“The Human Family Tree,” Sunday night on the National Geographic Channel, is a stunt. But it’s an enlightening one, a painless lesson in biology and history that could change, or at least tweak, a lot of people’s fundamental perceptions about race.
The fun begins with members of the Genographic Project, a nonprofit venture of National Geographic and I.B.M., descending on a street fair in Astoria, Queens, to swab the cheeks of a hundred or so people in that highly diverse borough. The DNA samples will be used to demonstrate how these New Yorkers share common ancestries despite their assorted heritages: Puerto Rican, Irish, Turkish, African, Indian, Thai, Korean and so on.
(Also fun: the choice of narrator. It’s Kevin Bacon, Mr. Six Degrees of Separation himself.)
The program is part detective story. What secrets lie hidden in these Queens genes? The experimentees learn their results at the end of the two-hour show, and while the discovery of a white man or an Ashkenazi Jew in the family tree might seem unsurprising to the viewer, it knocks some of the test subjects for a loop. That’s the point, really: while it’s easy to pay lip service to the notion that we’re all the same under the skin, it can be hard to digest when you find out that it applies to you.
The bulk of the program is a standard science documentary about human migration, with the mandatory Google Earth-style zoom-ins, lots of arrows moving across continents and actors playing our ancestors at different points on the Homo sapiens timeline. (This involves wearing a lot of fake hair and non-PETA-approved fabrics.) You feel sorry in passing for our cousins the Neanderthals, dwindling toward extinction in their Iberian caves just 25,000 years ago while we were walking across the Bering Strait and populating the last new world.
The information being offered here is not original or particularly controversial (unless you’re in the camp that says no to the scientific method right up front). But to claim that we are all African - that every living man traces back to one 60,000-year-old African man and every living woman to one 200,000-year-old African woman, and that race is solely a product of adaptation to the environment - still feels like a revolutionary assertion, one that we as a species aren’t necessarily ready to grapple with.
On the way to their big we-are-family finish, the makers of “The Human Family Tree” build their case gently but insistently, showing how changes in climate explain different waves of migration out of Africa and across first Asia and then Europe. Moving ice and rising and falling oceans alternately give passage to or strand humans in places like Indonesia, the Philippines and Spain, accounting for local physical variations.
Facts are dropped in that illustrate both what a long, slow process our movement around the planet was and how quickly conquest and commerce affected the gene pool once some basic transportation problems were solved. Even at this point, the first three-quarters of human history took place entirely in Africa. But now 35 percent of African-American men carry European genetic markers.
After all this information, the big reveal is a bit of a disappointment. The DNA tests give a broad overview of racial heritage; they don’t tell you that, say, your great-great-great-grandmother was Oglala Sioux. The test subjects are brought together on a yard-size map of the world and made to stand on the continents representing their predominant markers; then they shuffle around in groups, re-enacting human migration in reverse, until everyone is crowded into Africa, cheering and waving color-coded DNA pennants.
The Queens cohort does, in fact, represent all the major migratory groups, thereby justifying the stunt’s original premise. This might not have worked in Stockholm or Nairobi, but you suspect that just as good a result could have been obtained in Los Angeles or Paris.
Of course, even in Queens not everyone is on board. An Irish-American man and his Korean-American girlfriend take part in the experiment to prove a point to her parents, who are conspicuous by their absence at the final get-together. It would be good “if my parents see this, you know, later on or whatever,” the woman says, but you don’t get the feeling that they’ll be watching anytime soon.
THE HUMAN FAMILY TREE
National Geographic Channel, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced by National Geographic Television for the National Geographic Channel. For National Geographic Television: Chad Cohen, producer. For the National Geographic Channel: Char Serwa, senior executive producer; Juliet Blake, senior vice president of production; Steve Burns, executive vice president of content. Spencer Wells, project director; Kevin Bacon, narrator.
Read also preview of The Human Family Tree
Source: The New York Times
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