h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We are stardust from the .

But we are stranded here on for the time being

And while we are here, this is what we are:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaEQEmt5ls&index=1&list=PLyon3Rc2gtzci-FrBfPLcHRS_hfHY9peQ

Would you agree that this ought to be a compulsory part of teaching curriculum in all schools all over the globe?

YES, yes, yes, 100% Yes. ... .. . . .. ...

As a more than 10th generation American, I just assume I'm a melange anyway. The only peoples who I might "have a problem with" have to do with religion and ideology, not race. I would only be surprised in the statistical sense if there was more than a trace percentage of Asian DNA in mine.


On a completely different note, the thread title reminded me of another fascinating video titled "You are two."

Rather than hijack this thread I'll post it to one of mine.

I'm a mix, too. Go back a thousand years, and you could find my ancestors pretty much everywhere, though mostly in Europe. But who really knows?

I had my mitochondrial DNA analysed a few years ago. It's the most common sequence in Europe (about 40%), originated in Asia but mostly found in the Basque region (Franco-Cantabrian), France/Spain about 20,000 years ago.

For years I have claimed to be 50% Danish, 50% German and 50% Polish. The latter half accounting for my overweight

I now have this idea of putting all my relatives to this test since the family name is onely really widely spread in Denmark and we have been debating for decades which country our ancestor Franz Andreas emigrated from. Some say Poland, others keep mentioning the French revolution, but Switzerland and the Netherlands have also been mentioned.

One of my (luckily distant) relatives is a blatant racist and only has nasty words for people from The Middle East, Arabia, Turkey and so on. Oh how I would love to tell her that she had a lot of DNA from those countries

Will you Basque in the glow of that finding?

I would. I most likely would not be able to help myself

This is the company that did mine: http://www.oxfordancestors.com/

Thank you ~ . .. ...

Because of the geostrategical position of the Iberian peninsula, mainly the south and Mediterranean coast, lots of different folks have been here.Im from the south, so I guess my mixture might be amazing.

Foenicians, Greeks, Romans. Celts, Tartessos, Iberos, Visigoths, arabs...



How curious that of the Basque ancestor.

Well according to the research, about 40% of Europeans have that same Basque maternal ancestry from 20,000 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_H_(mtDNA)

At first I was disappointed to have the most common type, I thought I was more special! But I realised the reason it is common must be because it's robust DNA, with resistance to disease and passing down other qualities such as a tendency to long life, or the ability to fight off threats to survival.

One day I want to visit the region to have a close look at the people and the area.

I have a good recipe for Basque soup somewhere.

This reminds me; one of these days I need to get around to reading _The Seven Daughters of Eve_.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Daughters_of_Eve

Speaking of cave women ancestors, I read "Clan of the Cave Bear" recently.

What I don't get about the unbroken male and female descents is the idea that the chains could be tens of thousands of generations long. Pure, random chance suggests that one family line might produce all sons, killing the female descent. True, every woman has a mother, but how do we know that mother didn't come from a different nationality because there were only sons in her community?

Baron, that's the book that comes with the Oxford Ancestors analysis, it's the same professor.

paulh, surely that's what a chain is, even if it crosses boundaries. The first woman with it must have had daughters, and they in turn had daughters, so even if one line didn't produce women, there was enough of the mtDNA to continue the spread. Random chance could have also produced a family line of only daughters after all.

My own mtDNA isn't pure, it has travelled thousands of years from Asia, on the way, looking at my mutations, picking up some Serbian influence before settling in the Basque region where it is still mostly found today. (Fancifully I like to think of my ancestors putting bison on the walls at Santimamiñe or Lascaux, there are some very artistic women in my family now.) Eventually some of the clan moved northwards, and the first discovery of the same DNA in England is a 12,000 year old male skeleton found in Goughs Cave in Somerset.

Your mitochondrial DNA source doesn't have to have daughters to pass on the mitochondrial DNA to successive generations just so long as a son has a daughter.

The grand-daughter will then have hal

Post above posted by accident when deletion was intended and is erroneous.

For what it's wotth, 64,000 men claim direct male descent from
Genghis Khan. Yeah, it works like that sometimes. But some men have daughters [no sons], and some women have sons [no daughters].