DNA USA Read online

  Also by Bryan Sykes

  Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

  Adam’s Curse

  The Seven Daughters of Eve

  DNA

  USA

  A Genetic Portrait of America

  Bryan Sykes

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  For Ulla

  Contents

  Preface

  DNA USA Location Map

  FIRST MOVEMENT

  1 The Point of Clovis

  2 The Nature of the Evidence

  3 The First Americans

  4 The Mystery of Cluster X

  5 The Europeans

  6 The Genetic Genealogy Revolution

  7 The World’s Biggest Surname Project

  8 The Jews

  9 The Africans

  10 “I Am a Zulu”

  11 All My Ancestors

  SECOND MOVEMENT

  12 The New Englanders

  13 Heading West

  14 The Great Spirit

  15 The Persuaders

  16 The Call of the Canyon

  17 A Question of Blood

  18 Portraits of America

  THIRD MOVEMENT

  19 The Private View

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  Black & White Photo Insert

  Color Photo Insert

  Preface

  Radcliffe Camera, Oxford. Part of the Bodleian Library.

  I am in Duke Humfrey’s library, the oldest in Oxford. My desk is made of strong, almost fossilized oak, its surface scratched by the marks of scholars long dead. Before me great books bound in fawn leather blotched with age are arranged on tiers of dark shelving. No reader is allowed to touch them and, save for an occasional dusting, they have rested here undisturbed for centuries. Looking up, my eyes stretch to a ribbed wooden ceiling, its intersections decorated with carved wooden crests: an open book surrounded by three crowns with, underneath, the Latin text Dominus Illuminatio Mea—the Lord Is My Light. On the walls hang portraits of archbishops and kings. This is no science library, and there are definitely no books about America. Virtually nothing has changed in Duke Humfrey’s library since it was finished in 1488, four years before Columbus set sail across the Atlantic.

  When the desk in front of me was first installed, the only voices heard in America belonged to the indigenous people whose ancestors had lived there for thousands of years. When stonemasons carved the joints that still support the roof above me, no Europeans had settled in the New World. When carpenters’ chisels fashioned the crests of the University adorning the ceiling, no African slaves had been taken in chains across the Atlantic. In the span of only five hundred years, while Duke Humfrey’s library has remained as it was, America has become the wealthiest nation on earth and home to more than three hundred million people. Since the library first opened its doors, people have converged on America from all over the world, joining the first Americans and sharing their vast continent.

  Hundreds, thousands, of books have been written about the transition from a thinly populated and rural land to the most technologically advanced country in the world. Unlike these myriad accounts, the story I wanted to tell would not be narrated by writers’ pens but by a different principal witness, one that is buried deep within our cells and whose voice, until very recently, has not been heard. It is the song of the genes, linking every single American back to his or her origins, wherever in the world those may be. It is also a story told through the experience of the tens of thousands of individuals who have listened to their own ancestral music during the last decade, and what it means to them.

  Sitting in the library, contemplating the task ahead, I knew that this was a project on an entirely different scale from any I had undertaken before. The sheer size of the country and the magnitude of the population ruled out any kind of systematic survey. I had to be selective or be overwhelmed. As a geneticist, what I found most appealing about America was that it is the place where the genes from three great continents converge. Like a tidal maelstrom, great currents of DNA slide into one another with powerful force. In the silence of the library, I imagined this struggle as a piece of music, alternating between thunder and serenity like a grand opera or a great symphony.

  That is why DNA USA came to be written in three movements. In the first I would look back to the original ancestral homelands from which Americans have come. In the second I would explore how these colliding ancestries have been blended in modern America. In the third and final movement I would look deep into the DNA of Americans and see how the atoms of ancient ancestry work together to preserve and alter human destiny.

  These matters decided, I closed my notebook, walked down the flights of stone stairs and out into the Bodleian quadrangle bright with May sunshine. What had a few hours earlier seemed impossibly ambitious was now reduced to more manageable proportions. I had a plan. Now all I needed to do was to carry it out.

  FIRST

  MOVEMENT

  1

  The Point of Clovis

  Clovis spear point. British Museum, London.

  I have had a weakness for grand museums ever since I was a boy. I used to catch the train up to London at least once during each school holiday and spend the day in South Kensington at either the Natural History Museum or the Science Museum. Like most boys, my favorite exhibits were always the biggest: the enormous hissing steam engine or the giant blue whale, and of course the dinosaurs. As I have grown older I appreciate these museums more for their embodiment of optimism and curiosity about the world than for the splendor of their individual exhibits. America has its fair share of grand museums, nowhere more so than the great showplaces surrounding New York’s Central Park or lining the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

  In London none is more celebrated than the British Museum in Bloomsbury, particularly since its lavish restoration. It houses the main national archaeological collections, and I spent many happy days there researching my earlier books. Imagine my delight, therefore, when one morning I found myself listening to the museum’s director, Neil McGregor, talking about one of the hundred objects from the museum’s collection that he had chosen to illustrate his radio series on the history of the world. That day he had selected an artifact from the North American Gallery—an object that, as he explained, was evidence that people had arrived in America much earlier than anybody thought. Compared with other displays in the gallery, the magnificent feathered headdresses and the elaborately carved totem poles, this object was at first sight rather modest, but the story it had to tell was of enormous significance for the early history of America. It was a stone spear point thirteen thousand years old, found in Arizona. Dr. McGregor took it out of its case and to the nearby study room, where he described its features in minute detail.

  I knew at once that I wanted to do the same and, three months later, after following a trail of connections, I was walking between the Doric columns that frame the museum’s famous entrance. Turning right through two glittering galleries, I arrived at a pair of tall wooden doors that led to the back rooms. Once behind those doors, the grand architecture was the same, but the paintwork was chipped and faded. This was the academic heart of the museum, where such decorative luxuries are deemed to be unnecessary. I was met by the archaeologist and curator of the North American collections, Jill Cook, who led the way into the book-lined study room, where a plastic box was waiting for me and, without further ado, the spear point was placed, very carefully, in front of me, cushioned on a sheet of gray foam rubber.

  It was about two and a half inches long and a little over an inch wide. Its shape reminded me of a broad fish knife narrowing to a s
harp point at one end and with a concave surface at the other. It was a creamy beige, more the color of milk toffee than anything else, and shiny. The first thing that struck me was how very symmetrical it was, and how beautifully made. The workmanship was of an extremely high standard, each face whittled down by a series of blows that had chipped off thin flakes of flint. With the hand lens that had also been brought, I examined the edge of this remarkable stone, but only after I had run my finger along it. It was sharp, but not razor sharp. The edge had been precisely shaped by hundreds of tiny chips, only really visible with the help of the lens. At the broad end there was a shallow groove, about half an inch long, where flint had been removed in a series of strikes that left serried rows of ripples, like a sandy beach after the tide has gone out. Jill explained that this was to help attach the stone point to a wooden shaft without the need for a sinew fastening. By splitting the end of a straight branch, the point could be pushed in along the groove with the ripples of flint acting like a ratchet to stop it from being pulled backward. The attachment was so strong that once the point was in the shaft, Jill did not have the strength to pull it back out.

  The spear point I held in my hand had been found in Arizona in 1942, but its particular style derived its generic name from a small town on the border of Texas and New Mexico. That town is Clovis, and the object in my hand was a Clovis point. The site of the town was originally called Riley’s Switch, but the coming of the Santa Fe railroad in 1906 created a larger settlement, and to mark its new status, the engineers were asked to suggest a new name. The stationmaster’s daughter was enthralled by French early medieval history and came up with the suggestion of naming the new town after one of her heroes, the first Catholic king of France, who had been converted to Christianity in the fifth century AD. Clovis in turn gave its name to the spear points first found in a dry riverbed just south of the town called Blackwater Draw, in 1933. In this way the classic early style of stone tools in America came to have a French pedigree.

  The discovery of the Clovis points had a dramatic effect on the prevailing view among the academic community, which at the time was struggling to acknowledge an Ice Age date for the first human settlement in America. The finds at Blackwater Draw were to push the date even farther back into prehistory, but they were already edging in that direction thanks to a chance discovery by a sharp-eyed ranch foreman called George McJunkin a quarter of a century earlier near the village of Folsom, New Mexico, 150 miles north of Clovis.

  McJunkin was a forty-eight-year-old African American. Having been born just before the outbreak of the Civil War, he had drifted west after the Union victory that secured his freedom. He was an acute observer of the natural world and took in the abundant signs of life, past and present, in the undulating plains that were his workplace. One day in August 1908 he was on his rounds when he rode into Wild Horse Arroyo, a small canyon still flooded from a torrential storm two days before. The rains had washed away a section of the canyon wall, and McJunkin noticed some large animal bones protruding from the newly exposed cliff. He rode over to take a closer look. They were far too large to be cattle bones and too big even for bison, at least the bison that lives in America in modern times. Though he did not know it at the time, McJunkin had come across the remains of the extinct Bison antiquus.

  He dug out one of the bones and took it back home. The next day he showed it to his friend, Carl Schwacheim, who he knew was also interested in natural history. Schwacheim, a blacksmith in nearby Raton, tried his best to take this discovery up to a higher level when he got in touch with the director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. The response was, let us say, less than immediate. It took another eighteen years, until 1926, for anyone from the museum to visit the site at Folsom, and that only came about because the curator, Jesse Figgins, had decided that the museum needed a complete Bison antiquus skeleton to put on display. While he was excavating the bison bones, Figgins made the discovery that would shift the debate about the antiquity of the first Americans to a much earlier time. There, within the collapsed rib cage of an enormous bison he found the undeniable evidence that humans had been in at the kill. A flint spear point, its edges knapped with great skill, lay among the bones, witness to a scene played out ten thousand years before.

  We can imagine the scenario: The men were ready, lying in wait along the walls of the narrow canyon. They knew from years of experience that the bison would come at this time of year as they moved down from the summer grazing high up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the plains where they would spend the winter. The hunters knew the time was right because the dazzling star Sirius had just begun to rise on the eastern horizon as the sun was setting. Like a diamond in the sky, the Dog Star flashed red, yellow, and ice-hot blue as it edged farther and farther into the heavens. This was the signal for the band to assemble at the killing point, where the canyon narrowed sufficiently to force the beasts into single file. Unlike today, Wild Horse Arroyo was filled with damp vegetation, and a stream ran along the bottom, but it was still a fine place to spring a trap. So important was the bison hunt that the band could not afford to be late and so they waited, relaxing while one of them took up position on the mound half a mile away to warn of the approaching herd. Nowadays we would be bored after a few hours, but boredom was a luxury that never featured in the lives of our ancestors. I say our ancestors because this scene, or something very similar, was also being played out in Europe and Asia at the same time. For the members of the band, about twenty strong, were not bored, only patient. The children threw pebbles into the stream that ran along the canyon floor, parting the reeds to discover frogs that hopped back into the cover of the vegetation. Occasionally they would disturb a rattlesnake and, well aware of the danger, taunt it with sticks as it coiled and shook its scaly tail.

  Waiting was a skill our ancestors had perfected, but the time was far from wasted. While the children played by the stream, the adults were making sure thay they were ready for the moment to come. The men unfolded the squares of deerskin that held their principal weapon, the glistening flint spear points that would soon be fixed to long sticks of fire-hardened cottonwood. They had been packed away six months earlier in the spring when the bison had reversed their journey on the way to their summer grazing grounds. Now the men took each of their points in turn and ran their fingers along the edges, tapping them expertly with a bone pick to remove a tiny flake here and there and renew the cutting surface. They tested the sharpness of the edge against their thumbnails. If it dug in rather than slide across the surface, the edge was sharp enough. And sharp it had to be to slice through the tough hide of a bison, through a gap in the ribs and into the beating heart of the great beast. Once the men were satisfied, the points were wedged into notches cut into the end of hardened stakes. They were not tied with sinew; any binding would only slow the passage of the weapon through flesh. The journey was only one way, and if the spear was withdrawn for any reason, the point detached and remained where it was.

  After three days of waiting the lookout heard something. A low, intermittent rumbling, like far-distant thunder. Peering into the blazing light of the eastern sky he could just make out a faint wisp of smoke rising over the plains. But he knew better. This was neither fire nor thunder but the signal the band had been waiting for so patiently: The bison were on their way. Quickly he ran down to the canyon, spoke, and pointed in the direction of the approaching herd. Immediately the men stopped what they were doing and ran to their positions. Two women climbed to the lookout ready to give immediate reports on the herd’s position. The other women ran to the stream and collected the children, moving them to safety away from the base of the canyon that would soon be trampled flat by pounding hooves.

  As they waited for the ambush, adrenaline pushed up their heart rates in anticipation. And yet it was not absolutely certain that the bison would choose to come through the canyon. Five years before, after a particularly dry summer, the bison’s route to their winter quarters too
k them three miles to the west, avoiding the ambush altogether. That winter, without the autumn harvest of bison meat dried to last, the band was continually hungry. Three elderly members, well into their forties, did not survive.

  For fear that they would be seen and divert the herd, the two women lookouts lay flat and watched the dust cloud as it meandered slowly in their direction. They could not see the animals, but the low, throbbing sound was getting louder. They looked toward the fold in the hills through which the herd usually came. One hour passed, then another. The drumming came and went with the breeze, but still no bison appeared. One of the women climbed down a few feet behind the crest of the hill so she could give a visible signal to the waiting hunters without alerting the herd.

  And then they came. Led by three enormous males, the great beasts cantered forward, their black eyes looking from side to side. Across the scorched grass that led to the mouth of the canyon, they came on. The lookout whispered to the messenger words that defined the size and composition of the herd. She then stood up and, using several arm movements, transmitted this intelligence to the hunters below. Her signals indicated that the herd was about forty strong and included several young bison. Having been born in the early summer, these animals would now be about five months old and weigh three hundred pounds.

  As they neared the mouth of the canyon, the lead males slowed to a walk, sniffing the air and clearly nervous about entering its narrow confines. The hunters pressed their bodies closer to the rock. A breeze coming down the canyon filled their nostrils with the heavy smell of bison, but more important still, meant that no human scent reached the sensitive noses of their intended prey. They let the big males past, then a few more, until a natural gap appeared in the following animals. Then the trap was sprung. Three young men leaped from their positions on the canyon wall right into the path of the bison, yelling and waving their arms. The forward party accelerated to a gallop and thundered down and out of the canyon. The others shuddered to a halt, fearful of running the gauntlet of screaming humans. They tried to turn and run back up the canyon, but it was too narrow, and their way was blocked by the other animals still pouring forward, unaware for the moment of the melee in front of them.