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The Times, UK
June 21, 2013 Friday 11:19 AM GMT
Accidents of Birth: The extraordinary tale of mtDNA haplogroup R30b
has lessons for us all
The future King of England is partly Indian. However that statement
affects Anglo-Indian relations - and it can hardly hurt them - the
fact that it can be made with confidence speaks volumes about the
power of science in the age of genetics to illuminate our history.
Genetic genealogy can solve personal mysteries by linking individuals
to vast extended families they did not know they had. It can answer
the yearnings of the uprooted for clues about their roots. It can
support (and undermine) grand theories of human migration, and it can
debunk prejudice with findings so startling that no sensible fiction
writer would make them up. What we now know about the Duke of
Cambridge's lineage is almost as significant for his future subjects
as it is for him.
It was already known when Lady Diana Spencer became the Princess of
Wales that one of her 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers was a
women of supposedly Armenian extraction who lived out of wedlock in
Bombay in the second decade of the 19th century with a Scot named
Theodore Forbes. Her name was Eliza Kerwak. What was not known until
one of her many non-royal descendents, Robin Dewhurst, agreed to a DNA
test was that whether or not Eliza was partly Armenian, she was
definitely at least half-Indian.
Only genetics could reach so far back with such impressive certainty.
Eliza's ethnicity can be deduced because Mr Dewhurst's DNA contains a
rare genetic marker that, in the early 19th century, was found only in
South Asia. That marker consists of a tell-tale cluster of
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Like all mtDNA, haplogroup R30b passes
between generations from mother to daughter and mutates slowly and
steadily enough for scientists to trace its odyssey through time and
space with great precision.
That odyssey began millennia before the Derwak-Forbes liaison in
Bombay, meandering across hundreds of generations and millions of
lines of descent. As scientists follow more markers across human
history, they are creating the ultimate family tree - a tangle of data
that fills in gaps left by conventional genealogies, but also by
conventional archaeology and anthropology.
The identification of Richard III's skeleton beneath a Leicester car
park this year was a spectacular case of DNA sleuthing in the service
of historians. But it can also help adopted children to trace their
biological forebears. It has been embraced by immigrant communities in
the United States to chart the long journeys undertaken by their
grandparents' and previous generations; and by African Americans
determined to know precisely where their ancestors were taken into
slavery.
Genetic genealogy can serve as a corrective to alarmists who claim
certain markers predispose all humans to disease; in fact they seldom
apply across all populations. It can also torpedo the dangerous
bigotry of race-based theories of intelligence. The truth is we are
all, to a greater or lesser degree, genetic mongrels.
As the tools of genetic analysis find mass markets, the price of
self-knowledge at this cellular level is falling fast. The more people
embrace it, the greater the number of connections they will discover
with each other. Rodney King once asked: "Can't we all get along?"
With a little help from DNA, it may not seem so impossible.
June 21, 2013 Friday 11:19 AM GMT
Accidents of Birth: The extraordinary tale of mtDNA haplogroup R30b
has lessons for us all
The future King of England is partly Indian. However that statement
affects Anglo-Indian relations - and it can hardly hurt them - the
fact that it can be made with confidence speaks volumes about the
power of science in the age of genetics to illuminate our history.
Genetic genealogy can solve personal mysteries by linking individuals
to vast extended families they did not know they had. It can answer
the yearnings of the uprooted for clues about their roots. It can
support (and undermine) grand theories of human migration, and it can
debunk prejudice with findings so startling that no sensible fiction
writer would make them up. What we now know about the Duke of
Cambridge's lineage is almost as significant for his future subjects
as it is for him.
It was already known when Lady Diana Spencer became the Princess of
Wales that one of her 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers was a
women of supposedly Armenian extraction who lived out of wedlock in
Bombay in the second decade of the 19th century with a Scot named
Theodore Forbes. Her name was Eliza Kerwak. What was not known until
one of her many non-royal descendents, Robin Dewhurst, agreed to a DNA
test was that whether or not Eliza was partly Armenian, she was
definitely at least half-Indian.
Only genetics could reach so far back with such impressive certainty.
Eliza's ethnicity can be deduced because Mr Dewhurst's DNA contains a
rare genetic marker that, in the early 19th century, was found only in
South Asia. That marker consists of a tell-tale cluster of
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Like all mtDNA, haplogroup R30b passes
between generations from mother to daughter and mutates slowly and
steadily enough for scientists to trace its odyssey through time and
space with great precision.
That odyssey began millennia before the Derwak-Forbes liaison in
Bombay, meandering across hundreds of generations and millions of
lines of descent. As scientists follow more markers across human
history, they are creating the ultimate family tree - a tangle of data
that fills in gaps left by conventional genealogies, but also by
conventional archaeology and anthropology.
The identification of Richard III's skeleton beneath a Leicester car
park this year was a spectacular case of DNA sleuthing in the service
of historians. But it can also help adopted children to trace their
biological forebears. It has been embraced by immigrant communities in
the United States to chart the long journeys undertaken by their
grandparents' and previous generations; and by African Americans
determined to know precisely where their ancestors were taken into
slavery.
Genetic genealogy can serve as a corrective to alarmists who claim
certain markers predispose all humans to disease; in fact they seldom
apply across all populations. It can also torpedo the dangerous
bigotry of race-based theories of intelligence. The truth is we are
all, to a greater or lesser degree, genetic mongrels.
As the tools of genetic analysis find mass markets, the price of
self-knowledge at this cellular level is falling fast. The more people
embrace it, the greater the number of connections they will discover
with each other. Rodney King once asked: "Can't we all get along?"
With a little help from DNA, it may not seem so impossible.