Using ancestry DNA to explore our humanness: Anita Foeman at TEDxWestChester

first of all thank you for having me and sharing in my project and ancestry synchronicity what I do in this project is take a look at ancestry DNA an ancestry narrative and see how those two stories either sync up or they don't and in either case we understand something about our humaneness now because I'm from the Department of Communication Studies I'm really comfortable with narrative one of our theorists famously said that people are storytelling animals we like a story with a nice neat beginning middle and end heroes and villains and another one of our theorists suggested that some of the family narratives that we have sound more like fairy tales and they do like genealogy and indeed I think of them as like lullabies that Loe us into a sense of security and predictability but I've also been very interested in the human genome project and when a human genome was mapped and scientists started to tell us that they could tell us something about our individual ancestry I thought what would happen if we held one story up next to the other but because that's not my background I had to talk to Leslie Slusher our geneticists on campus to find out where to start and she suggested that I read the book the seven daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes and Brian Sykes was right at the beginning of this study on connecting us to our ancestry and he developed a theory and in order to test that theory he needed to get a sample of the oldest DNA that he could get and so he got permission to get a sample from the five thousand-year-old Iceman who was found in the Alps between Italy and Austria and he got permission to take a sample and then to see if he could find somebody living today who had the same profile as the as the Iceman and so indeed in England he found a woman whose name was Marie Moseley and Marie Moseley had the same exact DNA as the five thousand-year-old Iceman and he goes on to say that could mean only one thing that Marie was a relative of the Iceman himself and the next thing that he says let me know that I was really onto something because he goes on to say that Murray started to feel something for the iceman that in the past he had seen the ice she had seen the Iceman taken from the glacier to the post-mortem room opened up bits cut off and no longer did she now think of him as the anonymous curiosity that she had seen in the newspaper and on television she started to think of him as a real person and as a relative which is exactly what he was and if I have learned anything from this research it's that we're all real relatives this is the map of the human trek that shows that we all started out some 60,000 years ago in sub-saharan Africa and we fanned out across the globe adjusting genetically so that we would survive in the physical environment around us and adjusting in our narrative so that we would survive in the culture around us so that these two stories from the beginning have evolved in tandem and people like Brian Sykes has collected DNA samples in England this is Rick Kittles who has the largest database of African DNA around the globe and what starts to happen as you see the story is that you start to understand not only are they telling us something about the rhythm of the past but they're telling us something about the rhythm of the future and the slides of the original research that I'm going to show you you start to see something about where the human race is going and in the project that we did at West Chester University our project was very straightforward we first asked people to tell us what they knew about the narrative of their family and that included filling out a pie chart that said what percentages do you think you had of different ethnicities in your background and then we asked people to be DNA tested and finally we showed them the results and the conversation that ensued is just fascinating now I want to say two things before I move into the original results that we found the first one is that geneticist told us as soon as they were finished mapping the human genome that we are 99.9 percent exactly the same and even that small percentage that differs is not all associated with what we think of as race or ancestry and that part tends to be the most superficial and yet it's still fascinating and the second thing has to do with the story of DNA and narrative evolving together for those of you who grew up in a Christian tradition you probably are familiar with the song we three kings and if you know the lore one of the kings was black and one of the kings of Orient was Asian and one of the kings was European and so the three kings became from the far reaches of the earth to the center of the known universe and I will tell you 2,000 years later some of the most basic labs will only tell you percentage of African Asian and European now over the more than 450 people that we have tested staff students and faculty it's rare to find somebody who has just all of one these three people happen to now the labs that we use are quite sophisticated so after they tell you your primary areas they then break it down in this case I don't include her percentages but they tell you how much South African how much Central West Africa etc so these are for people with all or almost all of one background now at the other end of the scale is this young woman now she filled out her chart at the beginning almost all European described herself as white and said that her family is from Columbia since forever now when we did the chart the thing that surprised her was that first of all it looked like a rainbow and second of all that there was Native American now that would not surprise somebody knowing she's from Columbia there would be indigenous people there and that these would come out as Native American but she said where she grew up in Columbia there was a tremendous amount of prejudice against the indigenous people and so you lean away from that narrative you lean into your European narrative until that's all that's there until somebody DNA tests you and this is what shows up well the next person identifies herself as african-american and in her chart she drew basically about seventy five percent African ancestry and then Native American she was shocked when she looked it's barely half African and then you see Asian which he didn't have now it is often difficult genetically to distinguish Native Americans from Asians but in discussing her narrative what we started to realize is that the American narrative for a long time was that you were black you were white or you were an Indian and so as a result there may be people in her background who do not fit neatly into those categories but they get shoved into that narrative now this happened to live somebody identifies themselves as all European in his case he thought he might have some Native American it doesn't take much to know that the narrative between blacks and whites in America is often negative and so people lean away from that now it does surprise me that we've maintained this romantic view of the Native American narrative even though we know that the true history is often different than that but I will say when he went back to his family and showed them this profile they said well maybe she was part black so you know there you go and in this case here's somebody with an all European narrative surprised at the African and I will tell you not one person who didn't specifically identify as Asian thought that they would have any Asian in their background though it popped up from time to time which you'll see this is interesting people in their in their interviews would often describe black and white people as opposite races but clearly when you look at these two people there's a lot of overlap and they are hardly opposite now Latino is interesting because that is not an ancestry in the same sense as Asian European etc but because people want that the labs try to give that information to you now he identifies his Latino culturally speaks Spanish etc but this was his profile now in the next image here's a woman when we first sent her DNA and it came back almost all Latino and who you look at her it doesn't sound surprising that's not how she identifies so we asked them to rerun the DNA without the possibility of Latino and this is how it came out which was much more in sync with how she thought of herself and it also gave us a sense of what the lab is doing to try to identify some of these more derived types profiles that we've learned there this woman is from Iraq she thinks of herself as Middle Eastern and even North African when I ran her DNA she was outraged she said and I asked her if she wanted to had a quote and she said yes a person's identity is firm and it's not going to change even in the face of DNA data right so there you go now I'm gonna give you the easiest test you've ever taken once you catch on to this how many of these people do you think have African ancestry they all do different as they look how many of these people how many of these people have Asian ancestry they failed okay I'm let me tell you something interesting I'm the first woman on the end it describes her background is from Eastern European Jews now it doesn't take much especially if your background is Russian Jews to know if you keep going far enough you are in Asia but there's no narrative to go with that so it's not included the woman in the middle several years before this project occurred had been in China and she said everywhere she went in China people kept saying to her you look Chinese so she was really surprised to find that in her background how many of these people have Native American well they all do and they all I believe thought they did and how many of these people have European different as they all look and lots and lots of people had European ancestry in their background I'm having looked at several of these slides now I'm gonna give you yet another test here are four people ABCD who do you think this profile belongs to anybody think a anybody B C D we just don't know okay it is it is this person both of her parents from India and she said she called her mother immediately said mom were wife now we associate a certain profile with this and you know a certain skin color but we had for more than one persons with Indian background a similar profile now who here has no East India East Asian ancestry and the gentleman in the middle is a Holocaust survivor again from European Jews and the person who did not have East Asian was this gentleman from India okay this young woman was so funny as she described herself as a hundred percent Italian and there's a lot of literature that tells us there's actually a lot of literature that can't get into now that tells us why she might have such a profile but she too called her mother and she called home her mother said that's not right and you're not ours and but she was seeing a dermatologist for a skin condition who said it actually did not surprise him this is the last image of a person this is Shaun whom I loved he almost nailed his profile his mother is Korean his father is Irish and he said he often finds himself in situations where there are older Korean ladies and he says he sees them looking at him like they sort of recognize him and he said to me doctor foam in my Korean is tight I speak great Korean and he said the minute he starts to speak Korean they say I want you to meet my granddaughter because to them to them he is authentic because he speaks Korean even though he's only half Korean and we've had interesting conversations about how much Korean you have to have how much DNA to make you authentic oh no I have to agree as we look at these images and look at the at the data that with Raphael Hernandez and Steen who tell us that looking at where we are going is going to disrupt the conversation that we've had about ancestry and race and it's going to be a more complicated conversation but I believe we're up to it my research team that includes Phil Thompson Bessie Lawton Randi Rieger and the graduate students and statistics are starting to do some quantitative data if you like charts look at that if you don't I'm going to tell you what it means the red is over estimation and the blue is under estimation we found that most often people are likely to overestimate their European background and we believe that they do it because they believe there's some benefit of that there's some payoff it is it is a status narrative and people lean into bed we found that some people will overestimate their African ancestry more underestimated and we think sometimes people overestimate it because even though African Americans have been marginalized in disparaged people still think of african-americans as authentic and so they still think they might have some of that in their background in some instances not one person overestimated their Latino background and again it's more of a culture the minute even if somebody has something in their background that might link them to that culture the minute they start to lean into the larger American narrative they sort of give that up so you don't find any overestimation and finally as I mentioned to you not one single person who didn't specifically identify as Asian thought they might have that in her background and that's particularly interesting because you often can't distinguish Native American DNA from Asian DNA so clearly Asians have been here since the beginning but there's no narrative and so it tends to go away and just in some and pulling all this together the message is that each one of us is totally unique there were not two people who had the exact same narrative there weren't two people who had the exact same profile now we know that we have to put people into categories because we have to make life manageable we have to make like print life predictable but when we start to believe that those categories are real and that we serve those categories rather than those categories serving us we really need to step back and reconsider the vastness complexity and sometimes discord of the rhythm of life thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 24,840

Rating: 4.8338656 out of 5

Keywords: TEDx, ted talk, English Language (Human Language), TEDxWestChester, DNA, tedx talks, ted talks, tedx talk, Education, Science, Culture, United States Of America (Country), History, tedx, ted x, ted

Id: 5HRTZVVyJC8

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 31 2014