"Your ancestry might surprise you"

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Your ancestry might surprise you
Your family tree may look quite a bit different from you thought it did. Which is to say, you might well be related to the queen of England--but through a common ancestor who lived in Africa tens of millennia ago. In pursuit of such knowledge, the National Geographic on Wednesday announced a five-year, $40 million project to trace the evolution and migration of human beings and their cultures over the thousands of years of human existence.

The new data and analysis will be combined or at least compared with existing knowledge and theory, such as the fact that, whether we live in Lake Forest, Ill.; Washington, D.C.; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, or the South Seas, we all have a common ancestry dating back to Africa, where the earliest known remains of humans were found.

"That is very clear," Wells said. "That comes out of every genetic analysis that is done. We can trace ourselves back to Africa 60,000 years ago. So, 60,000 years ago, everybody alive is living in Africa."

But the second earliest example of human beings was found in Australia, from as far back as 55,000 B.C., when a lingering ice age connected Australia and New Guinea. So much sea water was drawn up into ice that humans could walk across land from Australia to New Guinea. At the same time, the nearby islands of what is now Indonesia were for the most part connected in a single land mass that joined the Asian mainland, again because of the low sea level.

DNA project to trace ethnic origins
Tucson researchers are looking for 100,000 people with $100 who are curious about their ethnic origins and can handle unexpected answers. The Arizona Research Laboratories at the University of Arizona is working with the National Geographic Society and IBM Corp. to trace human migratory routes 50,000 years and older through DNA.

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Now, some good news from Africa
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania Tanzania has reinvented itself twice. The first time was in 1964, after a bloody revolution had overthrown the Omani-descended sultan who ruled the neighboring spice island of Zanzibar. Tanganyika, as it was then, persuaded the successful African-led rebels to join their island with the mainland, and Tanzania came into being. This union remains precarious because of latent Zanzibari nationalism after too many years of misrule. The second time was when Julius Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzanian independence, stepped down in 1985. Two successive presidents over the last 20 years have ushered in free-market reforms, fundamentally altering the direction of a once moribund socialist economy.

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