormous dinosaurs, the narrow Caucasian skull of ancient
Kennewick Man, who almost rewrote Native American history not long ago.

And now we are hunting down that story within ourselves, in the map traced by our genes. It turns out that our
tiny genome is a better atlas than earth or sky a truer story of our migrations, our amazing diversity, and our
ultimate unity as a still-young species. Our map has begun to rewrite history. At the same time, it offers
contradictions that inflame bitter issues about equality, race, intelligence, illness, and above all ownership not
just of our land and origins and remains but of the meaning of our very cells, of our ultimate story. Who will
profit from studying genetic sequences?

Not surprisingly, some indigenous groups protest the harvesting and patenting of their genes, seeing it as the
final blow in a long history of marginalization; others fear they will be vilified as carriers of genes that cause
certain illnesses; while yet others have embraced the quest, hoping to uncover their true origins and match myth
with map.

Some of the findings are truly reshaping our sense of self and history. A few of the most remarkable:

Although we are a species that seems to live and die by our loyalty to groups, human beings are
amazingly similar genetically more so than other species of large mammals (the chimps living on a single
hillside in Africa show twice as much genetic variety as all of the six billion humans living all over the
globe today). There is less than one-tenth of a percent difference among us all. Even more striking: When
those differences do occur, an astonishing 85 percent occur within groups. Only 15 percent occurs
between groups.  
Race as we know it is a genetically meaningless distinction. In fact, the most commonly accepted signs of
difference skin color, hair texture and color, nose size provide no clue to the genetic links between
groups. Languages are actually much better markers for genetic relatedness.  
Groups that look the same are sometimes the most genetically distinct. The darkest-colored people on
earth in Africa, Melanesia, Australia, and India are scattered around the globe and only distantly
related. New Guinea highlanders and sub-Saharan Africans look the same but are genetically as distinct
as human beings can be. Certain groups that historically have hated each other like Jews and
Palestinians are genetically quite similar. 
Africa was the birthplace of humanity. One hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago, our
ancestors went through a kind of genetic bottleneck: Living in eastern Africa, they were isolated for
thousands of years from other human beings. The people who emerged reached Australia sixty thousand
years ago, the Middle East forty thousand years ago, and Europe thirty-six thousand years ago. Finally,
about twelve thousand years ago, humans entered the Americas.  
Certain subtypes of genes seem to cluster in specific ethnic groups, and though we may be
uncomfortable with that, they seem at least loosely aligned with traits, illnesses, and behaviors. New
evidence indicates that intelligence, and even the amount of gray matter in our frontal lobes, is
inherited a finding that could be explosive given the history of eugenics.

The genetic map is still too new and contradictory to be definitive. Different parts of the genome are giving us
different answers, says Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake
City, and a population genetics expert. The answers are there, but we haven't even tapped into them yet. 

If the gene can rewrite our history, can it also rewrite our spirit, myths, or identity? Genetic anthropology is a
challenge, because it really contains two separate stories, says Laurie Zoloth, chair of the Jewish studies
department at San Francisco State University. The genome map suggests one narrative of how alike we all are,
and a second narrative about our differences, especially in the frequency with which certain diseases show up.
We have to listen to both stories at once. At the same time, we have other narratives historical,
anthropological, archaeological, or those passed down through families. We re at a crossroads in how we view
identity. The genome map is truly a point of intersection between science and culture. 

The Secrets of Blood

The field of genetic anthropology was forged single-handedly about a half-century ago by Italian scientist Luca
Cavalli-Sforza a man known for his charisma. He s magisterial and gracious and reeks of old European
nobility, Harpending says. Now an emeritus professor of genetics at Stanford University in Palo Alto,
California, Cavalli-Sforza decided in 1961 to trace mass migrations by studying human blood and then teaming up
with anthropologists, linguists and mathematicians to try to model our evolution. Back then genetic tools were
crude and he could not look at DNA itself, so he searched for proteins encoded by genes for more than 110 traits
in more than 1,800 mostly aboriginal, relatively pure populations. The culmination of decades of research,
Cavalli-Sforza s The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton University Press, 1994) was a
thousand-page atlas of our migrations and diversity. Among his radical discoveries: Europeans are not
descended from the continent s Stone Age ancestors, but from farmers who started migrating out of the Middle
East nine thousand years ago. Native Americans came here in three separate waves of migration. China s genes
show a clear split between northern and southern people, despite the prevailing belief that all Chinese are
descended from common ancestors. (See He s Not One of Us).

Cavalli-Sforza s findings were shocking enough to secure him a place in history, but he then upped the ante. He
called for an overarching quest for our origins, the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), as a companion
project to the enormously successful Human Genome Project begun in 1990. His proposal triggered a flood of
controversy that still reverberates. Aboriginal groups accused the HGDP of plotting to steal and patent their
genes and dismantle their culture. If you take the blood of the children, I ll take yours! one Central African
farmer yelled at Cavalli-Sforza while waving an ax. He was worried that we might want to do magic with the
blood, the scientist recalls.

The project was eventually abandoned as a formal enterprise and is now proceeding quietly but fervently at
laboratories worldwide. The Center for the Study of Human Polymorphism, headquartered in Paris, offers for
study DNA samples from around the world. And the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has a
Genetic Variation Program. Even so, fear still flares. In 1998, geneticist Spencer Wells who studied with
Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford collected blood from the Ossetian people of the Republic of Georgia. The Ossentians
speak a different language from their neighbors and regard themselves as a distinct group. Wells discovered that
they were frightened the scientists might be trying to infect them with something that would destroy their
ethnic group and allow the Georgians to come in and take over their land. 

Clearly the gene, and the blood that carries it, is an icon with the ancient power of myth. One anthropologist who
isn t surprised at the outcry is Jonathan Marks of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. There s an old
anthropological adage: Blood is never just blood. Blood is a sacred, magical substance, he says. Even in
Western civilization blood assumes all kinds of power especially in the age of AIDS. If you collect people s
blood you immediately encounter some of their most powerful taboos. Some of these scientists went in blindly
and just wanted to open the veins of indigenous peoples without understanding the political context. 

Most geneticists believe studying the genome will help abolish racism. They seem baffled at the suspicion and
rage one Australian citizens group dubbed HGDP the vampire project . I don t understand the fear, says
Kenneth Kidd, a geneticist at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Kidd s
renowned lab now possesses a stock of blood samples from thirty-six populations around the world. The work
we re doing is showing how young a species we are, and how similar we all are around the world. We are all
different, but we are all the same. I ve stood in front of Native American advocates and told them this, and they
say, You re lying. We don t believe you. They think we want to patent their genes and make a lot of money. 

The scientists may be the purists (perhaps willfully naďve ones) they say they are, but the corporations that
fund them sometimes are not. As Marks says, Biotechnology companies are acutely interested in this. If there is
economic value in the blood of indigenous people, then what is a fair price?  And the hard fact is, given our
cultural history, any study of differences could play into the hands of those who want to base social policy on
those differences. Studying the genome map of human diversity has two profoundly opposite possibilities: It
may help smooth our differences, or it may inflame them.

Either way, the scientists want a clear picture. Only by studying relatively pure populations can we get a good
picture of our past. People like me are not very informative about how Europe was colonized because I m of
mixed European ancestry, Kidd says. But Finns, Swedes, Scots, Danes groups that are indigenous will give
us a much better picture. 

Priests, Slaves, and Rebels

Every one of us is a melting pot of genetic lineages. Even so, the findings of our genome map have sent
shockwaves through certain groups. Take the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road, which ran through
Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Sampling blood from populations along the Silk Road, Wells uncovered a Y
chromosome marker common among Mongolians but rare in central Asians. This means the twelfth- and
thirteenth-century invasions of the Mongol armies of Ghenghis Khan left a strong cultural heritage, but not a
genetic one; in other words, they were a small, elite group moving into a much larger population. They may have
changed the course of history, but their genes did not prevail.

Other research into Jews known in Hebrew as kohanim priests who are said to be direct descendents of Moses
and Aaron actually confirms the legend. A gene found in only about 3 percent of all male Jews shows up in
about half of all self-declared kohanim. At the same time, Jews were shocked when scientists found the kohanim
gene in a black, Christian tribe in South Africa and Zimbabwe named the Lemba a tribe that believes its
members are descended from Jews and that scholars have never taken seriously. In fact, in the tribe s founding
clan, 53 percent of males had the gene. In another surprise, Jewish males studied by an international team of
scientists led by Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Batsheva Bonne-Tamir of Tel Aviv
University in Israel were shown to have Y-chromosomes that correlated highly not only with other Jews but also
with Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, and Lebanese.

In one fell swoop, the genome map confirms apocryphal oral histories and yet binds groups that may consider
themselves enemies. Even more striking, new studies are resurrecting the speculation that intelligence is
heritable, and that it may be different in different groups. This kind of thinking began with Swedish botanist
Carolus Linnaeus, who in 1758 divided humans into four races: red Americans, yellow Asians, black Africans,
and white Europeans each with different traits. It was a short skip and a hop to eugenics and the Nazi gas
chambers. Recently these ideas were resurrected in the controversial bestseller The Bell Curve by Charles
Murray and Richard Hernstein (Free Press, 1994), which proposed that IQ was inherited and discovered that
IQs of black people were uniformly lower than those of Caucasians. The book relied in part on the work of
geneticist Philippe Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

What most people seem to miss about The Bell Curve is that it followed twelve thousand youths for twelve
years and found that IQ is the single best predictor of all kinds of life outcomes, Rushton says. But it was the
fifteen IQ-point difference between blacks and whites that took all the attention. Nobody cared that East Asian
and Jewish [students] scored much higher than whites. 

Rushton says the much-pilloried The Bell Curve didn t go far enough. It could have explained the differences in
IQ scores by the differences in brain size, he contends. Black-white differences in brain size have been known
reliably for 150 years. The attempt to abolish the concept of race is pure political correctness. If race was not a
predictive variable, it would not be used. 

It s enough to make your skin crawl whatever color you happen to be. But what's even more discomfiting is
that some of the science backs up these differences. The stuff he says makes you gag, but it s right, says the
University of Utah s Harpending. I don t teach it because I m a coward. He publishes these abridged editions
that are just right for the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, this correlation between brain size and intelligence
has been there for years. 

A new study from the University of California-Los Angeles seems to confirm the evidence. UCLA researchers
found that the amount of gray matter in the frontal parts of the brain is determined by the genetic makeup of an
individual s parents, and it strongly correlates with that individual's cognitive ability as measured by IQ tests.
Published in Nature Neuroscience in November, the research used specialized brain mapping, creating the first
images ever linking genes and intelligence. We were stunned at the results,  said assistant professor of
neurology Paul Thompson, the study s chief investigator.

Group traits may be inherited as well. Softer but intriguing work from Harpending suggests that traits like
impulsiveness and unpredictability may be regulated by the dopamine receptor known as D4. Specific mutations
of genes are known as alleles, and according to Harpending, one allele puts people at a somewhat increased risk
for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. There are big population differences around the world in that
gene. It s completely absent in China and in Bushmen. You find it in 40 percent of North American Indians, and
60 percent of South American Indians. We believe it does have an effect on behavior. 

The science itself is not the danger; it s what we do with it. Fissionable atoms can t hurt us, but atomic bombs
can. According to Marks from the University of North Carolina, even non-racist and brilliant scientists like
Cavalli-Sforza have difficulty eliminating the deeply embedded Platonic ideal of Linneaus four races. Cavalli
will gladly tell you there is no such thing as race, Marks says, but his genetic diversity map has four
color-coded ethnic regions. He s starting out with a fundamental fallacy that's 250 years old. He s reproduced
race but called it ethnic regions. The fact is, we re so accustomed to thinking about our world this way it seems
entirely natural. But if we look at it very, very carefully, we will realize it is entirely arbitrary, and not natural at
all. 

The Crimes of Culture

The genome map tells us two stories: Groups and races do pass on traits such as intelligence, robustness,
impulsivity; and groups and races cannot be so easily separated because our diversity and our links are far
more complex. But our culture tells another story, and its crimes are based in our biology, the ways our brains are
hardwired a different aspect of our genes.

Racism arises from our primate origins, according to Frans De Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia: Outgroup hostility is very strongly developed in our species, like many others. 
Just like birds, hyenas, chimps, and all other species, we compete for resources. The basic reason for all animal
territoriality is to defend the resources that are on it, De Waal says. In addition, race segregation seems to occur
in adolescence and to be linked to reproductive strategies. It sure is striking, Harpending says. When The
New York Times did its big series about race, it made that point. People lost their friends in puberty. Evolution
leads me to propagate with somebody who looks like me, so I can pass on copies of DNA like mine. 

OK, but when a Muslim declares Jihad on an American citizen ten thousand miles away, territory and
reproductive strategy seem unlikely motives.

Race talk is as tricky as God talk, says molecular geneticist Ursula Goodenough, a professor of biology at
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and author of The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford University
Press, 1998). Race is something you can see, and it s important if only because of that. But there s a difference
between being aware of race and chasing it away. Goodenough suggests racism is just one aspect of our
primate-based fear of difference. If you take a group of apes and introduce an ape they re not familiar with, they
gang up on him. My cats do it too. Lord have mercy on a strange cat that ventures into my yard. The core thing
we fear is the unfamiliar. There was a group of day care kids in Iowa in a particular town with a lot of
diversity orphans from Vietnam and Thailand, black kids, white kids, Chinese. The kids all went to school
together and never paid any attention to color. But then a kid came in with Down s Syndrome, and they were
completely freaked out. 

Because we are more sophisticated than our ape brethren, we are exquisitely tuned to subtle cues of difference.
And those differences need not be physical, although when we band into groups, we often create physical
differences by grooming ourselves in what amount to invented species markers, whether it s the wide-brimmed
hats and studded boots of swaggering Texans or the shaven heads and flowing orange robes of Hare Krishna
followers. We have words for things and can symbolize and abstract, Goodenough says. You can t say, The
reason Germany is down and out is because of the Jews until you can abstract. That s at the core of any
fundamentalist group. 

The answer, Goodenough says, is to become familiar with what is different, like the multiracial kids at the Iowa
day care center: You can still label it as a difference, but without judgment. We all know some people are
smarter than others, and some are nicer than others, some are musical, and some can t carry a tune. The problem
is we are each embedded in our hierarchies, but at the same time we say all men are created equal. It s
emblazoned on our constitution. It ain t true, and we know it. The best we can offer is an equal chance. 

Race, Genome, and God

Brent Kennedy s path to spirituality and the Pandora s box of his own genome began when he almost died of a
rare auto-immune disease called sarcoidosis, a condition more common in non-Caucasians than whites. I was
incapacitated, he says. I had searing fevers, lost my hair, had lung adhesions, and ended up in a wheelchair
certain I was going to die. 

After six months of medicine and meditation, he went into remission. Something just kind of happened two
weeks into it, and I accepted it and decided to try and learn from it. I don't even pretend to know the nature of
God, all I know is that God is there and there s a purpose to our lives. So I'd lie in bed and meditate on getting
well, and think about my life and my family. When he recovered, Brent quit work, took his life savings and
began a quest to find out why he had sarcoidosis. He was certain the answer lay in his family s lineage.

Brent s family settled in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia and Eastern Tennessee in the early
1700s. He grew up being taught that he was of English and Scotch-Irish origin like all his neighbors. At age
nine, however, he began to question his roots.

I went to the Coal Town Theater in nearby Norton and saw the movie Lawrence of Arabia. I sat there in that
darkened theater and thought, My family doesn t look like the English. My family looks like the Arabs. My
mother looks like she walked out of the Sahara desert. And a lot of people in the mountains of Appalachia look
like this. His family, however, had little to say when he questioned them. Later, on fishing trips to the mountain
lakes, he sometimes encountered dark-complexioned people who belonged to an Appalachian group known as
Melungeons. They were a mystery people. I thought my mother looked like them. I asked my Dad and he just
looked surprised and went about his work. So I decided my family was just a funny-looking group of English
people. 

In 1988, after recovering from sarcoidosis, Brent began to interview all of his living relatives about their
background. It took two years, and a few relatives were so angered they refuse to speak to Brent today. I was
asking about race, and that s not something people want to talk about. What I discovered is that I had
Melungeon ancestry through all four of my grandparents, and really heavily on my mother s side. I had
discovered a mystery heritage. He also discovered that all his life hed suffered from another rare ailment:
Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF). Once properly diagnosed, he was treated and his symptoms disappeared.
Both FMF and sarcoidosis are common in Melungeons.

Who were the Melungeons? They d preserved an oral history that was scoffed at by scholars. They claimed to
have Turkish, Portuguese, and Mediterranean blood. Back in the sixteenth century, it is said, Sir Francis Drake
dropped fifteen hundred Turkish and Mediterranean captives on Roanoke Island; not long after, Spanish and
Portuguese soldiers were abandoned in the Carolinas and Tennessee. Brent became convinced that the
Appalachian Mountains had become a kind of safe haven and melting pot for dark-skinned immigrants pushed
out of colonial towns by Caucasians.

The genetics now back up the oral histories. Two years ago, University of Virginia botanist Kevin Jones began
to analyze locks of hair from eighty Melungeon women and swabs of cheek cells from forty Melungeon men.
Tested against the National Institutes of Health s encyclopedia of genetic sequences from around the world, he
has found exotic DNA from northern India and the Middle East. The study is still to be completed, but it s
intriguing that diseases to which Melungeons are susceptible such as FMF are also more commonly found in
the Mediterranean. Brent knows thirteen other Melungeons with FMF. All are being successfully treated.

One of the most amazing things to me, Brent says, is that the Melungeon people want the genetics. They re
not afraid. We want to prove that the old Melungeon ancestors were not lying; they were to the best of their
ability trying to tell people who they really were. We ve been taught the preferred history of the settlement of
this country. We weren t taught about Turks and Armenians and gypsies and Jews settling here in the 1600s.
Yet I can take you to the most isolated family cemeteries here and show you tombstones with carved stars of
David. I trust these people. These were my ancestors; they knew who they were even if American historians did
not. You can change your name and your language, but your cultural artifacts and your genetics remain. 

Ultimately, Brent says, he hopes the genetic studies show something more profound about identity. What is
pure? What the heck is an Irishman anyway? A Viking, a Scot, a Celt? If you take the vast majority of Americans
and run their DNA, they ll be in for some surprises. The truth is, nobody is who they think they are. 

That s the true challenge of our genetic map to look without flinching at the ways we differ and the ways we
are the same. To give the science its full measure, without corrupting it in service of myth and history. To
understand that, in the end, identity is not fixed and impermeable with clear boundaries, but an ever-evolving
creation. As it should be.

Site and magazine supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
© 2002 Science & Spirit Magazine. All rights reserved.

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