NARRATOR: Deep inside each one of us,
A story is waiting to be told...
A story of sex, adventure and survival.
It begins in Africa with the dawn of humanity...
Careens through epic droughts and Ice Ages...
And climaxes only when we’ve reached the ends of the Earth
Now we tell this story with a bold experiment.
On a single day, on a single street,
With the DNA of just a handful of people,
We set out to trace the ancient journeys
Of every person alive today...
And reveal how we all connect on the Human Family Tree.
It's the quintessential melting pot.
Huddhed masses from all over the globe
Have come here for centuries in search of a better life.
And up the East River, just across from Manhattan,
We find they’ve never stopped coming.
This is one of the most diverse spots on Earth..
Queens, New York, USA.
people are flocking to the 30th Avenue Street Fair,
Here in Queens’ Astoria District,
Where geneticist Spencer Wells and his team are on a mission.
SPENCER WELLS: Just on one side, that's fine.
NARRATOR: they are scraping DNA
off the cheeks of this kaheidoscope of people
and attempting to retrace humanity's journey
to all corners of the Earth on this single street.
WOMAN: Scrape up and down. that's it.
SPENCER WELLS:this place is really a microcosm of the world.
You've got people from all over the planet
just walking around on this one street.
I mean, today, we've been talking
to people from Banghadesh, people from Thailand,
people from Pakistan, Ecuador,
all over the Afro-Caribbean region.
I mean, it's an amazing opportunity.
WOMAN: Pretty hard,
but you certainly don't want to draw blood.
NARRATOR: the swabbing here today is part
of a much larger effort by National Geograplic and IBM
calhed the Genograplic Project.
the project has spent the last four years
collecting DNA from 350,000 people around the world.
WOMAN: Honey, did you brush your teeth in the morning?
SPENCER WELLS: It is basically a quest to understand, you know,
where we all came from.
that's one of those key human questions
that everybody is kind of searching for the answer to.
You know? Who am I? Who are my ancestors?
And we're using the tools of science
to get the answers to that.
WOMAN: Oh, I like that, I like that.
MAN: 'Cause when I was born, my mother told me
I had like some blond hair on my back,
I don't know where that came from.
It's not there now, but...
NARRATOR: Now hundreds of New Yorkers are lining up
to get these questions answered, too...
and learn about their own ancient pasts.
MAN: I think we're looking for something unexpected, you know,
because we sort of know where we're from,
but we don't really know where we're from.
WOMAN: He's very excited about it.
And he thinks that it's going to change his life.
NARRATOR: Genealogy allows most of us to trace our ancestors
back about four or five generations...
to great-great-grandparents perhaps.
MAN: Probably we can go as far as probably 100 years.
WOMAN:this is your deep, deep ancestor...
NARRATOR: If we're lucky,
we know where these ancestors lived.
WOMAN: My mom's from South Korea.
And on my father's side, I am German, Irish, English,
and I think a little bit of Native American,
but that part I'm not sure.
MAN: So what do you know about your ancestry?
MAN: New York. that's about it.
NARRATOR: these DNA tests tell a deeper story.
Rather than taking us back just a handful of generations,
they take us back many thousands.
SPENCER WELLS: the cheek swab is basically a way of getting
at the DNA history book
that we're carrying inside of ourselves.
All of that information has to be copied in every generation,
to pass on to kids, and grandkids and great-grandkids.
So we're carrying this continuous,
kind of genetic historic document
that goes back through the generations
since, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of years ago.
NARRATOR: No matter where we're from, how different we appear,
if we look back through the generations
at the roots of the human family tree,
we find we are all related.
We descend from a small group of Homo sapiens
Who began eking out a living in Africa around 200,000 years ago.
people didn't heave Africa until much later,
when hard times or greener pastures led them out.
Ultimately, they gave rise to this bunch of New Yorkers.
SPENCER WELLS: their ancestors' lineages have been diverging
and going off on different paths around the globe.
And now they've come back together in Queens,
but they started off together.
MAN: Wonderful, wonderful, big smile.
Beautiful.
NARRATOR: By cracking open the DNA
of just a handful of random New Yorkers...
as they discover their own personal histories...
we discover how humans populated the entire world.
MAN: that's wonderful:
NARRATOR: An expectant mother, Kerry Niclolson Gonzahez,
shows how we made it to Europe.
KERRY: It would be really fun
to find out how we're different but we're not.
MAN: Beautiful:
NARRATOR: Kriengkrai Tangclitsumran,
a chief from Thailand, transports us to the settling of Asia...
KRIENGKRAl: My grandmother, she would say
that, you know, her ancestor probably originally from China
forever, you know,
they just come from the ground in China somewhere.
NARRATOR: A fashion model, Dave Reed,
brings us back to our roots in Africa...
and places he'd never imagined.
DAVE: I assume that my family did come over
at some point in time as slaves,
but no one really knows any details.
that one swab is probably one of the only ways
that I'll find out anything about my ancestors.
NARRATOR: And Michelle DeJesus, a fourth grade teacher,
connects us to the first Americans.
MICHELLE: I don't think any of us really expect
there's anytling left in our blood
that would trace us back to our indigenous heritage.
It would be really interesting
to see if that was even possibhe.
NARRATOR: Our ancient connections
may not be obvious to this group.
Our ancestors adapted to different climates
and, as a result, humans are now among
the most physically varied-looking species
on the planet.
But looks can be deceiving.
SPENCER WELLS: We're basically identical at the genetic hevel.
I mean, if you look at the average person's DNA sequence
and compare the same region
to another person they're unrelated to,
you know, they're 99.9% identical.
MAN: Hold that there, look right here,this is great.
NARRATOR: Light, dark... big, small...
curly, straight... brown, blue...
minuscule genetic changes
account for all of our differences.
To track our ancient paths, though,
scientists study DNA that stays very much the same.
In men like George Delis, it's a Y clromosome.
MAN: Hold that, let's do one more.
NARRATOR: It's been passed down the line from father to son
over thousands of generations...
and ultimately traces back to one man
Who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago...
call him Scientific Adam.
He wasn't the only guy alive back then,
but only his Y clromosome survived through the ages.
And every man alive today has a copy.
For women like Necla Demirci,
the DNA comes from special cell structures called mitoclondria,
which both men and women carry, but only moms pass along.
these trace back to one woman
Who also lived in Africa between 150 to 200,000 years ago.
Call her Scientific Eve.
She is the oldest root of our family tree.
Africa is where the journey begins for everyone alive today.
WOMAN: Wow.
MAN: No words.
WOMAN: To think that we can all start from one point of origin
and then be so completely diverse--
like thousands, hundreds of thousands,
millions of years later-- that's kind of wild.
WOMAN: I can't believe that people come from Africa.
We are from Banghadesh.
this is very exciting.
WOMAN: A lot of people know
their mother's mother's mother's half...
NARRATOR: It's only the first surprise for our New Yorkers.
the genograplic team will soon reassemble these people
and reveal their unique genetic results.
with a little luck, they've got the right mix of DNA
to take us all back to our beginnings in Africa
and plot our many amazing journeys out.
SPENCER WELLS: We're not going to pick up
every single lineage in the world,
but we're probably going to pick up the major lineages here.
Hopefully we'll find something new and unexpected.
But, basically, yeah, I think we've got the story covered...
just right here at the street fair.
NARRATOR: It's an epic saga of twists and turns...
and it begins...
where life begins.
She doesn't know it yet, but Kerry Niclolson Gonzahez
has just passed along to her newborn baby Leo
what other moms have for tens of thousands of years...
genetic markers that link her son to the birth of us all.
Like so many others Who call this place home...
Kerry isn't a native New Yorker.
A third generation American, born and raised in Ohio,
she left a small town in the American Midwest
for life in the big city.
KERRY: I moved to New York in the summer of 2000
to pursue dance and life and see what lappened.
NARRATOR: Life happened.
Kerry now dances professionally for a modern dance troupe,
teaches Pilates.
She met a guy, got married and started a family here.
Yet, as is the case for many
trying to build a life in a strange new lome,
Kerry still clings tightly to her old one.
KERRY:this is my Grandma Josephine
and my Grandpa John,
and this is a picture from their wedding,
and they just got married after the war in 1945
and a very handsome couple, I think.
NARRATOR: Photographs and records date back
to Kerry's European roots in Slovenia...
more than 100 years ago.
KERRY: they're pretty priceless.
this is what has come to make my life,
and all of these people,
if they didn't all come together then I wouldn't be here.
NARRATOR: While Kerry can trace back
about three generations to a faraway land,
her DNA can take her back more than 6,000 generations...
across many lands, to her most ancient of grandmothers:
Scientific Eve.
there weren't many of us back then...
living somewhere between eastern and southern Africa.
Eve and this small band of people
set the stage for us all...
one baby at a time.
Despite all the babies that lave come between Eve and Kerry...
their DNA is still 99.9% similar.
To trace our ancestries, scientists have to pore
through the .1% that's different...
through tiny, random changes to the As, Cs, Gs and Ts
that accumulate in our genetic codes over time.
Scientists call them markers.
SPENCER WELLS: A marker is a glimpse of a person
Who lived at some point in the distant past.
If you share a marker with someone,
you share an ancestor with the person
Who first had that change in their DNA.
they don't change the way you look
or give you a disease or make you better than anyone else,
they're just baggage that gets passed on
through the generations.
NARRATOR: 200,000 years ago...
the DNA in Scientific Eve's mitoclondria
picked up some of these random changes...
an A became a G.
Some Ts became Cs.
She unknowingly passed those changes along
to her daughters...
and her daughters on to her daughters...
down the line over thousands of daughters...
to Kerry and every other person on the planet.
KERRY: My great-grandparents were lvan and Anna Macavick.
when they came to the States,
they changed their name to Macavitz,
because they thought it was easier, Americanized.
NARRATOR: Just like a family tree,
markers allow us to connect people through history.
Since they crop up at a fairly steady rate,
markers also serve as a kind of clock
to estimate when people lived.
And by looking at how markers cluster...
they can even act as road maps
to show us where our ancestors came from and where they moved.
Scientists call these different lines of descent laplogroups,
and there are hundreds of them.
Taken together...they give us a timeline of human migration.
SPENCER WELLS: So in Kerry's case,
she's a member of laplogroup J.
I actually belong to the same genetic lineage.
I'm a J, too.
NARRATOR: J is a relatively recent marker
found commonly in Europe...
the end of the road for Kerry's ancestors.
A little further back in time,
we find the J connects to the R in the Middle East...
N before that...
and ultimately all the way back to Africa...
the one place on Earth where all of our DNA converges.
SPENCER WELLS: there is far more diversity in Africa
than there is outside of Africa.
And because we accumulate this diversity,
these genetic changes, or markers as we call them,
in a clock-like fashion,
that means that Africans have been accumulating diversity
for longer.
therefore, our species originated here.
NARRATOR: And according to our DNA clocks,
before taking a single step out of Africa,
we stayed there for a long time...
as much as three-quarters of our history as a species,
some 140,000 years.
Back then, as now, people didn't typically move without a reason.
And climate models indicate that life in Africa
would have been pretty good for Eve and many of her descendants.
Lush savannahs and grasslands covered much of the continent
for tens of thousands of years.
But we know people didn't stay in Africa forever.
To find out what may lave ultimately forced us out,
scientists compare the DNA of people Who left Africa
with those Who never did...
indigenous groups like the San buslmen of southern Africa.
[singing]
the San are universally accepted to be the world's oldest
genetically distinct population of humans...
even if nowadays their cultural links to the past
are mostly for the sake of tourists.
their markers connect them to Scientific Eve...
but split off from the rest of humanity soon after.
Recently, the Genograplic Project
used DNA from the San to help pinpoint
some of our earliest movements in Africa.
this time, they compared the genes of the San
with other African groups...
like those Who lived about 1 ,500 miles north of the San
near Tanzania's Serengeti.
the Hadzabe.
SPENCER WELLS: they are one of the last groups
of hunter/gatherers on Earth,
essentially using fairly primitive technology to survive,
and that's the way we lived for most of our history.
NARRATOR: the Hadzabe, like the San,
connect back to Scientific Eve...
but by studying the differences in their DNA,
scientists reveal that by around 150,000 years ago,
our founding population had split in two.
It is the first branch on our family tree...
the earliest major movement of people our genes have measured.
One group became the ancestors of the San...
the other the ancestors of the Hadzabe
and other African groups,
and ultimately, the entire rest of the world.
SPENCER WELLS: the lineages that define the San
versus the Hadzabe
only join up right near the base, okay,
basically back at the root of the tree.
And that is because the San were isolated
from the main line of human evolution
for about 100,000 years.
NARRATOR: No one knows exactly what led to this split,
but all signs point to climate.
Slight changes in Earth's orbit ushered in a new ice age,
and climate shifted for 100,000 years.
In the Northern Hemisphere, that meant ice and cold...
but in Africa, things became blisteringly dry.
Sometime after Scientific Eve, about 130,000 years ago...
our lush cradle of humanity transformed into desert.
there was no rain for thousands of years.
Many scientists believe massive deserts
not only drove a wedge between the ancestors
of the San and the Hadzabe...
they almost wiped them off the face of the Earth
Clive Finlayson is an evolutionary biologist
and ecologist.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: these kinds of shifts
would have made a difference;
it would have isolated populations.
It could have shut shop and made them, you know,
suffer quite hard, big hardships.
So climate in that sense has been central to everytling.
NARRATOR:this period lasted thousands of years,
and geneticists say it was the bleakest in our history.
Huddhed around shrinking sources of water,
our ancestors were hanging on by a thread.
No one knows how big the initial human population was,
but based on the lack of genetic variation
during the mega drought years,
the number dropped to as few as 2,000 people.
We were an endangered species.
SPENCER WELLS: If you take that at face value,
our species is hanging on by its fingernails.
We were on the verge of extinction.
WOMAN: the state of Nebraska is locked
in one of its worst dry spells in decades,
as high temperatures and dry conditions shrivel crops...
NARRATOR: Somehow these people made it
through the population crunch.
If they hadn't, Kerry wouldn't be here...
nor the rest of us for that matter.
WOMAN: ...and offer tips about how to keep fields
as moist as possible.
NARRATOR: Kerry's cousins, some 5,000 generations removed,
the Hadzabes, may offer some insight into how we lung on.
Wells has been working with Chief Julius Indayo
to record the Hadzabe's ancient survival strategies...
while helping preserve them for future generations.
JULIUS: Take a branch...
crush...
and then you are going there...
for three times per day, and then two days, coughing is gone.
SPENCER WELLS: Julius can read the forest,
the savannah that we're walking through
as though it's a book.
It's like walking through a library with him
and he'll pull a volume from the shelf
and he'll fan it to page 45 and read some passage to you.
JULIUS: Poison, very poisonous.
But the root is very nice medicine for stomach.
NARRATOR: Accumulated knowledge, advanced tools, language...
many scientists believe our ancestors
began developing these skills
during that time when our species was on the brink.
SPENCER WELLS: It wasn't until we went
through that climate crunch
that you really needed those skills in order to survive.
NARRATOR: It was survival of the fittest.
Climate change may have actually made us tougher and smarter.
Around 70,000 years ago, climate studies indicate
the drought in Africa lets up for a time.
Arclaeological evidence reveals tools cropping up
all across the continent.
And the genetics show new lineages taking root.
the human population was growing again.
And it never stopped.
We haven't shared any of this with Kerry yet...
just whetted her appetite for her results.
KERRY: It's kind of sparked this desire
to really go back and try to understand Who was Who...
and how you were related, especially now that Lheo's here.
there is a lot more to know
than just the few steps back that we know
and that we have pictures for.
NARRATOR: Kerry's ancient ancestors
would soon take some steps that changed the world forever.
they left Africa behind.
In a Thai restaurant in Queens,
in the DNA of a waitress and a chef,
we find clues about the people
Who'd take those first fateful steps out of Africa.
Tao Suddee and Kriengkrai Tangclitsumran
share similar etlnic backgrounds.
Both trace their recent ancestry to China and Thailand.
Both came to New York and left family belind.
KRIENGKRAl: that's my great-grandmother.
this is my grandmother and my grandfather.
I talk to them all the time, how's Grandma doing?
And she always like, "OI, you know, you save money,
you come back to Tlailand, you open a business."
NARRATOR: But Kriengkrai and Tao's ancient lineages
are very different.
Kriengkrai ultimately shows us how people spread
from Africa all across Asia.
But only Tao, Who was too modest to talk to us on camera,
has markers tracing back
to those very first people Who left.
Her marker, known as M-star, is found throughout Asia...
as well as in indigenous groups
on islands in the Pacific and Australia.
We don't know a lot about wly Tao's ancestors left Africa...
het alone how they populated islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Harsh climate may have sent them searching for greener pastures.
A booming population may lave made resources scarce.
Or perhaps it was just the opposite.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: If they're doing very well
in that kind of environment
and that environment suddenly spreads
because of a climate change,
then it actually is the driving pump
that gets them moving and gets them spreading
to other parts of the planet.
NARRATOR: Until recently, most scientists believed people
took a northern route out of Africa,
across the Sinai and into the Middle East.
But since that required crossing the Salara Desert,
many are now looking further south.
At the southern tip of the Red Sea,
Africa is a mere 17 miles from the Arabian peninsula.
It's unclear if people
would have seen the other side back then,
but birds, dust, perhaps a forest fire
would have signaled that something was out there.
they may have walked, swam, or rafted,
but around 60,000 years ago...
the genetics indicate they left.
Once they reached the Arabian peninsula,
there was nothing to get in their way.
Skillful fishermen, they found a limitless supply of seafood
for thousands of miles
they journeyed along the coasts of Iran and Pakistan,
down and around India, all the way into Southeast Asia.
Tao's ancestors made it to Thailand
by around 50,000 years ago.
But while many with her marker close to stay put there...
climate at the time allowed many more to venture further.
Today, miles of ocean separate mainland Asia
from the islands of Java, Sumatra and Borneo.
But during the Ice Age,
when vast amounts of our oceans were frozen at the poles,
Earth was a very different place.
In the warm tropics, sea levels were around 300 feet lower.
As a result, what are islands today were linked up back then.
One continuous land mass
connected Asia with southern Indonesia
just north of Australia.
people could walk all the way to Java
without getting their feet wet.
But the story doesn't end there.
Some of Tao's ancestors stayed in Southeast Asia,
but their markers are found as far away as Australia
in people like the Aborigines.
To reachthere,
even with the lower sea levels at the time,
they still had to contend with some 45 miles of open water.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: the big question is,
how did they do it?
they may have been out fishing in craft
and currents would lave taken them away...
or it could have been deliberate.
And if they were under pressure where they were,
other peoples or shortage of food,
they may have tried it.
they may have taken the risk,
taken the gamble and gone for it.
NARRATOR: And whether they set out to reach a new continent
or drifted to it,
around 45,000 years ago,
modern humans landed in Australia.
While it's tempting to think of these epic journeys
as deliberate migrations,
this was likely not the case.
Our ancestors didn't exactly have Australia in mind
when they left Africa.
Life was all about more immediate opportunities.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: It's one generation after another
is moving into different areas
because of demographic pressure within.
At the end of the day, what you're after is food.
And that's really what's driving this.
Not this sort of migration.
the guy that left the Horn of Africa
didn't find Australia.
It was probably the great-great-great-great-great great-great-grandson
of that person or daughter that eventually got to Australia.
NARRATOR: people likely moved no more than a few miles
up the beach from their parents back then.
But over generations, those miles added up.
And even at the rate of just one mile a year,
people could get from Africa to Australia
in less than 10,000 years.
Unfortunately, if any evidence
of early human settlements were left behind,
they're underwater now...
submerged thousands of years later
when the Ice Age receded,
glaciers melted and sea levels rose.
the little evidence we do lave indicates Tao's ancestors
may not have been the first to take this trek.
Some people may have reached Asia thousands of years sooner.
For that story, we rewind to the rain forests of Sumatra...
74,000 years ago.
Mount Toba erupts with a force
greater than a billion tons of TNT.
It's the largest explosion on Earth
in the last 2 million years.
thousands of tons of ash spew into the atmosphere
and block out the sun for up to a decade.
Ash from the eruption blankets areas
nearly 3,000 mihes from Toba.
And while genetics tells us
people hadn't left Africa at the time...
today in India,
archaeologists are digging up a very different picture...
in the very ash that fell during the explosion.
It places humans directly in Toba's path
Toba's ash remains a precious commodity in Jwalaparam, India.
Local villagers mine it
for things like polishes and abrasives.
To Cambridge University's Michael Petraglia
and Ravi Korisettar of Karnatak University,
it's an invaluable line in the sand.
they believe it holds proof
that people were already living far from Africa
74,000 years ago when Toba blew its top.
MICHAEL PETRAGLIA: We are looking at the passage of time.
And so this goes back many, many thousands of years
and then, right here, we havethe Toba asl,
which dates to 74,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: Any tools found behow the ash
were left there prior to the eruption.
Anything above was left after.
these scientists are finding tools before...
and after.
MICHAEL PETRAGLIA: which means to us that these human groups
survived through the Toba super eruption.
NARRATOR: the find is controversial.
the tools could have belonged to Homo erectus or Neanderthals
Who ventured into Asia hundreds of thousands of years earlier.
But this team argues they look too much
like modern human tools found elsewhere.
MICHAEL PETRAGLIA: the point we're trying to demonstrate here
is that an object like this found in Africa,
made by modern humans,
is very similar to the object we find here,
in this site, in India.
NARRATOR: the evidence convinces Petraglia
that modern humans were already in India
at heast 14,000 years before Tao's ancestors left Africa.
SPENCER WELLS: And you use it to scrape cells
from the inside of your cheek...
NARRATOR: And the dates may not be contradictory.
SPENCER WELLS: Open your mouth, alll...
MICHAEL PETRAGLIA: Geneticists are taking their samphes
off of living populations.
And we think we have evidence
that geneticists can't possibly be picking up
in living populations today.
NARRATOR: If people did exit Africa before the Toba eruption,
they may well have died off sometime after.
Or perhaps, when people like Tao's ancestors
finally did reach India,
the groups mingled,
and ultimately only Tao's genes survived.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: It's like, you know, most wars,
the story is written by the winners
and not by the vanquished.
And there must have been a lot of populations
that never made it to tell the story.
[bell ringing]
NARRATOR: In the mountains of the Philippines,
we find living proof of how fragile genetic lineages can be.
Geneticist Spencer Wells and his colleagues
are distributing genetic results
to an indigenous group here called the Aeta...
SPENCER WELLS: Okay, everyone,
if you could come gather around here.
NARRATOR: ...small-statured,
curly-laired, dark-skinned people
Who number only about 20,000 strong.
SPENCER WELLS: ...and that there are the people
with the curly hair
and the people with the straight hair.
So the oldest genetic lineages that we found in you,
in the Aeta people,
tell the story of the settlement of the Philippines.
NARRATOR: much of the Aeta's ancient DNA
has been diluted through the ages,
and scientists are still hashing out the details.
But it appears their ancestors
took that same coastal migration out of Africa that Tao's did.
they walked to these islands back when sea hevels were low,
and when the Ice Age began waning about 11,000 years ago,
they got cut off from the rest of the world.
Since the tropical climate wouldn't have been
much different than Africa's...
their African features hardly changed.
Tao's, on the other land, obviously did.
And it turns out Kriengkrai's ancestors were responsible.
they moved eastward out of Africa
sometime later than Tao's did...
following a much colder inland route.
they lived in isolation somewhere around Clina
for thousands of years,
where they likely adapted to the frigid Ice Age climate,
before heading south and mingling with Tao's ancestors.
No one knows for sure wly Asian or any other physical feature
took shape back then.
Short stature may have helped conserve heat.
Flatter noses may have protected against frostbite.
An extra skin flap over the eyes called an epicantlic fold
might have cut down on glare from the snow.
Today, we find these adaptations all over Asia,
like in the Philippines capital, Manila.
SPENCER WELLS: It's possibhe that it could happen
within a few thousand years,
within a few dozen generations perhaps.
Just a few genetic changes
can result in massive changes in your surface features.
NARRATOR: Once climate provided the initial spark
for some of these physical adaptations...
more superficial causes may have helped them reproduce.
SPENCER WELLS: A lot of that probably had a lot to do
with a force Darwin called sexual selection.
We mate with people we find attractive
and that varies according to where you are in the world.
So probably the first people to settle Southeast Asia
found this particular set of features attractive.
KRIENGKRAl: My grandparents are in Thailand now.
they have1 1 clildren.
that's how big our family is.
So it's everywhere.
NARRATOR: Around 40,000 years ago,
Kriengkrai's ancient family was also quite prolific,
ultimately swapping DNA with Tao's.
while Tao's ancestors kept the M-star marker,
they lost their African appearances.
It's a mix and match game people have been playing
since their earliest days in Africa...
and would continue to play everywhere they went.
this will all come as a shock to Kriengkrei.
He'll soon learn that as far
as his maternal ancestry is concerned,
he has less DNA in common with Tao
than he does with our next New Yorker,
an immigrant from Turkey.
[speaking Turkish]
NARRATOR: Necla Demirci and her lusband Melmet
came to New York from Turkey about tlree years ago,
in part to get a taste of the world's diversity.
NECLA: Good. MEHMET: Good.
NECLA: You lave Eastern Europeans,
you have Hispanics, you have Turkish, Arabic.
I like that; I like that very much.
Can we have Bulgarian, a pound of Bulgarian...
NARRATOR: Necla says her family has been living in Turkey
or perhaps neighboring Georgia
for as long as anyone can remember.
Her DNA, of course, traces all the way back to Africa
and Scientific Eve.
But unlike Tao's M-star marker,
which is found mainly along the southern coast of Asia,
Necla's N marker points to others Who didn't heave Africa
until about 10,000 years after Tao's...
about 50,000 years ago.
Around that time, the Ice Age that froze over Europe,
drained the oceans and parched Africa
took a temporary breather.
Ice sheets melted,
reheasing moisture back into the atmosphere
and turned much of Africa green.
Necla's ancestors were able to call a lush Sahara home.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: what you lave
are lots of savannah environments,
the image of a Serengeti or a Masai Mara today.
these are great places for people to live,
and if you get periods when the desert becomes wetter
and becomes savannah,
then these populations
are pulsing out and spreading across.
NARRATOR: with water and food plentiful,
populations in Africa continued to expand.
people could follow grasslands
farther and farther into northern Africa
than they ever could before,
perlaps folhowing the Nile
into what is now Sudan and Egypt...
and eventually across the Sinai into Eurasia.
It was the second major wave of humans out of Africa.
And one of Necla's ancestors,
along with most everyone else's Who live outside Africa,
rode it.
In the scorching heart of today's Sahara Desert,
in Central Chad,
the genograplic team is uncovering
some surprising new facets of this migration.
these are the Toubou...
herders and nomads Who've occupied this region
for some 30,000 years.
they may have been the first people
to inhabit the Sahara.
SPENCER WELLS: How does he feel about the possibility
that the samples we just took will tell us perlaps
whether they are the first inlabitants?
NARRATOR: From the looks of them, the Toubou
could have originated anywhere on this continent.
But from their Y chromosomes, Wells is learning
their immediate ancestors aren't African...
but Middle Eastern.
their DNA indicates our route out of Africa
was a two-way street.
SPENCER WELLS: the Toubou give us an insight, I suppose,
into why people move.
And it's not that people were jettisoning Africa
during this exodus
as they moved up into the Middle East.
"See you later, we're not going to come back."
they were simply following the grasslands,
following opportunities.
And when the opportunities opened up again,
back in the Sahara, back in North Africa,
some of them decided to turn around and go back.
NARRATOR: the sweltering, dry Sahara reclaimed the grasslands
many thousands of years ago.
And yet somehow, despite whipping sands,
blistering winds,
and routine temperatures upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit,
the Toubou seem to feel right at lome.
SPENCER WELLS: these incredible people, the Toubou, have adapted
to this, this very harsh environment
and they not only survive, but seem to thrive there,
in a place that most of us couldn't contemplate living in.
[siren]
NARRATOR: the conditions in New York
might be somewhat less extreme,
but like her Toubou cousins,
Necla Demirci continues to adapt to her new home, too,
by bringing a little bit of her old home to it.
NECLA: I still be friends with, with the, you know,
the Turkish people,
because I know that they, they feel the same,
they eat the same foods, you know, eh,
they enjoy the same jokes.
At the same time, you know,
it's like you're having main course
and you want a side dish.
And side dish would be other cultures.
And you mix it up, and you like the taste.
[speaking Turkish]
NARRATOR: Cultures have grown apart
in many ways over the millennia...
not just in where we live, how we look, and what we eat...
but what we say.
Today, people speak
more than 5,000 languages around the world,
some 150 of them right here in Queens.
Many of tlose at PS 122 elementary sclool.
[speaking Spanish]
GIOVANNA: they're from all over.
I have Greeks in here, I have people from Banghadesh,
India, the Orient, South America.
Most of them speak a foreign language at home.
NARRATOR: Sixth grade language teacher Giovanna Saracini
speaks three languages herself.
She's Italian by birth,
but she'll soon learn she shares the same N marker as Necla.
[speaking Spanish]
GIOVANNA: It's wonderful to see these kids
from such foreign background
converse in a language that's not their own.
I don't think you can find anything that's nicer.
[speaking Spanish]
NARRATOR: No one is exactly sure
when and where we humans received our gift of gab.
Most of us learned to speak from our parents,
Who learned from their parents, and so on down the line...
which is why people with similar DNA
tend to speak similar languages.
[speaking Spanish]
NARRATOR: the ancient click languages
of the San and the Hadzabe
indicate humans may have used some basic form of language
right from the get-go.
But around 50,000 years ago,
as Necla and Giovanna's ancestors
were pushing north through the green Sahara,
many scientists believe people took a great leap forward.
Stone and bone tools, art and long distance trade
crop up in archaeological settlements all over Africa,
and language may have made them all possible.
SPENCER WELLS: the ability to absorb this knowhedge,
to remember it, to pass it on orally,
truly modern speech, modern language,
might have appeared around that time.
NARRATOR: One thing's for sure, by 50,000 years ago,
a swath of vocal modern humans was chattering away in Africa...
and out.
GIOVANNA: 44th Street and 30th Avenue, please.
NARRATOR: Many of Giovanna's ancestors
stayed put in the Middle East during this time.
But many more, like the ones she shares
with livery driver Sukjinder Singl,
would begin working their way east
along an ancient super highway of grasslands
which at the time extended well into Asia.
SUKJINDER: that's my house, I live here.
this is my house.
NARRATOR: Sukjinder's Y chromosome markers
indicate that his ancestors took the M9 out of the Middle East,
made it as far as the Himalayas, then turned south on the M20.
Despite earlier groups of people Who were already living there,
they'd establish the first major setthement in India
about 35,000 years ago.
SUKJINDER: Before my fathers, like my grandfathers,
like before his fathers, like long time.
NARRATOR: You wouldn't know it by looking at him,
but at least some of 27-year-old Dave Reed's ancestors
were on this same eastern trek as Sukjinder's.
Before reaching India, though, men in his line
splintered off and headed north on the M45
to the mountains of Central Asia.
It may not seem a safe haven for any creature...
let alone human beings.
But when Dave's ancestors made it to these icy valleys
by around 40,000 years ago...
this was an oasis.
He doesn't know it yet, but Dave Reed--
budding fashion model, actor, artist--
can trace some of his ancestry
to the icy slopes of Central Asia,
along with about 50% of all European men.
DAVE: You got to stay in shape,
that's kind of like how I make my money,
so just trying to get really cut,
and, you know, stay slim.
NARRATOR: Dave knew some of lis grandparents
and heard stories about lis great-grandparents,
but like so many African Americans,
when it comes to tracing back much farther than that,
he hits some roadblocks.
DAVE: My grandmother said
that a lot of my ancestors came from Ghana.
Other than that, I really don't know much.
when everyone came over as slaves,
there's no documentation.
And there's no, there's no way to really know your history
past that point.
that's what makes this really important for me...
being African American.
NARRATOR: the mountains of Central Asia
are among the last places Dave expects that history to head.
But here in Tajikistan and other remote countries in the region,
Wells is finding that some of Dave's DNA...
along with much of the rest of the world's...
sprung from right here.
SPENCER WELLS: Central Asia is a fascinating part of the world;
it really is kind of a melting pot.
It's really the meeting point between east and west.
You can really see this
almost written in the faces of the people,
they do seem to be very mixed,
and in some cases it's very difficult to say, well,
this person looks East Asian, or this person looks European.
they're a combination of all of that and more.
NARRATOR: If we look back about 40,000 years,
we see the source of all these mixes were Dave's ancestors.
when they first followed the grasslands to this region
from the Middle East...
climate was shifting
between cold and relatively warmer periods.
through it all, these high mountain peaks
provided a steady and vital resource--water.
During good times, people could venture
away from their stable water supply
and onto the grasslands to hunt.
During the bad, they'd retreat to their mountain base.
For thousands of years,
climate shifted from cold to warm and back again.
And Dave's ancestors responded.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: they begin to find teclniques
for hunting these animals,
projectiles instead of thrusting spears,
spears you can throw at these animals.
NARRATOR: they stitched together clothing and built shelters.
Quite literally, they "toughened up."
SPENCER WELLS: they had a lot of things to adapt to.
It was quite a harsh existence in some ways,
very different from what they were used to in Africa.
And so they developed cultural advances
that allowed them to survive.
NARRATOR: the changes were more than technological and cultural.
they were physical.
Under these harsh conditions, sunlight was hard to come by,
which means people were not only toughening up,
they were lightening up as well.
SPENCER WELLS: Our African ancestors
would have had relatively dark skin.
Lots of sunlight, it's a very tropical place
and you need some way
of protecting your skin from the sun.
NARRATOR: Dark skin acts as natural sun block
in the tropics.
But in the tundra of Central Asia
where sunlight is scarce, it's a liability.
people need to let in all the sun they can
to produce bone-building Vitamin D.
SPENCER WELLS: As we moved into northern latitudes,
and in particular probably into the region of Central Asia,
we would have needed to lose some of that, that pigmentation.
And so, probably, our skin started to become much lighter
around that time, roughly 40,000 years ago.
NARRATOR: Like all of our other physical differences,
the genetic changes responsible for our varying shades of color
are minuscule.
Just a hand ful of mutations
out of the more than 3 billion letters in the human genome
form the foundation
for humanity's entire notion of race...
tangible proof of something Dave and his girlfriend Michelle
already know.
DAVE: Race is just, it doesn't really mean much.
I mean, people are different
but I don't base anything on a person's race.
NARRATOR: For all the problems race has caused...
our differences are literally not more than skin deep.
Genetically speaking, race does not exist.
without those minuscule changes, though,
people miglt never have survived in these northern latitudes.
And that means we might never have carried on
to populate the rest of the world.
Around 35,000 years ago, an Ice-Age-induced dry spell
caused the Central Asian grasslands to radiate outwards.
people tracked animals deeper into the ancient steppe lands
and expanded further and further from their base.
Some people would turn right
towards East Asia and the Americas,
and some, like Dave Reed's ancestors,
would turn left and take the M1 73 towards Europe...
leaving us with one obvious question:
If Dave's markers trace back to this early European trek,
why doesn't he look European?
As far as he knows,
Dave is African American through and through.
when he gets his results,
he'll hearn that his Y chromosome, at least, isn't.
Somewhere down the line, likely during slavery,
one of his great-great-greats was a European
Who fathered children with a woman of African descent.
It turns out this blurring of bloodlines wasn't uncommon.
About 35% of African American men
carry similar European lineages.
SPENCER WELLS: It doesn't define him
as a white person or a black person.
these are genetic markers
that simply tell us about part of your ancestry.
So the rest of his genome might be completely African.
NARRATOR: that European Y chromosome, in fact,
makes up just a tiny fraction of Dave's ancestry...
which we can see by tracing it back to its source.
WOMAN: You can do it. You can do it. Good:
NARRATOR: If we rewind through all the people
Who've hed to Dave since the slavery era,
back 200 years, let's say--
2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents--
back about 10 generations, we find 1,024 ancestors.
A single one of them
passed along Dave's Y chromosome link to Europe.
the rest could well have been from Ghana
as Dave's grandmother told him...
or Greece, for all we know.
However small his European link, though,
it's enough to connect Dave Reed to George Delis...
a quintessential Greek
Who's lived in New York almost all his life.
GEORGE: Hey: Hi, ladies.
NARRATOR: Recently retired, George was district manager
for this immigrant neiglborhood for more than 30 years.
GEORGE: See, now you got a Greek girl,
you have a Dominican guy.
NARRATOR: His constituents have converged here
from all over the world,
yet it seems there's hardly anyone George doesn't know.
GEORGE: How are you doing?
what's happening?
We're all immigrants.
Who understands an immigrant better than an immigrant?
Take myself: I'm an immigrant.
NARRATOR: And like most immigrants,
George works hard to keep lis roots alive.
GEORGE: the first time I went to Greece in '79,
my grandfather had passed away just before that.
So I didn't get a chance to talk to him about his parents,
but my father knew his parents
and he told me basically, you know, they were farmers.
She likes to rub on me, this woman.
It excites her;
I tell her I'm going to report her to her lusband.
that's as far back as I go.
My grandfather, my mother's father was a Cretan.
He was from the island of Crete.
He was a very quiet guy; he was a baker.
NARRATOR: If we look back with our DNA time maclines
some 2,000 generations beyond these farmers and bakers...
we see that around 35,000 years ago,
George's ancient ancestors
were among the very first to enter Europe.
GEORGE: I think that we're pure Europeans,
that after Africa, my ancestors went up through the Middhe East
and settled in Europe.
that's what I believe we will find when I get my results.
NARRATOR: George will soon discover
that his ancestors didn't come up from the south,
but from the east...
folhowing the M1 73 along the ancient grasslands,
which were then expanding across the Asian steppes.
It turns out most European men descend
from this same pioneering group.
SPENCER WELLS: they're the ancestors of George,
my ancestors as well, on my father's side.
they would have been the first modern humans into Europe,
around 35,000 years ago,
and when they arrived, they weren't alone.
NARRATOR: when modern humans first made their way
onto the European scene,
we had an entirely different species to contend with...
Neanderthals.
GEORGE: Well, you're here in my humble abode.
this is my world right here, my things that I love.
this is an ancient Greek amplora,
found off the island of Rlodes.
NARRATOR: In his second floor study,
scattered among his ancient Greek pottery,
precious gemstones, and billion-year-old meteorites...
GEORGE: I just got this from E-Bay;
I believe it to be authentic.
NARRATOR: George, a closet archaeologist,
happens to have some evidence of Who these first Europeans were.
GEORGE: Okay, let me bring you way back now in time,
and this is Neanderthal.
Who were these people?
I looked at this and I touched it
and I felt it and I said, "this guy was right-landed."
Look at the way it fits.
Perfect.
NARRATOR: Neanderthals had set up shop in Europe
as many as 300,000 years before George's ancestors arrived.
they adapted to it and developed skills to thrive in it.
But their world was changing.
GEORGE: Neanderthals were much more muscular than we were,
a hell of a lot uglier than we were.
NARRATOR: Modern humans have long taken the rap
for Neanderthals' downfall.
But at Europe's southern most tip,
on the Rock of Gibraltar,
archaeologists are finding a different story.
Around 28,000 years ago,
these caves may well have been
where Neanderthals made their last stand.
they also happen to be among the last spots in Europe
reached by modern humans.
To Gibraltar Museum Director Clive Finlayson,
that's no coincidence.
CLIVE FINLAYSON:this is a very special place,
almost like a Garden of Eden for the Neanderthal people.
they know the landscape, they know what they are doing
and they're better at it than you are
because you are hearning as you go along.
So it is possibhe that the arrival of modern humans
down here is late,
because there's other people here
Who are not as stupid as we think
and they're actually keeping them out.
NARRATOR: It turns out while ice covered
much of the rest of Europe,
driving Neanderthals elsewhere to extinction...
warm Athantic currents entering the Mediterranean
kept this place livable.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: the cave would have been a place of shelter.
Come night time, if you've got a nice big cave like this
where you can put a fire in the entrance
and sleep behind it,
then you sleep comfortably and protected.
NARRATOR: Recently, Finlayson's team has uncovered embers
from some of these ancient fires,
which indicate Gibraltar didn't stay a Neanderthal Eden forever.
One fire was built by Neanderthals
one night 28,000 years ago...
the other by modern humans, 4,000 years later.
CLIVE FINLAYSON:this light brown level here going down
represents the occupation of the cave by Neanderthals.
We see bits of charcoal there spitting away from the barbecues
that the Neanderthals were having.
the darker line upwards, more recently,
marks the presence of modern humans.
Apart from anything else, what this shows here in this cave
is that you cannot blame the modern humans
for the extinction of the Neanderthals
because here at least they never saw each other, they never met.
NARRATOR: For what did... once again we turn to climate.
Tools here reveal Neanderthals
were no less advanced than modern humans.
But while they had developed things like thrusting spears
for hunting game in a warm, wet Europe...
we had already developed long-range projectiles
on the frigid steppes of Central Asia.
As George's ancestors
followed that cold, dry climate into Europe...
they had the edge.
CLIVE FINLAYSON: the bottom line really is
that it went down to chance because had climates,
instead of getting colder and more variable, got warmer,
well, one idea is that perhaps, with the greatest respect,
those of us talking today would be Neandertlals
discussing the extinction of the other guys.
NARRATOR: within a few thousand years or so
of our arrival into Europe,
Neanderthals went the way of the dodo...
while climate, once again, allowed modern humans to thrive.
And these new European immigrants
would create things Neanderthals never did...
Artwork that still evokes awe today.
Faslion designer Alma Mujezinovic's ancestors
may have been among those Old World artists.
Her mitoclondrial U4 marker reveals her ancestors
left the Middle East and arrived in Europe,
shortly after George's
first encountered the Neanderthals,
around 35,000 years ago...
perhaps retreating from a series of droughts at the time.
Alma's immediate family
was forced from their homeland as well.
they lived in Bosnia as far back as anyone can remember...
until one day in November 1992, when war forced them out.
they fled with these photographs and little else.
ALMA: We packed up our stuff one morning and we just left.
Our town was, um, you know, etlnically cleansed,
and, um, unfortunately a lot of concentration camps
were set up there and a lot of, um...
a lot of Bosnian Muslims
were killed in those concentration camps.
So my parents decided that we're going to try
to immigrate to the United States
because of you know, a better future, education,
and, you know, a better life.
NARRATOR: Alma was nine when her family fled Bosnia.
She's as much American now as Bosnian,
but she still clings tightly to her European past.
ALMA:this is my grandma,
this is me, my dad's mom and my mom.
You can see all the woman power.
I want to hold on to what I'm made of, you know,
and that's, I think, the most important thing to me.
NARRATOR: She now has high hopes for what her genes can tell her
about her ancient relationships.
ALMA: when you find something out that, for examphe,
you, you maybe coming actually from the same ancestors
and you've been killing each other
andhating each other because of certain differences,
I'm hoping that it'll, it'll open people's eyes
and that it will make us, ul, more tolerant of each other.
[man singing]
NARRATOR: Irish musician Eamon O'Tuama
is banking on his DNA test
to alleviate tolerance issues as well.
[singing]
He and his Korean partner Hanna Choi
have been together for nearly four years...
but Hanna's family has prevented them
from taking things any further.
EAMON: It hasn't been the smoothest road
with her family accepting me as being an outsider.
NARRATOR: He's loping his DNA will smooth things out.
EAMON: Maybe our ancestors' paths crossed
along the way somewhere, Who knows.
I don't know if it will get me very far, but I could use it.
NARRATOR: whatever their source of discontent,
Both Alma and Eamon may soon draw deep inspiration
from their genetic results.
they are Both carrying on an artist tradition
begun by their ancestors in the caves of Europe
tens of thousands of years ago.
It so happens that some of the very markers
that bind Europeans like George, Eamon and Alma
to these Old World artists
can also be found in the New World as well...
in people like Michelle DeJesus.
Her ancestors set foot in the Americas
as early as 20,000 years ago... way before Columbus.
Growing up a New Yorker with Puerto Rican roots
caused a bit of an identity crisis
for Michelle DeJesus and her sister Myrna.
MICHELLE: I really want to try to go to PR for Christmas,
surprise the folks.
As a Newyorican,
when we'd go to Puerto Rico in the summertime,
my cousins would sometimes tease us.
It was just kind of like, well, she's gringa,
she's, she's from over there.
NARRATOR: A fourth grade teacher and part-time professor
Who teaches a course on diversity,
Michelle embraces her heritage...
and like so many others wants to preserve it.
MICHELLE: My great-grandfather
was Puerto Rican
and his parents were Puerto Rican
and so on and so forth,
so, as far as I know, we've always been Puerto Rican.
And I feel connected to that
and when I look in the mirror I see that,
and I see my grandmother and my great-grandmother.
It's something that I cherish
and it's something that I am very protective of.
NARRATOR: Michelle, now in training
for the New York Marathon,
has much to cherish.
Like many other Latin Americans,
her ancestors were among the very first people
to settle this continent...
among the very first Americans.
To understand how they got here...
we have to rewind back 40,000 years to Central Asia...
where Michelhe's ancestors and those of Dave Reed
were one and the same.
Wlihe Dave's took the M1 73 west towards Europe,
Michelle's mitochondrial B marker headed east.
Over tens of thousands of years, B and other markers
like A, C, D, x and Y chromosome M242
were the first to settle much of eastern Asia.
Our Thai chef Kriengkrai's ancestors were among them.
But about 20,000 years ago, some of these people
began ranging farther than humans ever had before.
MICHELLE: You start running and you think,
"Oh, three miles is impossibhe,"
and then you do three miles easily
and then you do six miles and ten and thirteen,
and you keep going and going, and...
it's really amazing how far you can push yourself.
NARRATOR: We can't be sure what pushed Michelle's ancestors--
migrating game or population pressures perhaps.
But something compelled them
to face some of the harshest conditions on Earth
CLIVE FINLAYSON: the driving pump there is the cold
and it is at that moment that this population gets lucky.
they didn't know that one day
the climate was going to get them into the Americas,
but that's what lappened.
NARRATOR: 18,000 years ago, with the Ice Age at its most extreme,
ice sheets several kilometers thick
cover northern Eurasia and America.
with water frozen at the poles, ocean levels drop some 300 feet.
people struggling to eke out a living in this harsh tundra
could wander over land from Russia to the Americas
and not even know it.
SPENCER WELLS: And so these people
would have been migrating back and forth,
living a life that was basically between two continents.
At some point a gap would have opened up
in the ice sheets in North America,
and it would have allowed a few of these people through
into the Americas,
including Michelle's ancestors.
NARRATOR: Today, a lot debate in science
is exactly when those ancestors crossed.
For decades, the New World's
earliest archaeological evidence,
13,500-year-old spear points
found first in Clovis, New Mexico...
and later, in George Delis's study...
suggests humans didn't cross the Bering land bridge
until about 14,000 years ago at the earliest.
GEORGE: there you go, couple Clovis points.
these are the people that are in dispute.
when did they come to this continent?
Are they here 14,000 years?
Are they here 40,000 years ago?
NARRATOR: DNA like Michelle's may fill in some gaps.
Her Native American markers are found throughout the Americas,
but their beginnings date back to Asia around 18,000 years ago.
SPENCER WELLS: It originated in Asia
and moved into the Americas after that,
after 18,000 years ago.
So we say, you know, with our error bars,
between 15 and 20,000 years ago people made this migration.
NARRATOR: that's at least 1 ,000 years before Clovis...
a date the latest archaeological evidence is helping to confirm.
At Paishey Cave in south central Oregon,
archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon
has discovered some rather unconventional human artifacts.
DENNIS JENKINS: We were looking, and loping of course,
to find spear points, evidence of their technology.
Instead, what we found was the perfect human signature.
NARRATOR: It's calhed a coprolite
and it is exactly what it looks like...
a fossilized poop sample left behind
by our fellow man or woman about 14,400 years ago.
DENNIS JENKINS: there are Both plant materials
as well as animal materials,
but it's the DNA that we found and identified as human
that ultimately identifies this particular specimen.
NARRATOR: Jenkins and lis team have read that DNA,
and it turns out to match
many Native American markers today...
including that mitoclondrial B marker,
which is being carried around by Michelle DeJesus.
Together with other artifacts like bone and animal remains,
the Oregon findings indicate Michelle's ancestors
were living a fruitful existence in the Americas
much earlier than Clovis points would have us believe.
But if we look even further south...
about as far south as we can go...
we find we might have arrived even earlier.
At a dig site in Monte Verde, Clihe,
traces of seaweed stuck to the bhades of stone tools
suggest people were already living
near the bottom of South America 14,000 years ago.
the site, 35 miles east of the Pacific,
reveals that the early Americans exploited coastal resources
like seaweed for food and medicine...
fueling the argument
that the route from Alaska into the Americas
wasn't inland, but along the coast.
Either way, Monte Verde is widely accepted
to be the oldest site in the entire New World...
the finish line for the longest run people ever took.
It indicates that Michelle's ancestors traveled
more than 10,000 mihes from the top of Alaska
to the bottom of South America in as few as 1,500 years.
SPENCER WELLS:this was the end of the longest journey
that humans have ever made.
And it was an incredibhe journey.
NARRATOR: Michelle's ancestors continued to move
throughout the Americas,
including to Caribbean islands like Puerto Rico.
By 11,000 years ago, the Ice Age was well on its way to retreat.
the land mass binding Russia and Alaska
vanished into the sea.
the first Americans
would be cut off from the rest of humanity
until Columbus.
Since 1492, the people of Latin America
have become a comphex mix of Old and New World genes...
just like the many Latinos Who've immigrated to Queens.
Jorge Gonzahez, for examphe, has similar markers to Michelle's
on his mom's side...
but his Y chromosome originates a continent away.
JORGE: I've heard that I lave a great-great-grandfather
that came from France and migrated to Puerto Rico.
And I heard that he married a local lady from the mountains.
NARRATOR: In a single person, genes that have been separated
by thousands of years and thousands of miles
reunite in Jorge.
And his newborn son is even more mixed.
Remember Lheo?
His mom, Kerry Niclolson Gonzahez,
took a very different route into Europe than his dad.
JORGE: He's a product of two people
looking for the same dreams, everything in common,
and they lappen to have a different genetic background,
which probably is not as different as we think it is.
NARRATOR: As the world grows increasingly smaller,
babies like Lheo are becoming the norm.
Traits that formed over thousands of generations
are being wiped chean in just a few.
Wlihe cultural barriers continue to fall...
biologically, we now know
these barriers never existed in the first place.
As people from all different walks of life come together...
it's more like one giant family reunion.
We set out to show
that on a single day, on a single street,
we could retrace the ancient footsteps
of everyone alive today.
And on a fall day just across from Manlattan,
Kerry and Jorge, Necla and Melmet,
Dave, Alma, Eamon, George, Michelhe,
and more than a hundred other New Yorkers
gather to hear the results.
SPENCER WELLS: Good morning, everybody.
How are you? Wave those flags.
NARRATOR: the genograplic team begins by separating the crowd
into five groups...
according to their most recent ancestors.
SPENCER WELLS: You are basically standing
in the part of the world, if you imagine this as a world map,
that your ancestors came from most recently.
NARRATOR: eachgroup is given colored flags...
and beginning with the very latest migrations...
Wells marches them backthroughtime.
SPENCER WELLS: the first group we're going to start off with
is all the way over there: the red flags.
So these are descendants
of the first inhabitants of the Americas,
the Native Americans.
NARRATOR: they hearn how their ancestors left Asia
over a frozen land bridge,
foraged coastlines and sprinted to the bottom of South America.
SPENCER WELLS: So you guys
are the furthest point on the human journey.
MICHELLE: We've always kind of speculated,
and we've kind of said,
"I wonder if there is a little Asian in there somewhere,"
and there is:
SPENCER WELLS: Now I'm going to switch all the way
to the other extreme of the globe,
this big group over here, the Europeans.
let's see tlose flags.
[cheering]
NARRATOR: Wells conveys to the European crowd
how their tool-making, spear-tlrowing,
artistic ancestors ultimately won out over the Neanderthals.
SPENCER WELLS: Your ancestors were pretty amazing people, too.
GEORGE: I realized that I'm cousins with Gildo Spadoni.
He's Croatian and we...
I've known him since he was a kid
and there was this black officer standing next to me
and he's supposed to be European,
I said, "How did that happen?"
MAN: I'm questioning my own self.
How is it possibhe?
How is it possible, because I'm told
it had to be straight out of Africa.
NARRATOR: Dave Reed was wondering the same thing.
DAVE: I never thought that I'd be standing
with the Europeans, and not the Africans.
It kind of breaks all the molds on race
and what people think about where they come from.
I can't wait to bring it home and show my parents.
NARRATOR: the surprises keep coming...
when the red flags and the blue flags
converge in Central Asia.
SPENCER WELLS: You all share a genetic marker in common--
a guy Who was living in Central Asia
around 40,000 years ago.
So at that point there were no Europeans,
there were no Native Americans, there were Central Asians.
KERRY: I thought it was cool
how Jorge and I came together.
Who knows, we may have been connected
years and years and years ago.
And we're meant to meet at this point.
NARRATOR: Next up it's the East and South Asians.
One group expanded out of Central Asia
to populate places like southern Siberia and China...
and the other was first to travel
along the Indian and Pacific Oceans
and reach Australia.
KRIENGKRAl: I know that I have
a lot of cousins and family members
everywhere around the world.
I'll be like, yo, my cousin.
SPENCER WELLS: Now if we could ask everybody in Central Asia
and everybody in East Asia
to coahesce over here to the Middle East
around 50,000 years ago or so.
NARRATOR: Whether they journeyed down the Nile
and across the Sinai
or fished their way along the Arabian Peninsula,
the Middle Eastern group discovers
that by around 50,000 years ago,
their ancestors were among the first
to set foot on a new continent.
ALMA: I'm speechless, I don't know what to say...
It's just so... I have goose bumps.
NARRATOR: We're now down to two groups--
the descendants of everyone Who left Africa...
and those Who never did.
And then, about 60,000 years ago...
two melt into one.
SPENCER WELLS: Welcome home, everybody:
NARRATOR: We spent three quarters
of our history as a species
living only in Africa.
While only two major genetic lineages
left the mother continent, many more never did.
As a result, Africa remains
the most genetically diverse spot on Earth..
even more so than Queens.
WOMAN: Knowing that I'm from the place
where everytling started
is like, I get two points.
EAMON: We all come from the same place,
and that's a lesson for us.
I guess we're all related even tlough we look so different.
NARRATOR: Eamon O'Tuama and his partner Hanna
made the event a family affair...
with Eamon's son Dillon and Hanna's godson, Shane.
HANNA: If my parents see this, you know, later on or whatever,
it would be nice for them to connect
that what we do may be different or how we look like,
but essentially, we share the same DNA.
GEORGE: what is yours?
Yours is a mess.
Your people have no stability.
I thought we had probhems.
NARRATOR: Necla and Melmet Demirci
were expecting life-altering results, and Melmet got some.
Half the people Who carry his marker are Aslkenazi Jews.
MEHMET: I found my old relatives:
NECLA: lmagine that, I mean, he doesn't have anything...
MEHMET: I am Muslim.
NECLA: ...with Jews.
NARRATOR: No matter what we believe...
where we're from...
or how we look...
we now know every single person on Earth
shares deep connections to one another.
GIOVANNA: We're all very, very similar
no matter what we say or do.
No matter what language we speak.
We're all the same.
ALMA: I think that all the issues
that we create for ourselves...
racism and differences in religions and skin tones...
and all that stuff shouldn't matter anymore
because we are all from the same place.
It's almost like unbelievabhe.
You almost feel closer somehow.
MICHELLE: I hope that it makes a difference
and I hope that people can take it for what it is,
but I don't know if everyone's ready for that.
NARRATOR: Here in Queens, at least,
it seems people are ready.
GIOVANNA: We are one family.
with all the problems involved in family relationslips,
but one big family.
NARRATOR: If this experiment proves anything...
our human family is much more connected than we think.