Our DNA Prehistory
We have had our DNA analyzed by the Genographic Project, which reports that Harry belongs to the rare Haplogroup G. Because all parallel prehistoric lineages have died out, the man whose reconstructed face is shown on the right was the ancestor of every present-day human male. He lived in East Africa, but about 60,000 years ago his descendants migrated out of Africa.
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| This reconstruction combines features of a human skull 100,000 years old with those of Tanzania's Hazabe hunter – gatherers, whose male genes show almost no change through the last 60,000 years |
One man's DNA developed a mutation at the M-201 site on the Y chromosome. He was
the common ancestor of all members of the G Haplogroup, some of whom pushed on
to India where they founded the Indus Valley civilization. A man who stayed
behind in the Middle East had a further mutation at the P-15 site. His
descendants form the sub-Haplogroup G2. Some of them migrated into Europe,
perhaps before it was gripped by the last ice age 15,000 years ago. Others
helped to invent farming in the fertile crescent (around today's Iraq) 10,000
years ago. Deep clade testing by
Family Tree DNA shows that Harry is a G2, like some Jews. Considering that
his paternal grandfather, a London diamond merchant, was a
Sephardic Jew
— who threw his son out of the house for being insufficiently Orthodox — Harry's
ancestors may have been among those who emigrated to Spain after the Romans
conquered Judea in 67BCE
.
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Liliane's mitochondrial DNA belongs to Haplogroup H — which may have saved her
life in 2005 when she had an infection so severe that she was hospitalized in
critical care.
A recent study found that patients with
serious sepsis were twice as likely to survive if they belonged to Haplogroup H compared to any other haplogroup.
The fact that H confers increased survival explains why it is so common among Europeans (two in five have it) although it
is the most recent haplogroup to evolve.
Haplogroup H spread from the Near East and the Caucasus at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
