Deep ancestry

My wife, Bette, and I recently treated ourselves to National Geographic's Genographic Project Kits. The kits make it easy to submit cheek scrapings for DNA analysis, as part of the society's Genographic Project. The results provide a wonderful perspective on one's place in the great human story.

In Bette's case, mitochondrial DNA carries the chronicle of a 150,000-year chain of mothers and daughters. That chain begins with "Mitochondrial Eve," an African woman who was the ancestor of every person alive today. Around 80,000 years ago, one of Bette's maternal ancestors left Africa, and from there the story continues through the Middle East into Western Europe, until one brave woman made the long voyage to North America.

My ancestral record is etched into my Y-chromosome, which fathers give to their sons. Like Bette, I'd be seen as a WASP, though I prefer to think of myself as a Welsh Celt, not an English Anglo-Saxon.

So my DNA results surprised me.

I'm a member of "haplogroup E3b." Like Bette's—and everyone else's— my ancestral story begins in Africa. But my paternal ancestors didn't leave Africa until just 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. And they stayed long in the Middle East, to become the first farmers.

Today, most men in my haplogroup live around the Mediterranean, making up 10 percent of all Spaniards, 12-13 percent of northern and southern Italians, 20 percent of Sicilians, 20-30 percent of Balkans and Greeks, and a whopping 75 percent of North Africans. By contrast, I share my haplogroup with only 3-4 percent of Irishmen and 4-5 percent of Englishmen.

So am I descended, perhaps, from a Roman soldier who came to Britain under Claudius in 43 A.D.? Or a Moorish trader bringing goods to the island from North Africa? Or an stonemason brought to Britain from Italy to help build the great cathedrals?

Of course, each of us has many thousands more ancestors than just those along our mother-daughter or father-son line. Even so, the Genographic Project can map vividly one of the trails on the journey that led to our birth.