The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  titillated by reports of bestiality and cannibalism: Actually, there was one rather unpleasant people-eating incident. As Alexander tells it, in 1822 about half a dozen men ran away from a penal settlement and ended up starving in the bush until one of their number, the Irishman Alexander Pearce, killed and ate the others one by one. Pearce was rearrested and sent back to the settlement, and yet he escaped once more with a new companion, young Thomas Cox. Why did Cox run with Pearce, the alleged cannibal? We’ll never know. Pearce ate him too. Pearce was caught again and finally hung in 1824.

  “They misquoted Latin”: A. Alexander, Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 204.

  “They melt from the earth”: A. Alexander, Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 217.

  it was the subject of relatively little research: J. Crowley, W. J. Smyth, and M. Murphy. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (New York: New York University Press, 2012), viii.

  hardly anyone spoke of it: The pattern is reminiscent of François Weil, a Frenchman, being the first to write a book about the history of American genealogy. Overall, Irish culture left the stories of the famine inside the box of folklore and actively downplayed its significance.

  Chapter 6: Information

  analog documents they held: A. Shoumatoff, The Mountain of Names: A History of the Human Family (New York: Kodansha International, 1995), pp. xxi and 318.

  “The core concept”: Quotes from Jay Verkler in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  he associates with personal strength: M. P. Duke, A. Lazarus, and R. Fivush, “Knowledge of Family History as a Clinically Useful Index of Psychological Well-being and Prognosis: A Brief Report,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 45, no. 2 (2008): 268; M. P. Duke, “The Stories That Bind Us: What Are the Twenty Questions?” Huffington Post, March 23, 2013, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marshall-p-duke/the-stories

  -that-bind-us-_b_2918975.html.

  they were impossible to read: G. Palsson, “The Life of Family Trees and the Book of Icelanders,” Medical Anthropology 21, no. 3–4, (2002): 337–67.

  “If well housed, the tiles would last ten thousand years”: Quotes from Gavan McCarthy in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “That’s the classic genealogist”: Quotes from Dan Jones in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  94 percent of all our stored information: S. Wu, “How Much Information is There in the World?” Phys.org, February 10, 2011, available at http://phys

  .org/news/2011-02-world-scientists-total-technological-capacity.html#jCp, and M. Hilbert, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science 332, no. 6025, 60-65.

  “When you have a hundred-percent count data”: Quotes from Kevin Schurer in this chapter are from my interview with him.

  demographics, longevity, and fertility: H. Ledford, “Genome Hacker Uncovers Largest-Ever Family Tree,” Nature, October 28, 2013, available at http://www.nature.com/news/genome-hacker-uncovers-largest-ever-family

  -tree-1.14037. The tree was built by Yaniv Erlich, whose light map project is also described.

  charges for online access: In some special cases it is free.

  “a puzzle the size of a football stadium”: G. Pálsson, Anthropology and the New Genetics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71.

  “Now a company in Iceland”: G. Pálsson, Anthropology and the New Genetics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 138.

  “Accidentally sleeping with a relative”: T. Sykes, “Iceland’s Incest-Prevention App Gets People to Bump Their Phones Before Bumping in Bed,” Daily Beast, April 23, 2014, available at http://www.thedailybeast.com/

  articles/2013/04/23/iceland-s-incest-prevention-app-gets-people-to-bump

  -their-phones-before-bumping-in-bed.html.

  eighty-eight thousand marriages: H. Gauvin, et al., “Genome-wide Patterns of Identity-by-Descent Sharing in the French Canadian Founder Population,” European Journal of Human Genetics 22 (2014): 814–21.

  the population boom in all of Quebec was “spectacular”: Unless otherwise cited, quotes from Labuda in this chapter are from my interview with him.

  “the exceptional people”: Quotes from Janet McCalman in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

  “My great-grandfather”: Quotes from Garry McLoughlin in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “Some of them weren’t nice”: Quotes from Leanne Goss are from my interview with her.

  “I hardly read novels anymore”: Quotes from David Noakes are from my interview with him.

  Chapter 7: Ideas and Feelings

  With no time to scream: My information about Equiano’s life and the plight of Africans during the slave trade came from many sources, including the writings of Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, as well as Olaudah Equiano’s book: O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Written by Himself) (Project Gutenberg EBook, 2005).

  “red water ordeal”: W. Hawthorne, “The Production of Slaves Where There Was No State,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 2 (1999): 97-124, via N. Nunn, “The Long-term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (2008): 139–176.

  sell them to slavers: C. Piot, “Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin During the Era of the Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 37, no. 1 (1996): 31–49.

  more than thirty million Africans: According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Guide to Black History, “Approximately 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905.” Available at http://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article

  -24156 (accessed June 1, 2014). In addition, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database stated that “12.5 million embarked for the New World between 1501-1866.” Available at http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed June 1, 2014).

  “The slaves all night”: J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, vol. 85 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  “When I get to heaven”: Biographical information about Wantchekon came from my interview with him and from L. Wantchekon, “Dreaming Against the Grain” (unpublished).

  exposed to the slave trade: N. Nunn and L. Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101, no. 7 (2011): 3221–52.

  trust was truly worthy: They ran many additional analyses in order to rule out other possible causes of distrust, such as colonialism. As with the connection between slavery and poverty, they found that colonialism mattered but by itself could not have caused the mistrust.

  public meetings in Benin: Of course, not all differences in trust or economic issues between countries can be entirely attributed to the slave trade. In Benin, for example, Wantchekon also found that trust was undermined when people joined religious sects that fostered a culture of fear.

  studies of the transmission of ideas: N. Voigtländer and H.-J. Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no, 3 (2012): 1339–92.

  decided to test them: A. Alesina, P. Giuliano, and N. Nunn, “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 2 (2013): 469–530.

  like religion and language: T. Talhelm, et al., “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice vs. Wheat Agriculture,” Science 344 (2012): 603–8.

  how many children they had: R. Fernandez and A. Fogli, “Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility” (working paper no. 11268, National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2005).

  women born in the new: It is importa
nt to keep in mind, though, that these effects, like Nunn’s trust effect and Voigtlander and Voth’s legacy of hate, are probabilistic: There is no guarantee they will have an impact. There is no way to determine which child from which family will do what his grandparents did or think what his grandparents thought.

  “careful in dealing with people?”: G. Tabellini, “Culture and Institutions: Economic Development in the Regions of Europe,” Journal of the European Economic Association 8, no. 4 (2010): 677–716.

  as well as poorer economies: Another intuitive but actually never-before-measured observation that resulted from Nunn’s analysis was the distinct geographical correlates of trust in Africa today: The closer people live to the coast, the less trusting they are. Why would this be so? Is there a relevant factor in the climate of inland Africa? Do the vagaries of fishing make you more cautious than you might be otherwise? Nunn and his colleagues looked for similar connections between coastlines and distrust in Asia and Europe, but they could find no comparable relationship.

  In most parts of the world rugged, mountainous landscapes tend to be less economically successful than flatlands. It’s harder to transport goods through hilly areas. The steeper a slope is, the more erosion is a problem. Watering crops is much more difficult on a slope because it’s harder to control water on a hill than it is on level ground. It can simply require more effort, too, for people merely to live in this kind of landscape, let alone to harvest food or goods from it. Flatter landscapes tend to be cheaper and physically easier to farm and to move about in general. Nunn cited a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that found that if a slope is greater than two degrees, then it costs more to farm it than it’s worth. If it’s greater than six degrees, it’s not even possible to farm. Yet today in Africa, uniquely in the world, challenging landscapes have better economies. It turns out that the way trust is mapped over the African continent was also shaped by the slave trade. Before 1900, the closer you were to the coast, the more likely it was that you, your parents, and your parents’ parents had been exposed in one way or another to the horror of the trade. The farther people lived from the coast, the less likely it was that they were taken as slaves. N. Nunn and D. Puga, “Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa,” Review of Economics and Statistics 94, no. 1 (2012): 20–36.

  Chapter 8: The Small Grains of History

  it’s quite close to it: S. Leslie, et al., “Fine Scale Genetic Structure of the British Population.” Manuscript submitted for publication, 2014.

  “their favorite gene”: Quotes from Peter Donnelly in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “Now we know that”: Quotes from Stephen Leslie in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  population genetics and statistics: Most geneticists know of Fisher only as a key figure in modern genetics, while most statisticians know of him only as a key figure in statistics.

  more than two thousand genomes: This was the number after ruling out people who were actually related to one another.

  “It was absolutely staggering”: Quotes from Sir Walter Bodmer in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “I had naively expected”: Quotes from Mark Robinson in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  produced in Roman times: If fourth-century Saxons invaded England today, stomped on all the cell phones, killed the engineers, and shut down the ports, how many generations would it take before stories about a small, flat object that carried people’s voices in it were considered a myth?

  Chapter 9: DNA + Culture

  “He has some very exciting news”: Quotes from Thomas Robinson in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  have had such an effect: J. Pongratz, et al., “Coupled Climate—Carbon Simulations Indicate Minor Global Effects of Wars and Epidemics on Atmospheric CO2 between AD 800 and 1850,” Holocene 21, no. 5 (2011): 843–51.

  the ancient Mongolian empire: T. Zerjal, et al., “The Genetic Legacy

  of the Mongols,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72, no. 3 (2003):

  717–21.

  “Most of the direct descendants”: S. Cauchi, “Descendants of Darwin Evolve into Guardians of the Wilderness,” Age, November 29, 2009, available at http://www.theage.com.au/national/descendants-of-darwin-evolve-into

  -guardians-of-the-wilderness-20091128-jy10.html.

  eight hundred or so years: When does the copying take place? When men and women copy their chromosomes into sex cells, the sperm and the egg. But they copy only half of their full set into each cell, twenty-three each, so that when sperm and egg get together, they make a full human complement.

  “It was a hellish time”: Quotes from Donald MacLaren in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “We beat on FT DNA to give us more”: Quotes from Robert McLaren in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “an old Scottish lineage”: Inheritance was not always passed directly down a single line from father to son to grandson to great-grandson. The clan leadership could pass down the male line through brothers and to their sons. But it’s still the same Y chromosome. Two brothers will have the same Y as their father, and they will pass that Y on to their sons.

  Johns, originated this way: M. A. Jobling, “In the Name of the Father: Surnames and Genetics,” TRENDS in Genetics 17, no. 6 (2001): 353–57. Much of my data about British surnames, as well as the general principles, comes from interviews with Turi King and Kevin Schurer and from T. E. King and M. A. Jobling, “What’s in a Name? Y Chromosomes, Surnames and the Genetic Genealogy Revolution,” TRENDS in Genetics 25, no. 8 (2009): 351–60; and T. E. King and M. A. Jobling, “Founders, Drift, and Infidelity: The Relationship Between Y Chromosome Diversity and Patrilineal Surnames,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 26, no. 5 (2009): 1093–1102.

  not the rules of language: F. Manni, W. Heeringa, and J. Nerbonne, “To What Extent are Surnames Words? Comparing Geographic Patterns of Surname and Dialect Variation in the Netherlands,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 21, no. 4 (2006): 507–27.

  Y in this population: G. R. Bowden, et al., “Excavating Past Population Structures by Surname-Based Sampling: The Genetic Legacy of the Vikings in Northwest England,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 25, no. 2 (2008): 301–9.

  non-Catholic fifth-century warlord: My information about the Irish Y, Lord Turlough, and Irish names comes primarily from B. McEvoy and D. Bradley, “Y-Chromosomes and the Extent of Patrilineal Ancestry in Irish Surnames,” Human Genetics 119, no. 1 (2006): 212–19; and L. T. Moore, et al., “A Y-Chromosome Signature of Hegemony in Gaelic Ireland,” American Journal of Human Genetics 78, no. 2 (2006): 334–38.

  the rule does not apply: T. E. King, et al., “Genetic Signatures of Coancestry Within Surnames,” Current Biology 16, no. 4 (2006): 384–88.

  “genealogy, genetics, and . . . pure dumb luck”: Quotes from Glynis McHargue Patterson in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

  enough to discredit all documentation: Note that the average nonpaternity figure will differ in different eras and within different populations, social classes, or castes.

  Chapter 10: Chunks of DNA

  “Is this Scott Woodward?”: Quotes from Scott Woodward in this chapter are from my interview with him.

  just a few years ago: Even after development of the Family Tree DNA test that looked at sixty-seven segments on the Y chromosome, many academic studies of the Y chromosome examined only seventeen segments.

  not at research facilities: A. Congiu, et al., “Online Databases for mtDNA and Y Chromosome Polymorphisms in Human Populations,” Journal of Anthropological Sciences 90 (2012): 197–212.

  “It’s pretty boring”: Quotes from Bennett Greenspan in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  “an incredibly strong woman”: Quotes from Blaine Bettinger in this chapt
er are from my interviews with him.

  “Little did I know, it’s addicting”: Quotes from CeCe Moore in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

  networks have changed through time: P. Ralph and G. Coop, “The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry Across Europe,” PLoS Biology 11, no. 5 (2013): e1001555.

  second to ninth cousins: B. M. Henn, et al., “Cryptic Distant Relatives Are Common in Both Isolated and Cosmopolitan Genetic Samples,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 4 (2012): e34267.

  throughout my genealogical tree: If I set up one of my sisters’ genomes and tracked it back up the table next to mine, some of the chunks that my mother passed on to me would overlap considerably with the chunks she passed down to my sister. Yet so random is the distribution of DNA through the generations that, according to Ralph and Coop, we may share no DNA with a number of our fourth cousins. It’s possible, though less likely, that we won’t share any DNA with some third cousins. In fact, technically it’s possible that we have no DNA from one of our grandparents, but, according to Ralph, the chance of that happening is roughly one in ten trillion. See also R. Khan, “Which Grandparent Are You Most Related To?” Slate, October 18, 2013, available at http://www

  .slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genome/2013/10/analyze

  _your_child_s_dna_which_grandparents_are_most_genetically_related.html.

  “It took us a while”: Quotes from Peter Ralph in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  1,000 and 1,500 years ago: Ralph’s exercise made me wonder what would happen if I traced my genome back through, say, fifty thousand years. In a nutshell, it would be very disintegrated and widely spread. But what if we started from that point fifty thousand years ago and then asked: What are the odds that all those minuscule bits that are spread all over humanity will come together to form a single genome in fifty thousand years? Calculating that is pretty much impossible. Yet somehow it happened.