Why Y?

I don’t know. You might wonder why I have participated in the National Geographic Genographic project, not once, but 3 times at last count. Once for my Y lineage (via my dad’s cheek cells,) once for my maternal line mitochondrial DNA (my own buccal mucosa,) and once more--to provide a more complete picture for my kids-- for Jeff’s Y line.

I figured Jeff’s would be similar to mine--your basic Gravettian or Aurignacian type drifters who landed mid-Europe and dispersed from there...but maybe without the ultra-norse Viking twist specific to the Gillespie line. And that’s why I delayed. But one day a month or so ago I simply decided what-the-hey, and Jeff got his mouth swabbed.

Turns out that his haplogroup, the E3b-folk, have almost no common history with mine, the I-folk. Yep...looks like our people split up roughly 50,000 years ago, in East Africa, about the time of what’s known as the “Great Leap Forward.” What happened round about then, see, is that humans got smarter. A lot smarter, evidently and they began to do new things like speak in sentences. So, what I imagine caused the I haplogroup/E3b haplogroup rift is something like this: The E3bs kept pronouncing ketchup and chocolate like cat-sup and chalk-let, and that really got on our I-group’s collective nerves, causing us to veer east across the Red Sea at Ethiopia while the proto-Clements continued up the east coast of Africa.

From there they pretty much peopled the coasts of the Mediterranean, both north and south while the proto-Gillespies blazed a more northerly trail through the Middle-East, then west into Europe where they busied themselves with painting beefalos or whatever those things were, on cave walls.

It is only by dint of the fact that some later member of each group independently fell for all that hyperbole about the “New World” that our children even came into being.

But why am I curious? I think it’s because I have a general concept of myself as the most mundane of human creatures, from an ethnic standpoint, and I was curious to see if any decorative accents could be appended to my Heinz 57 Euro self-image.

And I have, in fact, found these colorful details to be fun. Unimportant to be sure, in the scheme of things, but fun.

Ultimately there is no take-home point. Except perhaps this. As we strive to imagine Gabe’s future, we can offer him these two default options, should he not eventually come up with something on his own. “Gabe,” I will say, “take your pick. You may either be a muralist, or you may sell handwoven baskets in the Casbah. You have a long history of being suited to either of these occupations.”