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Pastimes : Genealogy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (156)	4/14/2005 12:59:13 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

Great post! Thanks! Here's a clip from Discover Magazine: The Hidden History of Men A research team braves Central Asia to capture a surprising genetic record of human migration and military conquest By Robert Kunzig DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 12 \| December 2004 \| Anthropology One day last fall, in the home freezer of Spencer Wells, there were these things: a large leg of lamb, a few quarts of milk, and underneath, DNA samples from 2,500 people in Central Asia. Wells is an anthropological geneticist and an energetic collector of DNA, especially Y chromosomes. He lived then in an old stone house outside Geneva, but he was raised in Lubbock, Texas. His own Y chromosome, like his name, hails from Connecticut—an ancestor was governor there in the 17th century. Before that, Wells’s chromosome came from southern England, and before that, maybe 30,000 years ago, it came from Central Asia. From then and there to here and now, it was passed on, like an indelible stain, by a thousand fathers to a thousand sons, one after the other, until it ended up in Wells’s father, a Lubbock lawyer, and then in Wells. The DNA samples in the freezer, then, are samples of Wells’s own roots—and of those of a good part of humanity. Before Wells collected the samples, the region was pretty much terra incognita, genetically speaking. Now some geneticists see it as a second font of human diversity. In Wells’s view, the grasslands of Central Asia, so reminiscent of the East African savannas with their abundance of big game, are where the human race fattened up after it left Africa, 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. “It was essentially a meat locker,” he says. “Loads of food. And that allowed them to build up the population density to then go out and move westward and then eastward.” The westward branch of humanity entered Europe; the eastward branch eventually crossed the Bering Strait and entered North America, and there the two branches met again in 1492. By that time they had come to seem very different from each other. Traces of how human beings had fanned out across the planet, acquiring superficial racial differences along the way, are written in our DNA and especially in the Y chromosome. discover.com