2.4% Neanderthal

Before I got married, I became super interested in my lineage and heritage. Knowing I was about to join my millions of years of successful reproduction with the last branch of another successful family tree made me want to know as much about the metaphorical forest as I could.

Thankfully, I was born into an age where science is highly prolific and accessible. This lead to the discovery of 23andMe.

23andMe is a lab-driven service that, for $100, provides you with one sample collection kit. This kit includes a plastic test-tube, a mouthpiece adapter (the sample you are providing is saliva), a snap-cap full of stabilizing chemical (you don't touch the chemical; sealing the vial releases its contents into the tube), a biohazard bag to hold your sample, and a postage-paid box to ship everything back to the lab to be analyzed.

After aggressively researching my familial line through Ancestry.com, I hit a wall at my great-great grandparents. My family is from a tiny farming town in the middle of Sicily, so record keeping at the turn of the century wasn't - let's say - industrialized. I knew going any farther back would either require a trip to Italy, a time-turner, or harassing my living relatives to perhaps the point of tears. I was far too curious to leave it at that, so I ordered a kit.

Since I am female, my kit only provided me details about my mitochondrial DNA (I don't have a y-chromosome that could provide any data on my patrilineality. But this was enough, for now. I opened the sample collection tube and saw the "fill to here" line about halfway up and had a mild panic, because I knew it required saliva, and who the hell can produce half a tube of spit like that?? And then I noticed the actual bottom to the sample chamber. HEH. So only about a cubic centimeter of saliva was needed. I have no idea what that is in liquid volume. But it isn't a lot.

I followed the instructions and shipped my kit off. They say it can take up to nine weeks to process your sample and provide you with the raw data, but it took mine about a month. They sent me an email when my results were available for viewing and I sprinted to the computer to log into the website.

And it uncovered some surprises! I knew I was Italian as far back as records were kept. But 23andMe tracked my haplogroup back 40,000 years. With this detailed information, I learned that my maternal line originated in Northern Scandinavia and spread south and east from there. I learned that the Sami people and (most likely) the high population of Moroccan Jews are our family's kin. I learned that my parents aren't even distantly related (phew), and that my DNA expression from my maternal line alone means I should have ice-blue eyes (like my grandmother's). I also learned that my DNA shares 2.4% with neanderthal DNA, placing me and my maternal line in the 16th percentile of all samples ever collected and logged, ever.

After doing my own sample kit and having my mind blown by the results, I bought a kit for both my husband and my brother (having my brother provide a sample would provide me with my entire picture, since he does possess the y-chromosome data). My husband just had his mind blown when he discovered that he was 0.1% sub-Saharan African and 0.1% Mongolian.

So while the family tree hanging on my wall shows all of the wonderful Irish and Italian names on both sides leading to me and my husband, I now have an entirely new appreciation for history, and human migration patterns, and the successful breeding history of my people. I mean, 40,000 years ago when my maternal line originated, the Sahara desert was wet and fertile. Neanderthals were just going extinct. Our ancestors were expressing themselves through cave paintings. And the record of all of that is kept within all of us. I guess Carl Sagan was right.

We are all made of star stuff.