Once upon a time I was teaching English conversation at a girls school near Tokyo. The lesson was on family relations and I had the students draw a family tree they could explain. (Sachiko is my aunt. Taro is her husband. Their daughter Hanako is my cousin. Etc.) Meanwhile I drew one on the board for me, then announced: "I'm half German, one fourth American of French ancestry, and one fourth ... mystery!" Everyone was very excited. And it's true: my paternal grandfather was an orphan.Well, thanks to the mapping of the human genome the mystery is a little closer to being solved. My father sent off a tissue sample (from his cheek, I think) to the Genographic Project, and the results came back
a few weeks ago. His Y-chromosome (and mine) belongs to Haplogroup J2 (M172). Our distant ancestors made their way from Africa to the Mediterranean via the Middle East by the paths shown on this map; the haplogroup emerged about 10,000 years ago. How they got to Columbus, Ohio is anyone's guess, but it probably didn't involve significant stays in central Asia or northern or central Europe. Indeed Europe may not have been part of the story at all, since M172's more common in north Africa than southern Italy or Spain.It's very exciting! Unexpected, too - our surname seems to have Scottish roots. But what does one do with this knowledge - is it even a candidate for "self-knowledge"? All this tells is that the line going back from sons to fathers leads back to M172, but this line of purest patriliny includes only a tiny percentage of my actual ancestors: think of all those sons' mothers and their mothers and fathers. On the other hand, these fathers almost certainly didn't marry people from far away. The kind of almost frantic itineracy which has characterized my father's family since his mysterious grandfather's generation is something entirely new in human history.
After Italy and California and Austria and New Mexico and England and Japan and New Jersey and France and New York and now Australia maybe it's time for me to change my name to Rick, move to Casablanca and open an American Bar.
