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I have not been able to find that map on line. I think it might be presented in animated form in a flash presentation on the Genographic Project website. Viewing any kind of animation is painful if not impossible on my dialup at home, so I cannot check that just now. I am a major map junkie, and the National Geographic folks feed my addiction with such paper maps. Bear with me as I expose my dismal geographic skill -- go figure -- and I'll try to describe the map I have.
Beginning with a supposed first pair humans in eastern Africa, one major migration goes north across the Sinai, branching into multiple haplogroups as it goes. One group goes north and then west across Asia Minor, terminating in what is now Greece. Another goes a little further north and then west, terminating in what is now northern Italy. Most of the branching groups go north and northeast. One skirts the Indian Ocean, then turns southeast, terminating in Australia. Another goes northeast up the east coast of Asia, across the land bridge, and terminates in the Pacific Northwest of North America.
What might be called the main branch goes further north, branching multiple times as it goes. Most of the branches go east or northeast into Asia. One branch goes northeast into what might be northern Iran where it branches multiple times again. One branch goes north from there to maybe Kazakhstan, then splits into two main branches.
Of those two main branches, one goes right up across eastern Asia, across the land bridge, and down through the Americas, terminating in what might now be southern Brazil or northern Argentina. The other turns west and goes right across Europe and down into the Iberian Peninsula, terminating in the northwest corner of Spain. This map doesn't show it, but it is my understanding that that migration continued into Britain and Ireland. That is haplogroup M343, the one I belong to, and apparently share with most of the folks we think of as Europeans and Britons. I think that haplogroup roughly corresponds to the cultural group that I have been referring generically as the Celts.
The whole thing as it happened from the first identified human haplogroup in eastern Africa to M343 arriving in Iberia spans about 50,000 years, so all of recorded history is just an afterword of sorts to the main story. From the last major branch in central Asia to M343 is about 15,000 years, again much longer than any written history.
Geez I hope that makes some kind of sense. And I do wish I could upload the map itself. Like all National Geographic paper maps, it is a thing of beauty. We all bleed the same color.
Note though: such family trees should be handled with care. They are good enough for first-order approximation, and that probably only for one sex, or even only for certain chromosomes or sections of chromosomes (M343 is an Y-chromosome, thus male haplogroup). Reality included tremendous mixing not just in the last millennia or so, but all ages. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The significance that I take from that image, and the meaning I find in the existence of M343, is that every man on this planet who carries the M343 marker, myself included, shares a common ancestor, a great, great, many-times-great grandfather, who lived in northern Europe. There just after the branching from M173, where M343 begins. I suppose that would be northern Germany. One individual, one man, acquired a mutation, probably insignificant in his life, which left an indelible and unmistakable marker on all his descendents, all of us who carry the M343 marker.
That makes all of us family in some grand humanist sense. And in spite of all the surface differences, some of them profound and significant, some less so, along with our common genetic inheritance there is a deep common cultural heritage that I think in the end is much more important than our differences. And I think if we are to have a long term future as a species on this planet, it behooves us to learn and understand that. That was the message of Joseph Campbell's work and I took it to heart.
I'm probably not expressing myself very well. I don't mean any of that in some sentimental, greeting card sense. I mean it in the very practical sense of learning how to share this finite planet with the other six or eight billion humans who inhabit it. We all bleed the same color.
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