The Genographic Project

This is so cool! It's "The Genographic Project", sponsored by National Geographic and IBM, among others... . You send them a cheek swab and they send you information about (cue important music)"your genetic journey". Basically, they look at your genetic markers and tell you where the current theories place your deep ancestors throughout pre-history. You know, like, 10,000 years ago, your ancestors were milling about in coastal China - or something like that. Your maternal line is tracked via mitochondrial DNA and your paternal line via the y-chromosome. I guess if you're not a guy, you're SOL about the y- chromosome stuff. Sorry, ladies!

Anyway, I find this all deeply intriguing, I guess for the same reason that I find genealogy so intriguing. Genealogy give me a connection to the past, and to the world. The genographic project pushes deeper into the past, and further across the world. OF course, your level of detail drops as you go further back, but I'm used to that from genealogy.

Big drawback to this: it costs $108 by the time you pay S&H. Upside: I've got two brothers who should (if Mom wasn't lying, and if my teenaged theory about them being mutants isn't true) have the identical mitochondrial and y-chromosome DNA as me. Put together, Mom and Dad also match up in this, so I'm hitting them up for a share of the cost, too. $27 to find out where my ancestral pioneers traveled - totally worth it!

BTW, did you catch that I actually share more genetic material with each brother than I do with either of my parents? I'm still startled every time I come across that. I'm more closely related to my brothers than to my parents.... weird.