Can something that talks about the differences between people end in evoking a sense of unity?
Among the tools that help us to decipher the past, literature covers it from the angle of emotions and the hues of culture and gives a somewhat flawed way of ascertaining the truth about the past, for two reasons. One, the recording of stories from the past has been coloured by the imagination of people documenting the same across generations, shaded by their own eccentricities. The other reason it’s flawed is because we are looking at it with our own lenses, which have been forged in the modern era. What seems so true from our perspective may have been totally the wrong way of seeing it, from the eyes of the people, who lived in the past.
Then, we come to archaeology and its connection to the tangible, the remains left behind by the denizens of the past. We have yet again been dependant on the interpretations of archaeologists, and their theories, and this, while revealing fascinating aspects about the past has left us wanting for more clarity. Last in the list, comes the field of genetics and specifically ancient DNA research, presenting the most valid view of the past, and through the lens of objective science, for I’m sure we can trust that the proteins and mathematical equations in this analysis won’t lie to us. For why should they? They gain nothing by taking sides!
The first stunning facet I encountered in the book was right there in the introduction in the words – “…we now know, from ancient DNA, that the people who live in a particular place today almost never exclusively descend from the people who lived in the same place far in the past.” How can many of us steeped in religious, nationalistic and linguistic notions of our uniqueness in the world, accept this finding?
In a way only a highly organised mind can work, the author takes us on a journey spanning the entire globe, roughly following the migrations and mixings at each critical location, since humans’ exit from the mother continent of Africa. Before we start our journey, Reich mentions how some member of the audience in a conference he attended wondered about how it was possible for him to get funds for this research he had taken and somehow, at the time how he left the need to justify his research by its relevance to detecting diseases in specific populations of the world. In there, is the materialistic paradigm of our post-industrial society that determines everything by its so-called ‘use’. Reich captures the need for research not only for its application, but for our understanding – “The study of the human past – as of art, music, literature, or cosmology – is vital because it makes us aware of aspects of our common condition that are profoundly important and that we heretofore never imagined.”
Part 1 of the book was the most technical of the lot and as it covers the history of this field, I could only achieve tiny windows of understanding like ‘bottleneck event‘, ‘massive mixtures of differentiated populations‘ and so on. The biggest puzzle involving the Neanderthals and what we know about their link to us was revealed by the proof that remnants of Neanderthal genes are left behind in us. The succeeding chapters also mentioned Denisovans and other archaic humans and how they relate to modern populations.
The journey through our current world actually begins in Section 2, and after a moment of silence for the missing ‘ghosts of humanity’, the book ventures into Europe, India, America, East Asia and back to Africa. Of this, the researchers have the richest information about Europe, because as Reich mentions in the last section, “Of 551 published samples with genome-wide ancient DNA data as of late 2017, almost 90 percent are from West Eurasia.” The science behind this research was birthed in this region and no doubt, the European scientists have more access as well as interest in exploring their own domains. However, with the remaining 10%, Reich constructs a graphic story of migrations in all the other regions.
I stepped into the chapter on India with excitement, an outcome of my growing up, surrounded by debates many about the origins of Indian ancestors! When I read about how Reich himself made a personal discovery, not in the thickness of European data, but in his research in India, about how he came face to face with his own background as a Jew, I felt that there’s something in what they call the ‘spirituality of India’, which makes you discover yourself, even if it’s science you are working on!
On a serious note, however, it was disconcerting to find how uncomfortable scientists were made to feel, when describing things as they were, and how they had to resort to terminologies so as not to disturb nationalistic sentiments. Reading about research that was done after this book was published, about the Rakhigarhi findings, and how scientists are constantly under pressure by elements that want to stick to their fringe theories, derived from dubious sources, shocked me. Made me feel as if this ancient DNA research is the new announcing to some parts of the world that ‘the sun does not revolve around the earth’!
Reich throws light on how studying Indian population influenced many other aspects of this ancient DNA research in the words, “The methods that we applied in 2010 to show that mixture had occurred between Neanderthals and modern humans were in fact primarily developed to study Indian population history.” Another aspect that is profoundly revealing is the discovery that the group of people, who add the most to the understanding of Indian population are neither the North Indians nor the South Indians but the remote tribes from the Andaman Islands!
One other thing that brought clarity to the understanding of Indian populations was the statement that “People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population, and indeed many Indians as well as foreigners see it this way” and the contrary conclusion, “The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations”. The years of practising endogamy because of notions of ‘caste’ is the reason behind these small populations, and this is something that has significant consequences for the genetic diseases’ aspect of Indians, the book revealed.
Finishing with this chapter, a few questions arose in my mind:
a) Would Reich change his chapter on India or any other chapter after the discovery and analysis of that ancient DNA sample from Rakhigarhi?
b) What would ancient DNA recovered from the archaeological excavations in the South of India, especially sites in Tamil Nadu, reveal about Indian ancestry?
c) Are these ancient DNA studies being applied to North East India and what fascinating aspects would they reveal about the spread of farming from East Asia and the route of its journey within India?
d) Is there scope for linguistic debates about ancestry to be resolved by deeper studies in ancient DNA?
e) Finally, will politics let the true picture of ‘who we are and how we got here’ evolve truthfully?
Indeed, a voice within me tells me with a smile that I have focused excessively on India, where I come from. But this is what evolved naturally out of my interests. I only extend a wish that like me, individuals from different parts of the world, would look at the chapter about their region and reflect deeply from their perspective, which would in turn hopefully add to the understanding of the world entire.
Concerns of Native Americans in this research and the difficulty of cooperation, I read about in the chapter on America and also about the intriguing discovery of how the ‘Surui’ and the ‘Karitiana’ tribes in the Amazon regions of Brazil seem to have significant Australasian ancestry, something deeply puzzling to the researchers, who indicate that most of America was populated by migrations of East Asians, into Alaska, and proceeding downwards until the southernmost tip of South America. Speaking of East Asians, there is so much happening in their regions too, as witnessed by the diversity of people in the Austronesian islands as well as mainland East Asia. More questions than answers are available now, but Reich talks about ‘state-of-the-art’ ancient DNA labs in East Asian countries and how the future is promising in its scope to expand our understanding of these diverse people. How scientists have tended to ignore Africa, right after humans marched out of it, around 50,000 years ago, sounded to me like forgetting the mother bird after growing wings. It was revelation to know that the current descendants of Africa too are not like some pure line extending from the first humans but a glorious mixture of returning populations.
In the final section, the troubling ethical concerns of Inequality, Race and Identity are mentioned and what they mean to scientists, nations and the common people, trying to make sense of all this. Reich repeatedly reiterates the dangers in interpreting and accepting the findings of this field, as vividly illustrated by these words of his: “The history of science has revealed, again and again, the danger of trusting one’s instincts or of being led astray by one’s biases- of being too convinced that one knows the truth.”
Coming back to India, indeed too many people are too convinced that only they know the truth and that, it is the only truth. The years of endogamous breeding is no doubt a contributor to these entrenched beliefs. The other tragedy in scientific education is the deep split between science and arts education. Scientists have been too busy learning the techniques in their own compartmentalised fields to pay attention to the troubling aspects of their innate instincts or biases and the higher ethics involved. As Reich puts it, “To understand who we are, we need to approach the past with humility and with an open mind, and to be ready to change our minds out of respect for the power of hard data.” Will scientists, who are making these discoveries, and the common people, understanding the same, rise up to this challenge?
In the final and most hopeful chapter of all, Reich describes the state of his current field in an exquisite metaphor, talking about how it was similar to the first circumnavigation of the world between the 14th to 18th centuries and the ancient maps that came to be, which challenged earlier notions as to where land ended, and how close continents were to each other. Looking forward to not only learning of the defined boundaries of continents, but to perceiving every river and ridge within this atlas of humanity’s journey, in the years to come.
And this brings me back to what I started this piece with, the feeling of unity that this book fills one with, and it’s captured in the words from the book, “Our particular ancestors are not the point. The genome revolution provides us with a shared history that, if we pay proper attention, should give us an alternative to the evils of racism and nationalism, and make us realise that we are all entitled to our human heritage”.
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