How Neanderthal are you? Tracing our genetic ancestry | Natural History Museum

Britain today is a real melting pot we have people from many different locations many different cultures vintage and ethnic groups so where do they all come from we invited six well-known friends of the museum to have their DNA tested we all ask ourselves these questions from time to time Who am I where do I come from how did I get here I was pretty convinced that my heritage came from Africa but my mother is a fairly fair skinned so I'd always assumed that she had some European blood in her I don't even offer a lot about my family history I only know going back about three or four generations I think whenever else has ever asked me you know where do you come from ethnically it's always been a very long answer everybody wants to be able to to look into their past and to see where we might have come from it connects you with with a wider world we've all got a history contained in our DNA so scientists can look at thousands of markers and track our evolutionary history and in particular there are two lineages that can be looked at a maternal one from mothers to children and a paternal one from father's to sons unless you're looking at the whole genetic code you obviously haven't got the complete story but by looking at these specific images it's possible to reconstruct some of these journeys that ancestors took in the distant past everyone today descends from ancestral populations that once lived in Africa I'm quite stunned that it's possible to go back so far it's almost biblical in it in its field but I mean not not quite back to somebody would Adam and Eve but but sort of the earth to a Garden of Eden about 60 thousand years ago a small group of modern humans moved out of Africa and into Western Asia we don't know why they did that maybe they were just following their food maybe looking for new places to live perhaps the group that came out of Africa was just a few hundred people perhaps a thousand people says it it's a relatively small number of people that are the ancestors to all of these non African populations the thought of being in the world at that time it's just incredibly excited yes it would have been perilous that have been dangerous yet as a sense of this opportunity discovery that would have driven them on not all modern humans left Africa many of them stayed behind and then they dispersed and migrated within Africa what the maps showed was that I think life began in East Africa and my parents I come from West Africa and it showed a little gradual migration not very far at all across from East Africa to West Africa but the fact that it seems that I am us 100 percent African makes me very proud around fifty five thousand years ago within the population that had left Africa there was a major split in one of these maternal lineages one that produced two main divisions and one group largely stayed in Western Asia and eventually migrated also into Europe the other group headed eastwards towards the Far East all my paternal side it's a pretty straightforward story really they and eventually in southern China and that's what I would have expected that's why I know of that history on the maternal side it's you know slightly more complicated story appears with them sweeping out and getting out as far as the Americas and Australasia in the end the modern humans that move out of Africa and into Western Asia moved into an area where the Neanderthals were living their evolutionary cousins they must have met and there was some interbreeding between them I obviously may not have been as pleasant as all that the interbreeding but you would like to think of it as a nice pleasant coming together as probably a bit grimmer than that but the idea that all Neanderthals are pushed to one side that they live on a bit in it in us and I'm glad there's at least one point eight percent of them in me I wasn't aware that I'd have any Indiana tile in me although probably some of my friends and family would disagree I came out as quite Neandertal I was quite surprised dad said my mom is a bit short and stocky so he imagines that the Neandertal side of the family is Daphne has the modern humans that remained in Africa don't show traces of Neanderthals in their DNA their ancestors never interbred with Neanderthals so there's no Neanderthal DNA there except where there have been later back migrations into Africa as it turned out I had no land haul ancestry at all but now actually with a retro spectroscope I think it would have been nice to have a bit at least 40,000 years ago humans started to enter Europe from Western Asia some of these groups came in very early as hunter-gatherers stayed there other groups came much later with the spread of farming my maternal line are relatively late arrivals in Britain or Europe maybe only a few thousand years ago coming with the spread of Agriculture up up through Europe whereas my father's line as seems have been here a bit earlier going up north towards Scandinavia so I like to feel that I look a bit like the sort of an episode of like a Viking but look like sort of Scandinavian Germanic kind of look there and I Sun like the cold so so maybe that's that's my father's line I can run it back there my systems were the last to settle down so they were the most nomadic of those people and so I feel this affinity with a kind of people who are constantly looking what's around the next bend over the next hill and I feel very much a connection with that if we look at the specific maternal paternal lineages we can reconstruct specific migrations but of course we've got a wider genome our whole genetic code and if we've got that we get a much wider view of people's ancestry we can look at a pattern of their DNA makeup and compare it with the pattern of populations all around the world the most surprising thing for me this 2% Native American and I can't begin to see where that might have come from except my mother lived in coastal Wales and of course it being near a maritime port you have huge influx of lots and lots of different people and I'd sort of think maybe that might've change things a little my closest marker is Danish so which it was a big surprise you know when there was a Danish king after all in the dense century so I mean am i I might be a royal blood royal Danish Viking blood that would suit me saying your mission is like saying you're a Londoner really there is no ethnic basis for that population there bear an island of people and that Island because it was on the naval trade routes like yes that's variously been taken over and run by pretty much every colonial power in history I guess that's what you're seeing in my genome that that diversity more recent integrations don't figure in the results but as techniques evolved more detail will emerge about the piles taken by both our ancient and our more recent relatives we're going to see some major advances in the next few years there's some really exciting science that that's just happening right now we're living in a time where mass migration is much more prevalent because of the technology we have and so genomes in the future will be much more interesting who knows what we're going to know in 10 years in 50 years in 100 years it might be a very very different picture we're all mingle with all you know been part of this this small group of hominids at one point it shows I suppose it a unity of the human population we are generally all part of one one big as a big happy family or not always happy but one big family that has different places in the world to live in you

Channel: Natural History Museum

Views: 482,314

Rating: 4.5029373 out of 5

Keywords: Natural History Museum, London, research, science, nature, palaeontology, geology, evolution, entomology, biology, climatology, Bill Bailey, Alice Roberts (TV Personality), Sian Williams (TV Actor), DNA Sequencing (Industry), Chris Stringer, Neanderthals, Africa (Continent), Migration Period (Event), Clive Anderson (TV Personality), National Geographic (Periodical)

Id: Tl-hI2IsCo0

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/tdietz20]

Everyone on earth except some folks in Africa are related to neanderthals. The only difference is northern Europeans have can have up to 4% of their DNA and Asians have about 1%.

[u/Pb2Au]

It's hilarious that old Cletus sitting on his porch in Alabama mouthing off about race-mixing has the ancestors who fucked other species.