Over the weekend, we welcomed a new male cousin, Cassius, into the family. All congratulations and blessings are due to the new proud mom, Emily, the proud dad, Max, Emily’s parents whose names I do not recall at the moment, and Max’s parents, Tony and Jennifer.
It is ironic that, as I received the news of a new male in the family, I was researching my paternal haplogroup, E-M96, on Family Tree DNA. There are few certainties in life. One will pay taxes. One will be born like baby Cassius. One will grow old, although the rise of artificial intelligence may stave off death for those who are young today. And one’s paternal haplogroup will never change over the centuries. The paternal haplogroup is like an eternal fingerprint that descends like a time traveler thought the ages. Baby Cassius will bear the same paternal haplogroup as his father, Max. And Max will be bear the same paternal haplogroup as his father, Tony. And Tony will bear the same haplogroup as his father, Walter. And so on and so on for thousands of years.
As I rummaged through my Family Tree account, I came across a fun set of facts. My paternal haplogroup has been around for a long, long time. Around 48,000 years ago to be exact. One day in Africa, a man was born with this new mutant paternal haplogroup, E-M96. And generation after generation after generation of sons continued to bear this genetic marker.
I share this paternal haplogroup with a series of notable people from history. My far distant cousins on my direct paternal line in no particular order are the following:
Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker
Desmond Tutu
Nelson Mandela
President Lyndon Baines Johnson
Albert Einstein
The Wright Brothers
The Royal Hunyadi family from Hungary
The Noble Berkeley family from England
Imagine how different one’s conception of self would be if one internalized all of one’s connections to paternal matches. Did you know that 44% of the Family Tree DNA participants from Kosovo share my E-M96 paternal haplogroup? That my closest exact match on my y chromosome was born in Serbia? Might one see oneself as more of a citizen of the world and the epic sweep of history? Consider whether myopic self-understanding of self-identity only [underscore “only”] as the descendant of American slaves does anyone any good. There is a universe of abundance out there in genetic genealogy.
Maybe, just maybe, the confluence of genetic genealogy and artificial intelligence will free our minds from limited thoughts about ourselves.