Donovan Webster - Meeting the Family: One Mans Journey Through His Human Ancestry

BY SPENCER WELLS, Director of the Genographic Project

BLACK, BROWN, AND WHITE; short and tall; blond, redhead, and brunette. We are an incredibly diverse species, almost dizzying in the variety of surface features that define us. Traveling the world, or simply walking down the street in a large city, we encounter people who seem to be so different from ourselves and from one another. But just how different are we? Appearances, it turns out, are deceiving. Peer beneath the surface, down inside our cells, into our DNA, and youll get a very different story. It turns out that humans are nearly identical at the genetic level. Yes, thats right, your DNA is basically the same as everyone elses on the planet, and that makes you part of a much larger family than you ever suspected.

In this remarkable book, Don Webster traces his ancestral journey, following the path taken by his DNA from an African homeland around 60,000 years ago, into the Middle East, Central Asia, and ultimately to his English ancestral homeland. Along the way he meets some pretty remarkable people, from Julius the Hadzabe chief to his distant relations in Uzbekistan. Its a travelogue with a twist, one in which the concept of family is reevaluated as Don expands the scope of his own family tree.

As I write this, the National Geographic Societys Genographic Project is in its fourth year. Launched in 2005, using the tools of molecular genetics, its goal has been to track the ancient migrations of our ancestors, using modern science to gain insight into some of humanitys oldest questions. It was a scientific quest, a global effort to disentangle the stories that weave us together as members of the human family.

Scientific inquiry was always what motivated us to create the project, but the public at large has thronged to the project as well. Over 310,000 people have swabbed their cheeks and sent the samples off to our laboratories, adding their own chapters to the human history. This response has been extraordinarywe had expected to attract perhaps 100,000 public participants during the course of the projectand it gives us extraordinary power to decipher the scientific details of our species past. But it also, inadvertently, has created a community, albeit one spread across more than 130 countries on every inhabited continent.

Donovan Websters goal was to meet some of the members of that community. His project began with an article commissioned for National Geographic Traveler magazine in 2005. Don was one of the very first people to be tested by the Genographic Project, and he chose to look at his Y chromosome. Tracing a purely paternal line, the pattern of markers in Donovans DNA told a story of an African beginning, hunting and gathering on the savannas of the Rift Valley in East Africa. Donovans ancestors left Africa around 50,000 years ago as part of the second wave of migration into Eurasia, via the Middle East. From there they zigzagged across the steppes of Central Asia before entering Europe around 35,000 years ago. This grand journey was what Don was hoping to retrace when we met in my office at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., just before the launch of the Genographic Project. I plotted the key locations on a map for him, from the remote wilds of Tanzania to the Basque country in northern Spainplaces his own ancestors had traversed tens of thousands of years ago. This skeletal outline was what he was hoping to put flesh on with his own travels, meeting his distant cousins along the way.

Dons story is at once unique and universal. It intersects with everyone elses at various points along the way. Each of us is carrying the pattern of our familys wanderings inside ourselves, in our own DNA. The tools of modern molecular genetics can help us read the history encoded there. Written in the pattern of nucleotides, the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts in our genome tell a story of birth, death, adversity, and triumphan epic trek from an African homeland to the far corners of the Earth. The baroque tapestry of human diversity, woven from such seemingly disparate threads, ultimately reveals a deeper pattern of shared journeys. We are truly members of a human family far more closely related than we ever dreamed of only a generation agoone that includes Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, New Guineans, Africans, and everyone in between.

So read onlets meet the family.