Spencer Wells and his team spent four years gathering DNA information from 350,000 people of diverse backgrounds. Excellent documentary in National Geographic, narrated by actor Kevin Bacon, that puts Texan geneticist, Dr. Spencer Wells, front and center. The Harvard-educated scientist explains to us all the roads mankind took out of Africa, reveals our common ancestral birthplace and what our DNA and genetic markers reveal of our ancient ancestors' paths; all unique migrations that saw some of the earliest descendants of Mitochondrial Eve, our common African Über-Great Grandmother, head North, East, and West.
Dr. Spencer Wells fascination with the past has led the scientist, author, and documentary filmmaker to the farthest reaches of the globe in search of human populations who hold the history of humankind in their DNA. By studying humankind's family tree he hopes to close the gaps in our knowledge of human migration. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wells is spearheading the Genographic Project, calling it "a dream come true." His hope is that the project, which builds on Wells's earlier work (featured in his book and television program, The Journey of Man) and is being conducted in collaboration with other scientists around the world, will capture an invaluable genetic snapshot of humanity before modern-day influences erase it forever. Wells's own journey of discovery began as a child whose interests led him to the University of Texas, where he enrolled at age 16, majored in biology, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa three years later. He then pursued his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the tutelage of distinguished evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin. Beginning in 1994, Wells conducted postdoctoral training at Stanford University's School of Medicine with famed geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, considered the "father of anthropological genetics." It was there that Wells became committed to studying genetic diversity in indigenous populations and unraveling age-old mysteries about early human migration. Wells's field studies began in earnest in 1996 with his survey of Central Asia. In 1998 Wells and his colleagues expanded their study to include some 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) of Asia and the former Soviet republics. His landmark research findings led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome and its ability to trace ancestral human migration. Wells later went to Oxford University, where he served as director of the Population Genetics Research Group of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford. Following a stint as head of research for a Massachusetts-based biotechnology company, Wells made the decision in 2001 to focus on communicating scientific discovery through books and documentary films. Since the Genographic Project began, Wells's work has taken him to over three dozen countries, including Chad, Tajikistan, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, and French Polynesia, and he recently published his second book, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project. He lives with his wife, a documentary filmmaker, in Washington, D.C. On "The Human Family Tree," NGC producers trace the ancestral footsteps of all humanity in a very bold experiment. On one day, on just one street in Queens, New York, National Geographic and the Genome project collected DNA from hundreds of random neighbors. This was part of the landmark genographic project led by the National Geographic Society and corporate underwriter IBM to map out how people originally populated our planet. There are now over 350,000 participants, myself included, in this ongoing study. You can go to the Nat Geo website and order a kit for yourself, and find out where your DNA traveled through time: LINK Dr. Wells, obviously, mother Africa, we all come from, and the human race then spread out. What caused aborigines to be aboriginal, Caucasians to be Caucasians, Mongoloids to be Mongoloids? What caused these distinctive racial categories? SPENCER WELLS: Great question. First, they are really only skin deep. So we all came out of Africa within the last 60,000 years. We are all effectively members of an extended African family, and we've come back together in places like Queens. But over that 60,000 years, we scattered like the wind around the world, and we adapted to the different climates and the places where we lived. So people, as they moved out of the tropics, had to lose some of the pigmentation in their skin that they needed to protect themselves from the sun in the tropics. We actually have to let some UV light through to make Vitamin D. So that's the reason people in Northern Europe have lighter skin. Probably something Darwin called sexual selection, choosing people we mate with on the basis of what we find attractive, that varies according to where you are in the world. That probably played a role as well, probably random events. Small populations moving around, tiny genetic changes get fixed. How many original humans do people get traced back to? Dr. SPENCER WELLS: Well, we can trace back to single individuals on these lineages. So we are looking at pieces of DNA that don't go through a shuffling process in every generation that most of the genome does, and therefore, they trace pure, direct lineages back in time to a single individual who gave rise to all of the Y chromosomes, the male lineages in the world, and all of the mitochondrial types, the female lineages. But in terms of the initial population in Africa, it turns out that if we look at the pattern of generic variation across the whole genome, probably as few as 2,000 people were alive 70,000 years ago. We were on the verge of extinction, and we came back from that. We became smarter. We developed better technologies. That allowed the population in Africa to expand and ultimately to spread around the world. So we are all one big happy family. But did we stem from the same group? Obviously, bucking Genesis, we didn't just spring from Adam and Eve. There was development and man standing up and walking and all. But was there spontaneous human development around the world at the time? Dr. SPENCER WELLS: Right. You are asking about a theory that the anthropologists called multiregionalism. The genetic evidence is that we all came out of Africa very recently. We all trace back to a small African population within the last 60,000 years. How long does the entire process take from the time you do the swab to the results? Dr. SPENCER WELLS: Well, for most people who order the kits over the Internet and go onto the website and who find out about the project and so on, it takes about six weeks to get your results back. They are all delivered anonymously. There's a code that goes into each kit. So there's no name attached to it. But it takes about six weeks, typically. From: richardatrwilliamsdotus <rich...@rwilliams.us> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2011 9:57 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Shring? Buddhist and Hindu mantras. emptybill: > I already addressed this in a post about the > primal bijas of Rig-Veda, all pointed out by > Brahmarshi Daivarata. You keep avoiding the question: Where do the TM bija mantras come from? If you don't know, just admit it. If you read them in a book, say so. But, at least try to provide a rational and logical explanation. Were the TM bija mantras 'seen' by rishis millions of years ago, who then 'came out of India' to reveal all human languages to the rest of the world; or were they made up by MMY, or did MMY get the bija mantras from SBS? Read more: Subject: A.I.T. (Aryan Invasion Theory) Author: Willytex Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: July 30, 2005 http://tinyurl.com/7mexjlt Subject: The Indus Valley and Beyond Author: Willytex Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: April 10, 2005 http://tinyurl.com/7d2tx2r
