SOUTH NAKNEK, ALASKA, December 9, 2006: “The National Geographic Society, IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation have launched the Genographic Project, a five-year effort to understand the human journey–where we came from and how we got to where we live today. This unprecedented effort will map humanity’s genetic journey through the ages. The fossil record fixes human origins in Africa, but little is known about the great journey that took Homo sapiens to the far reaches of the Earth. How did we, each of us, end up where we are? Why do we appear in such a wide array of different colors and features? Such questions are even more amazing in light of genetic evidence that we are all related–descended from a common African ancestor who lived only 60,000 years ago. Though eons have passed, the full story remains clearly written in our genes–if only we can read it,” states the National Geographic website, here, in their explanation of the Genographic Project to map our DNA’s journey around the globe. However, the Society’s multimillion-dollar research project to collect DNA from indigenous groups around the world in the hopes of reconstructing humanity’s ancient migrations has come to a standstill on its home turf in North America.
Billed as the “moon shot of anthropology,” the Genographic Project intends to collect 100,000 indigenous DNA samples. But for four months, the project has been on hold here as it scrambles to address questions raised by a group that oversees research involving Alaska natives. At issue is whether scientists who need DNA from aboriginal populations to fashion a window on the past are underselling the risks to present-day donors. Geographic origin stories told by DNA can clash with long-held beliefs, threatening a world view some indigenous leaders see as vital to preserving their culture. They argue that genetic ancestry information could also jeopardize land rights and other benefits that are based on the notion that their people have lived in a place since the beginning of time.
How did descendants of the hunter-gatherers who first left humanity’s birthplace in east Africa some 65,000 years ago come to inhabit every corner of the Earth? What routes did they take? Who got where, and when? As early humans split off in different directions, distinct mutations accumulated in the DNA of each population. Like bread crumbs, these genetic markers, passed on intact for millennia, can reveal the trail of the original pioneers. All non-Africans share a mutation that arose in the ancestors of the first people to leave the continent, for instance. But the descendants of those who headed north and lingered in the Middle East carry a different marker from those who went southeast toward Asia. Most of the world’s six billion people, however, are too far removed from wherever their ancestors originally put down roots to be useful to population geneticists. The Genographic Project is focusing on DNA from people still living in their ancestral homelands because they provide the crucial geographic link between genetic markers found today and routes traveled long ago.