Sarah Jessica Parker found out that she was related to Esther Elwell, an innocent woman, accused of heresy in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. A lady who signed up for the Ancestry.com test learned that her great-grandmother ten generations before is also George Washington’s aunt. Ancestry is the fun part of genetics.

I am colorful!

Majority of the people who can trace their roots 3-4 generations back would have gone all their life thinking that they have always been Europeans or Indians. Our genes are a lot more than that. I may be 33% Scandinavian, 28% Irish, 13% Italian, 8% Lebanese and 18% South Asian. I am an Indian and have lived here all my life. Let alone speak, I don’t even know what Irish sounds like. Yet when someone asks me where I am from I will say I am part Irish and show my genetic report as proof. Yes mate, I am telling the truth, there is no arguing with the DNA.

People are discovering to their disbelief, their rich ancestry around the world and how colorful they actually are. An individual with Asian features may have ancestry pointing them to the heart of Europe and this is just one example.

We are all from Africa

Modern humans emerged from  300,000 Years Ago in a number places across Africa. According to researchers, our origins were not in one civilization. Many different populations are represented in the ancestry of your DNA. Your blood and distance relatives have ancestry from each of those populations. Would you continue labeling sections of people if you knew that we are all direct descendants of a single woman who lived in eastern Africa somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago? Ethnicity is not something that always existed. It started as a way to identify people from different parts of the world during the time civilizations began to spread around. Dividing people on the basis of their background took on a full swing when wars began happening. This further deepened the segregation but it still does not change the fact that we are all mixed and nobody is a pure line of people from a single population. You might be dominated by the geographical choices of your predecessors but the fact remains that all of us have ancestors who moved out of Africa eons back and our genes are going to tell us that story. Good old James Watson himself got a shock of his life learning of his 16% African ancestry.

We have all been everywhere. We have different parts of the world in us. So who cares where anyone comes from. Learning about your genetics will widen your perception of yourself. You have a bit of everyone in you. We are all after all born of a single cell.

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