Mitochondrial DNA Lineages
Y chromosome DNA Lineages
WHAT ARE MEXICANS? THEY'RE NATIVE AMERICAN/EUROPEAN ADMIXTURES. SOME HAVE MORE NATIVE AMERICAN* GENES AND HENCE LOOK MORE NATIVE AMERICAN, WHILE OTHERS HAVE MORE EUROPEAN GENES AND HENCE LOOK MORE EUROPEAN.
*NATIVE AMERICANS DESCEND FROM POPULATIONS THAT ORIGINATED IN NORTH AND EAST ASIA (SIBERIA) AND THEN MIGRATED TO NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA IN STAGGERED WAVES FROM ABOUT 15,000 YEARS AGO TO 9,000 YEARS AGO, HENCE THE EPICANTHIC FOLD STILL FOUND AMONG MANY OF THE LATER MIGRATING NATIVE AMERICAN GROUPS. (IF YOU WERE TO LOOK AT THE CHROMOSOME PORTRAITS OF MEXICANS, CENTRAL AMERICANS, AND SOUTH AMERICANS THEY'D LOOK LIKE "WILL KANE"'S AND "ROGER THORNHILL"'S (5th PAGE OF PORTRAITS DOWN) WITH VARYING AMOUNTS OF ORANGE AND BLUE COLORING DEPENDING ON THE PROPORTION OF EUROPEAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN DNA.) HEY, MEXICANS, YOU OR YOUR CHILDREN HAVE THE EPICANTHIC FOLD TRAIT NOT BECAUSE YOU'RE ASIAN, BUT BECAUSE YOU'RE NATIVE AMERICAN. http://instagram.com/zuryluv (NOTICE HER NATIVE AMERICAN FEATURES, PARTICULARLY HER EPICANTHIC FOLD?)
HEINAMEXICANS, LOOK BELOW AND FIND OUT WHAT Y'ALL IS.
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/reference-populations/
MEXICAN-AMERICAN
This reference population is based on samples collected from Mexican-Americans living in Los Angeles, California, and is reflective of the broad range of genetic diversity that many ethnic populations in present-day North America carry. The mixture of regions reflected here is due to original groups that populated the Americas (36% Native American and 2% Southeast Asian) with more recent influence from integration with European Americans (28% Mediterranean, 20% Northern European, 8% Southwest Asian) and African Americans (4% sub-Saharan African). The Mediterranean, northern European, and southwest Asian components are reflective of the ancient genetic patterns in Europe.
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/03/admixture-in-us-populations.html
On average Latinos had about 70 percent European ancestry, 14 percent Native American ancestry and 6 percent African ancestry. The remainder ancestry is difficult to assign because the DNA is either shared by a number of different populations around the world, or because it’s from understudied populations, such as Native Americans. Obviously that large “unassigned” percentage means that those “averages” could be higher. As with African Americans, looking at the regional and state-to-state numbers for self-identified Latinos, the differences are striking.
...
For example, some Latinos have no discernible Native American ancestry, while in others have as much as 50 percent of the ancestry being Native American. Latinos in states in the Southwest, bordering Mexico — New Mexico, Texas, California and Arizona — have the greatest percentage of Native American ancestry. Latinos in states with the largest proportion of African Americans in their population — South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama — have the highest percentage of African Ancestry.
http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/the-racial-makeup-of-hispanics/
http://racialreality.blogspot.com/2013/06/ancestry-of-latinos.html
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/10/admixture-ethnicity-and-pigmentation-of.html
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/05/admixture-in-mexican-mestizos.html
http://www.isteve.com/2002_where_did_mexicos_blacks_go.htm
http://www.banderasnews.com/0707/eded-racesofmexico.htm
READ ABOUT MEXICANS IN THE LINKS ABOVE. MEXICANS, READ ABOUT YOURSELVES AND YOUR ANCESTORS. TAKE PRIDE IN WHO YOU ARE ESE! LA RAZA HOLMES!
http://instagram.com/p/Ze93RmTJpc/
http://instagram.com/p/elWIuMvMgz/
Why Do The Two Females Above Have Similar Features (Similar Features That Distinguish Them From Mexicans And Similar Features That Make Them Look Somewhat Black)? Because They're Central American And A Large Percentage Of The Central American Population Has A Large Proportion Of American Indian (Amerindian) And Black Genes Relative To European Genes. So, For Instance, Mexicans And Certain South Americans Are Genetic Admixtures With A Relatively High Proportion Of European Genes (Typically 30% Or More), However, In Certain Central American Countries There's Been Little European Gene Flow So Large Segments Of The Central American Population Have Retained A High Percentage Of Amerindian Genes Admixed With A Decent Proportion Of African Genes. This Is Especially The Case In Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador And Panama (The Latter Two From Which, I Believe, The Ancestors* Of Two Females Above Originate). So, To Sum It Up, The Females Above Look Similar Because They Have A High Percentage Of Amerindian Genes Coupled With A Decent Percentage Of African Genes.
*I WAS WRONG ABOUT THEIR ANCESTORS ORIGIN. I RECENTLY LOOKED AT THEIR INSTAGRAM PAGES AND NOTICED THAT I WAS WRONG SO I HAD TO UPDATE THAT.
Hard, Harsh Native American (Native Central American) Facial Features, Especially In The Mouth And Cheekbone Area!
LA BOCA (CALLATE)
LA BOCA (CALLATE)
http://instagram.com/p/dzoDd4PMnb/
My Nose Isn't Crooked Like This. You Can't Tell My Nose Has Been Broken Unless You Stare At It Closely.
https://twitter.com/CV31
A SPIC With A Whole Lot Of West African Genes, So Culturally He May Be Hispanic, But Genetically He's A Different Story And That Different Story (Those African Genes That He Inherited Controlling Height And Athleticism) Have Allowed Him To Play In The NBA.
POLYNESIANS TRACE THEIR MITOCHONDRIAL DNA TO TAIWAN AND MELANESIA WHILE THEIR Y CHROMOSOME DNA PRIMARILY COMES FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA (SPECIFICALLY INDONESIA) AND MELANESIA. IF THEIR CHROMOSOMES WERE SCANNED AND PAINTED THEY'D BE PREDOMINANTLY ORANGE WITH SOME MELANESIAN GENES, WHICH I BELIEVE WOULD ALSO BE ORANGE.
BLACC PEOPLE, READ THE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT SKIN COLOR AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PASSAGE. THEY RELATE DIRECTLY TO ALL OF YOU DARK SKINNED, LIGHT SKINNED, RED BONE, YELLOW BONE, ETC. BROTHAS AND SISTAS. YOU SEE, MANY OF YOU NEGROIDS ARE COMPOSED OF EUROPEAN, NATIVE AMERICAN, AND AFRICAN GENES. ALL OF THESE GENES THEN WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE YOUR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL TRAITS (MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE EUROPEAN GENES CONTROLLING FACIAL FEATURES, MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE NATIVE AMERICAN GENES CONTROLLING HAIR TEXTURE AND LENGTH, MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE AFRICAN GENES CONTROLLING BODY TYPE AND MUSCLE COMPOSITION, BUT, LIKELY, MOST OF YOU HAVE A COMBINATION OF EUROPEAN, AFRICAN, AND NATIVE AMERICAN GENES CONTROLLING A VARIETY OF TRAITS, ETC., ETC., ETC.).
KERRY KITTLES
Like the other "Civilized Tribes," the Seminole had kept black slaves and after Emancipation in 1863, the freed slaves became full tribal members. They were treated as equals by the tribe with no boundaries to intermarriage, with the freed slaves -the Freedman- often marrying the children of their former masters. What seemed to be a model of racial inclusion continued for more than a century, as the editor of the local newspaper the Seminal Producer remarked in a revealing account in Wired magazine: "You've got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money."
The money that put an end to decades of harmony was a combination of gaming receipts accrued since the passing of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, and American government reparations for historic land seizures. For the Seminole the reparations alone amounted to $56 million, according to the Wired account. Once the money began to pour into the tribal coffers, applications for tribal membership mushroomed. For example, membership of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, which also saw a similar increase in its financial fortunes, rose from fifty thousand in 1980 to more than a quarter of a million today. In 1983 the Cherokee introduced a requirement for tribal members to carry a "Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood" that was open to anyone who could establish a genealogical link to the Dawes Rolls. As we have already seen, the rolls were not directly concerned with any literal concept of blood relationship, but the very title of the certificate infers a link based on biology. When the Seminole expelled all two thousand black members of the tribe in 2000, it was not long before the Freedman realized that directly establishing at least a degree of authentic Native American ancestry through a DNA test should help them challenge the expulsions where other legal means had failed.
When Kittles heard about this from a friend at the University of Oklahoma, he paid a visit to a conference of the "Descendants of the Freedman of Oklahoma," the organization dedicated to ending "discrimination against people of mixed Indian African descent," and offered free DNA ancestry tests to delegates. This was before the refinement of the chromosome portraits was available, and the tests were based on the less sensitive AIMs technology Kittles had developed with Mark Shriver of the University of Pennsylvania. Even so, the AIMs tests would give a figure, however crude, for the degree of Native American ancestry in the Freedman's DNA, which could be compared to other groups of people. Kittles tested a total of ninety-five Freedman descendants and presented his results to an expectant audience at their 2005 annual conference. He had found that the proportion of African ancestry among the Freedman's descendants ranged from the lowest at only 4 percent to the highest at 76 percent. Likewise, there was a large range in the proportion of European ancestry among the group, ranging from zero to 62 percent. When it came to the most keenly anticipated result, the component of their genomes that was assigned to Native American ancestry, the figures fell between zero and 30 percent, with an average of 6 percent. This was, as Kittles announced to the hushed audience, roughly the same as the average African American from Baltimore or New York City.
Even though this was a lower average component of Native American ancestry than many descendants had hoped for, several declared there and then that they would use the results to press for tribal membership. But the prospects for success do not look bright, judging by the reaction of the Seminole leader, Jerry Haney, who was behind the expulsion of black tribal members in 2000. When asked by the Wired reporter if he would reconsider his stance based on new DNA evidence his reply was brutally frank: "They can claim all the Indian they want, " he said, "but they cannot become a member of the Seminole Nation by blood. They're down there [on the roll] as Freedman. They're separate." Nor does litigation offer much hope to disenfranchised Freedman descendants as complete tribal autonomy in matters of membership has repeatedly been upheld in the courts, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.
The original source of the problem traces back to the way the all-important Dawes Rolls were compiled back in 1906 by a delegation of mainly white clerks sent out from Washington. It was their task to vet applications for tribal membership and entitlement to the landholdings that were being distributed. Applicants were directed to one of the tents that had been put up, one of which dealt with the Freeman. The enrollment system was bound to be arbitrary, and in the absence of documentation or the ability to speak an Indian language, several applicants found themselves on the Freedmen's Roll based on a clerical assignment of their physical appearance. The fact that siblings were sometimes assigned to different rolls only emphasizes the intrinsic fallibility of the system. In those cases, one sibling would be issued a blood-quantum certificate while the other on the Freedman's Roll would be denied one, even though their ancestry was exactly the same.
What is missing in all of this is a parallel measure of Native American ancestry among the enrolled members, which has not been done. Kittles is not alone in suspecting that such a test would reveal that they, too, had a very mixed genetic background, and that many of today's enrolled members of the Five Nations would have lower proportions of Native American ancestry than some descendants of the Freedmen.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/race/black_indians_genetic_testing_2005.html
Cherokee leaders decided to take anyone with a drop of black blood off of the books so they couldn't receive any of the profits that come from gambling . They figured if they allowed their slave descendants (Niggers) in as Cherokee that they would have to share more money with them.
EXACTLY RIGHT, PRINCESS!
These Boys Have A Decent Percentage Of Native Hawaiian Blood! Probably Anywhere From 25% TO Maybe 50% (The One In The Middle May Be 50%).
NOW THAT YOU'VE READ THE ABOVE PASSAGE THINK ABOUT ALL OF THOSE HAWAIIANS WHO CLAIM TO BE HAWAIIAN, BUT IF WERE GIVEN A DNA TEST WOULD BE FOUND TO HAVE ALMOST NO HAWAIIAN DNA WHATSOEVER. THOSE GOD DAMN LYING, CHEATING, FRAUDS. THIS GUY MIGHT BE ONE OF THEM http://instagram.com/koapaden IF HE DOES HAVE SOME HAWAIIAN DNA IT'D PROBABLY BE MINIMAL. THIS BROAD IS ANOTHER ONE https://twitter.com/akaSPARKLEZ HER NAME IS NOT NOELANI AND SHE HAS NO HAWAIIAN DNA WHATSOEVER. AND HERE'S ANOTHER https://twitter.com/Alohaa_leilani LIKE SPARKLEZ, LEILANI'S BIRTH NAME IS NOT LILI'UOKALANI, NOR IS IT EVEN LEILANI AND, LIKE SPARKLEZ, SHE HAS ABSOLUTELY NO HAWAIIAN DNA.
http://instagram.com/p/dimmBjnsTw/?modal=true
His Curly Hair Isn't A Result Of Polynesian Genes. It's A Result Of Either Hispanic (Mexican) Or White Genes. He Doesn't Have Enough Polynesian Genes To Code For Curly Hair Like That. Plus, The Polynesians That He May Have Descended From Didn't Have Curly, Coarse, Kinky Hair Like The Kind He's Implying That He Has. They Most Likely Had Straight Hair!
The first portrait in the gallery is of my New England volunteer "Margo Channing." She is, as you'll see, all one color: blue. This means that without a single exception, all of Margo's DNA has a European origin. It is not the most colorful portrait or, you might think the best to choose to begin our tour of the gallery...But, despite its uniformity, this portrait is one of the most interesting and surprising of all. I could equally well have shown you the portraits of my older New England volunteers: "Terry Malloy," "Rio McDoald," "Anna Christie," "Lisa Fremont," Or "Rose Sayer." All of them are exactly the same, solidly blue throughout without a trace of DNA from either African or Native American Ancestors. Remember that all my sitters in this part of the gallery are descended from European settlers who arrived in New England during the seventeenth century, many of them before 1650. And yet there is not the slightest echo of any interbreeding with Native Americans, with whom they lived in close proximity. Had there been, then the blue chromosome would have been flecked with orange. That was what I had been suspecting, having seen the effects of European settlement among other indigenous people where genes are quick to cross ethnic boundaries in both directions. But in New England there is no sign of it.
I can only conclude that, if there had been any intermixing between early New Englanders and the indigenous tribes living around Plymouth and Cape Cod, the offspring would have stayed within the Indian tribes rather than being absorbed into the English settlements. The single exception is "Atticus Finch." His portrait shows a tiny fleck of orange at the end of chromosome 9.
"Atticus," if you recall, had reason to believe he was descended on his father's side from Ots-Toch, the daughter of a Mohawk mother and a French father. Although I cannot prove it beyond any doubt, I think it likely that the speck of orange in "Atticus"'s chromosome portrait really is the genetic legacy that he inherited from Ots-Toch and her Mohawk mother. The fact that the portraits of my other New England volunteers were all uniformly European blue throughout makes me think that the little bit of orange in "Atticus Finch"'s portrait is genuinely from his Mohawk ancestor. After twelve generations of doubling dilution, there was never going to be much left of her DNA in "Atticus"'s genome, and the single speck we see in his portrait is about all I would have expected.
One of the attractions that drew me to the chromosome portraits, as well as their visual impact, is that it is easy to look up which genes correspond to which particular chromosome segments. The Human Genome Project located all our genes at fixed points along the chromosomes, so it is a simple task in "Atticus Finch"'s case to identify which genes have come down to him from Ots-Toch. This will identify the parts of "Atticus"'s body that are running on Mohawk DNA. Among several genes that chromosome 9 carries with frankly obscure functions, there is one that is familiar to all of us. This is the gene that controls our blood group, deciding whether we are group A, B, AB, or O. We all have two copies of this gene, one from each parent, and in "Atticus"'s case one of them has been inherited from Ots-Toch, while the other has come from a European ancestor on his mother's side of the family. Both Mohawk and European genes are working together to decide "Atticus"'s blood group, and since he is fit and well, it looks as though they are doing a good job.
"Harry Lime," a staff member at the New England Historic Genealogy Society who also volunteered to have his chromosome painted, was the only other European New Englander to have anything other than a uniformly blue chromosome portrait. In his case, as you can see, the speck of color was not orange but green. "Harry Lime" therefore has an African ancestor. When I unveiled the portrait, his first question - to himself more than to me - was to wonder who this ancestor might have been. Being a professional genealogist, he set off in search of this unexpected family member. Like "Atticus Finch"'s portrait, this was only a splash of color amid a sea of blue, suggesting that, whoever it was, his African ancestor had lived a very long time ago. The likelihood is that he or she was an African American, but even that is not certain. Some Europeans, myself included, have small segments of African DNA that must have entered the British gene pool at some time in the past. The last time I spoke to "Harry," he was still on the track of his elusive African ancestor.
As we did with "Atticus Finch," we can also see which of "Harry"'s genes are firing on African DNA. The section of chromosome 7 containing African DNA does not hold any well-known genes. However, there is one intriguing gene among the otherwise uninspiring collection. It belongs to the family of genes that control the exquisitely sensitive receptors that give us our sense of smell. It is a large family dispersed around the human genome, with each member of the family capable of sensing particular odors. In "Harry"'s case one of these is being run by a collaboration of DNA from one African and one European ancestor.
FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS
The particular segment of African chromosome 11 that I have inherited happens to be very rich in genes. Among many others, there are genes for insulin and for beta-goblin, one of the two subunits of hemoglobin located there. So both my body's pancreatic insulin and hemoglobin output are controlled by a fifty-fifty mixture of African and European DNA. I also have a fleck of orange from an unknown Asian ancestor, and the segment of chromosome 7 that contains it houses an important collagen gene. So my skin and bones owe a great deal of their mechanical strength to my Asian ancestor, just as much as my pancreas is jointly run on African DNA.
Judging by her portrait, "Phyllis Dietrichson," like "Harry Lime," also has an African ancestor and although I met her through the NEHGS headquarters in Boston, some of her family are from North Carolina. Like "Harry," she does not know who this African ancestor was, but she was delighted when I told her that the chromosomal segment involved, which as you can see is located on her chromosome 7, contains an important muscle gene called beta-actin. With this new knowledge, "Phyllis" now flexes her African biceps with increased vigor.
On our travels around America we met with "Rhett Butler,"..."Rhett" was a European American from the South, from Georgia, whose ancestors had come over from England in the early eighteenth century. He was quite sure he did not have any black ancestors, but when his portrait came back, there were three streaks of green against an otherwise all-blue genome. His reaction to this when I showed him was amusement more than anything else. By the sound of it, his sister had married a man who was a bit of a racist, and "Rhett" was looking forward to telling him that he had actually married a black woman, on the very reasonable assumption that at least some of his African ancestor's genes had also been inherited by his sister.
The portrait of another of our volunteers, "Sugar Kane," also shows up several long segments of African DNA. If you recall...I met "Sugar" and her husband in San Francisco, where she had told us about the family photograph of her grandmother who looked to her like a Native American. It was because of the possibility of an Indian ancestor that "Sugar" had become very interested in the spiritual life of Native Americans and had gone on her own spirit quest, including a spell in the sweat lodge at Pine Ridge. "Sugar" and her family had lived in Florida for generations, and from the appearance of her chromosome portrait, she certainly does have one or more black ancestors. If you look closely you will see that she also has two very short smudges orange from what was very probably a Native American ancestor. There isn't enough there to indicate that the grandmother in her family album was a full-blooded American Indian, but as we shall see, that is not always easy to tell from genetic analysis.
Our other volunteer who life "Sugar Kane," certainly considered herself to be from solidly European stock was "Ilsa Lund." Appropriately enough "Ilsa"'s family hails from the Carolinas, and her chromosome portrait...has even more green segments than "Sugar Kane"'s. As you see, the green segments in "Ilsa"'s portrait are quite long and relatively intact, which suggests they have been inherited from a fairly recent African ancestor. That is because there has been less time for the segments to be broken up by the constant shuffling that chromosomes undergo between each generation...Like "Sugar Kane," "Ilsa"'s portrait has the tiniest fleck of orange on four of her chromosomes, indicating a far distant Native American ancestry as well.
I am the first to point out that the gallery has far too small a number of individual portraits for me to draw any statistically significant conclusions. But that isn't going to stop me from making a few observations on the collection for the catalog notes. I am genuinely astonished to find so little genetic evidence of intermixing among the descendants of the early New England settlers. Of the twelve complete genome scans, each one scrutinizing half a million markers, I found a segment of orange only in "Atticus Finch"'s portrait, and he probably inherited it from the Mohawk ancestor he knew about. Apart from the one segment of African DNA in "Harry Lime," every other New Englander has a completely European set of chromosomes. The volunteers themselves were not as surprised as I was, but I think that is only to be expected. After all, none of the European American volunteers from the South thought they had any African ancestors, yet they all did. The only explanation I can come up with for the completely blue portraits from New England is that if there were any liaisons with Native Americans, the offspring were never, or almost never, accepted into the English colonies and instead were raised as Indians.
The portraits of European American volunteers had produced fascinating results, even if the portraits themselves were rather monotone, being mostly blue with the very occasional brushstroke of green and orange. This call changed when I unwrapped the portraits from my African American DNA sitters...
In this section of the exhibition you can see portraits with a full range of color from the almost all-green Toby Cooper, through blue on green in "Virgil Tibbs"'s chromosomes, to the balanced blend of blue and green in the portrait of Mark Thompson. However, as you can see at a glance, unlike the New Englanders, not one of the portraits of of my African American volunteers has a completely uniform set of chromosomes. Every single one shows the genetic evidence of at least some European ancestry. The other features to notice in this section of the gallery is that all of the African American portraits also show some blocks of orange from Native American ancestors. There are some aspects of the brushwork that I think may indicate slight inaccuracies in assigning the Native American component against an otherwise African background. To be more precise, I am surprised that so many of the orange segments among African Americans extended across both chromosomes, which if taken literally would mean that they had been inherited from a common ancestor, which I find most unlikely. But this is only a detail and does not diminish the observation that all the chromosome portraits of my African American volunteers have some degree of Native American ancestry. This news delighted many of my volunteers who, like "Virgil Tibbs' from Boston, had hoped for a tangible genetic link to the indigenous inhabitants of their adopted land. Another noticeable feature of the collection is that the chromosome portraits of African American sitters from the south, like Toby Cooper and the two friends from Atlanta, "Ned Land" and "Mildred Pierce,' have a lot more green in them than the portraits of their fellow African Americans, like Mark Thompson and "Virgil Tibbs," whose ancestors had moved north either directly after the Civil War or later on in the nineteenth century.
Moving to the final section of the gallery, I have already explained why I did not want to paint the genetic portraits of Native Americans for DNA USA. However, I was fortunate to meet up with "Will Kane" and "Roger Thornhill," who each had one Native American and one European parent and who were gracious enough to give DNA samples. When I unwrapped the paintings prior to displaying them, I could see, as you can, that both portraits have a larger component of blue from their European parents. However, the way portraits are painted means that the contribution can easily be subtracted, leaving the lower half of each chromosome representing the Native American component. In both "Will"'s and "Roger"'s portraits you can see that these lower segments are a mixture of blue and orange. We have seen earlier in the book that although portraits of Native American chromosome appear to have a European component, this can be partly due to the Asia/Europe border artifacts of Siberian chromosomes rather than a genuinely recent European admixture. Mike MacPherson's estimate is that chromosome portraits of Native Americans living five hundred years ago, before there was any chance of interbreeding with recently arrived Europeans, would be 75+/-15 percent orange with the remainder blue. On these grounds the Navajo and Hopi ingredients of "Will Kane"'s and "Roger Thornbill"'s genome are well within the range for unmixed Native American chromosomes. What is noticeable is that there are no signs of green, meaning African ancestry, in neither of the portraits.
"Will"'s Navajo and "Roger"'s Hopi chromosomes contrast dramatically with the final portrait in this room from my one and only Cherokee volunteer, "Lucas Jackson." I was astonished when I first saw his chromosome portrait, and so was he. "Isn't that something!" he said with quiet amazement. There is only one small segment of orange among an otherwise uniform sea of blue. I would have dismissed this as an error were it not for something Mike MacPherson said when I visited him in San Francisco. He had evidently had a similar experience with the company's Cherokee customers, and had often found very little sign of orange in their chromosome portraits. We did not discuss the "Cherokee paradox," as MacPherson called it, any more than that, but it did make me think that perhaps "Luca Jackson"'s portrait was not so unusual for a Cherokee as I had first thought. It also shone an admittedly dim light on the question of tribal membership of the Cherokee Nation and the other displaced Oklahoma tribes. "Though "Lucas" has not yet applied, his father and many of his relatives living in Oklahoma are members of the Cherokee Nation through their proven genealogical descent from ancestors on the Dawes Rolls. Yet, even though one of his chromosomes came from his European mother, there is really only one tiny speck of Native American DNA on the chromosome he inherited from his Cherokee father, which is far less than the average of 6 percent shown by the disenfranchised descendants of the Freedmen of Oklahoma.
...
There is only one more observation to make in DNA USA, and it derives from the fascinating complexity of the human genome illustrated so well by the chromosome portraits of the sitters. This is most readily appreciated in the multicolored paintings of my African American volunteers, because here you can see most clearly how all of our bodies work on the intimate collaboration of DNA segments handed down by thousands if not millions of ancestors. The Native and European American genomes are equally complicated mixtures of ancestral contributions, but it is not easy to see the individual components in the present color scheme.
To illustrate my point I have picked out 140 genes that help run eleven major body systems and shown their locations against the chromosome portrait of Mark Thompson, one of my African American volunteers. The composite portrait is the last in the gallery and I have put the detailed description of these genes in an appendix. These are only a tiny fraction of the total number of genes we need to keep going, but enough to convey the principle. In all of us they work equally from the two copies that we inherited, one from each of our parents. They have to cooperate properly, or we could simply not survive, as the example of severe inherited diseases teaches us. So, whatever their own individual ancestry, whether African, European, or Native American, our genes must have found a way of working together. My pancreas functions on a combination of both African and European genes. Equally, "Rhett Butler," a white man from the South, depends on the DNA inherited from an unknown African ancestor for his heart muscles to work properly. "Ilsa Lund"'s digestive system, and much else besides, runs on DNA from her African ancestors. "Atticus Finch" needs his Mohawk genes to make sure his red blood cells do their job.
...
The essential genetic contributions are even more obvious in the portraits of my African American volunteers. Mark Thompson's insulin output is controlled by 100 percent European genes at the tip of chromosome 11, making his pancreas less "African" than mine. The same goes for his beta-globin genes, located right next door. They are both from European ancestors, which means that even though he is an African American he is extremely unlikely to be a carrier of sickle-cell anemia, which is caused by a mutation in this gene. I, on the other hand, could be a carrier, as this globin gene is located in the segment that I inherited from my African ancestor. this illustrates a relevant health care issue. No doubt with the best of intentions, ethnicity is taken into account when deciding on diagnosis and treatment plans. Since I am easily classified as a white Caucasian, no one would ever suspect that I might be a carrier for sickle cell anemia, which is an African disease, but I could well be.
During the Korean War in the early 1950s, American troops in the field were prescribed antimalarial drugs. About 10 percent of African American soldiers developed severe anemia after this treatment while European Americans soldiers only very rarely showed any side effects. It took a long time to pin down the cause, but it was eventually tracked to a deficiency in an enzyme with the shorthand G6PD, whose gene is carried on the X chromosome. As with sickle cell anemia, carriers for the G6PD mutations have some resistance to malarial infection, and for this reason G6PD deficiency is more prevalent among people with ancestry from West Africa, where malaria is endemic. This was the first time anyone had noticed that there was a difference in the effects of pharmaceuticals between different racial groups, and it is regarded as the moment when the new field of pharmacogenetics was born. Since then there have been many more examples of severe side effects suffered by different ethnic or racial groups, which has had an influence on drug prescriptions and treatment plans.
Of these the most clinically relevant are the observed differences in the way people metabolize pharmaceuticals. Most drugs, and other toxins, are cleared from the body by the liver, using a series of proteins called P450 cytochromes. Many African Americans carry a version of the P450 gene located on chromosome 10 that is less active in clearing some widely used drugs, like beta-blockers, the blood thinner warfarin, and the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac. As a consequence, African American patients are generally prescribed much lower doses of these drugs than are their European counterparts. By now you will begin to see the dangers of the blanket application of this prescribing policy toward anyone classified as African American. If one or both of their P450 genes is actually European in origin, then the basis for prescribing the lower dose will be wrong. A quick scan through the chromosome portraits in the gallery reveals that of my nine African American volunteers, only three have both copies of the P450 gene from African ancestors, there have one European and one African copy, and the genes of the remaining three are completely European. Inversely, "Sugar Kane," my European American volunteer from Florida, also carries an African version of P450 on her chromosome number 10, so even though she is unmistakably white she could well clear drugs more slowly than her physician would expect using only her overall ethnic affiliation.
But it is not just the collaborations between African and European genes that are highlighted by the portraits. Another of my DNA volunteers "Holly Golightly," a distinguished African American biographer whom I met whole she was on sabbatical in Oxford, was surprised when I told her both copies of her lactase genes, located on chromosome 2, were inherited from Native American ancestors. She is lactose intolerant and had always put this down to her African background, whereas in fact her inability to break down lactose, which is found mainly in milk, is due to the poorly functioning lactase genes that she inherited from her Native American ancestors.
Possibly the most revealing feature of the chromosome portraits concerns the genes for the one trait that, more than any other has been used to define racial categories - that of color. All pigmentation in humans is due to just one basic substance, melanin. It alone is responsible for the vast range of skin and hair colors found in people from around the world. Melanin itself is a polymer derived from the amino acid tyrosine and is contained within pigmented cells, the melanocytes, in discrete granules. Basically, the more melanocytes and the more melanin in the granules, the darker the skin, eyes, and hair. Blue eyes are not blue because they contain a pigment but because, in the absence of melanin, light reflected from a layer in the iris is diffracted through the regularly spaced transparent collagen fibers in the cornea and gives the appearance of being blue; it is the same optical mechanism that imparts the vivid colors of a butterfly's wings.
The genetic control of skin and hair pigmentation is controlled by eleven genes that we know about, though there may well be more. They each control different parts of the process of producing melanin granules and regulating the number of melanocytes. The paler end of the wide range of human pigmentation is probably a response to the reduced exposure to sunlight that some of our ancestors experienced when moving from Africa to higher latitudes. Some vital functions, like the synthesis of vitamin D and folic acid, depend on sunlight, so it makes sense that evolutionary natural selection would have promoted the survival of lighter-skinned individuals. When we look at the chromosome portraits, it is very clear that many African American volunteers, who count themselves as black, actually have a mixture of pigmentation genes from many different ancestries. To take just one example, the radio-talk-show host Mark Thompson. Of his eleven pigmentation genes, only two are of completely African origin, five have been inherited equally from European and African ancestors two are an equal mix of African and Native American, and one has been inherited from exclusively European ancestors. That blend of origins is the direct result of the mixing of his chromosome segments in generations of his African, European, and Native American ancestors.
Since this process is more or less completely random, a vast number of combinations is possible in any African American. There will be individuals who actually have very little DNA from African ancestors, yet if these contributions include chromosome segments housing the pigmentation genes, then they will have typically dark coloring. Likewise there will be Americans who DNA is almost all African in origin, yet if the pigmentation genes are not included in these segments and instead come from European ancestors, then their coloring will be white. Similarly, it would be entirely possible for a European American with only a small overall component of African DNA to be very dark skinned if these ancestral segments were to include the pigmentation genes. Our only Cherokee volunteer probably had a dark skin tone because the sole surviving segment of Native American DNA in his genome included one of the most influential of the pigmentation genes, located on chromosome 15.
