2.6% Neanderthal - and Proud of It!

 

by Pa Rock

Hat Size 8

Yesterday, I filled this space with a description of the work that my very sweet and highly dedicated ChatGPT bot, Ernestine, and I are doing as we create a homepage dedicated to preserving and sharing my  family genealogy and research.   In that posting I described the desktop on my computer as being covered in a cat vomit of icons spewed from top to bottom and side to side.  We are currently involved in the process of going though those icons one-by-one as we decide what to preserve and what to pitch.

Perhaps I should have a desktop yard sale:  two random icons for three dollars - or five for five. 

Let's set that aside for the moment.

Earlier in the week I posted about meeting my sister and three of her four adult children for brunch in Harrison, Arkansas, this past Sunday.  Two of those in attendance were my nephew, Justin, and his son, Graham, who is my grandnephew.    During our visit Justin asked me to give Graham a "40,000-foot view of where the Macy portion of his family originated.  I was caught off-guard and stammered a response that we were basically rooted in the British Isles - England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland - which is factually accurate, but I knew that I had more detailed information somewhere which I needed to dig out and share.

Yesterday, while wading through the cat vomit, I came across what I was seeking, and infographic from the National Geographic Society that gave a breakdown of my genetic composition by nationality and showed the general routes my ancestors took out of Africa and around the globe.  (And yes, no matter what you learn in Sunday School or from the Trump administration, mankind is firmly rooted in the bowels of sub-Saharan Africa.)

The Human Genome Project, information to decode the arrangement of information on the human gene, was officially announced to be "complete" in 2003, although gaps remained and it wasn't until August of 2023 that the full sequence of the human genome was finally published.  But beginning in the early 2000s as the general information became available, private companies started analyzing human genes for research purposes as well as to benefit family historians (for a profit).

The National Geographic Society was one of the first organizations out of the gate on this push to analyze history through human genetics.  In 2005 they began an endeavor called the "Genographic Project" to study human migrations patterns.  To that end, they collected DNA samples from members of the public who paid a fee to be part of the research - and in return for the fee they were provided with their DNA results.  This was the first public effort of its kind, before the dozens of pay companies like "Ancestry," "23 and Me," "My Heritage," and "Family Tree DNA."  I'm an adventurous sort, and when I heard about the National Geographic program I signed up, received the vial in the mail, spit in it, and sent it off..

Not being the sharpest rock on the beach, I didn't understand much of the information that the company ultimately provided, but I did like the pictures and saved the infographic to my computer desk top.  National Geographic quit selling their kits and abandoned the research in 2019, but in the interim they collected and analyzed DNA data from 579,685 participants - one of those being ol' Pa Rock!

So what did I learn from the experience?  What was on the infographic that I saved to my desktop and then forgot about?  What is it that my grandnephew, Graham, would probably like to know?

First of all, Graham, your genetic make-up would be a lot like mine, but have differences.  My DNA and your grandmother's (Abigail) would be very similar because we are siblings with the same parents.  But your DNA would contain markers also obtained from your father's father and your mother. But, a good chunk of what I am about to divulge would apply to you as well.

44% of my DNA is based in Northern Europe, 38% in the area around the Mediterranean Sea, and 18% in Southwest Asia.  Somewhere along the line that led to your grandmother and me, we also acquired 2.6% of our genome from ancestors who were Neanderthals (which explains my large skull size - which I had thought was just to house my big brain!)

Google, the God of all knowledge, tells us that almost every modern human alive today has some Neanderthal DNA in their genome.  Google also tells us that Americans with European, Asian, and Indigenous American heritage carry the highest levels of Neanderthal DNA, typically 1% to 2% of their genome - and mine is 2.6% - whoops!

Ernestine and I both tried in vain yesterday to get the National Geographic infographic turned into something called a PDF so that I could share it by email with all of my partially-Neanderthal relatives.  Now I am on the lookout for a computer-savvy adolescent to come in and do that for me.  Somehow, though , we did get it posted to my new genealogy homepage, so it will be available there when the webpage is finally published.

In the meantime I am thinking about getting a tee-shirt made that says:  "2.6% Neanderthal and Proud of It!  What's your excuse?"  It will probably need to be a 2-or-3X.  I have a Neanderthal gut, too!  

Happy trails!