Future African American thru-hiker

[Gray Blazer]

... and a lot of other people from these hemisperes.

Take it in the context of an ignorant yankee moron who forgets about Mexico and Canada, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada.

[Old Hiker]

Me!.........

Got your birth certificate handy? Just askin' !

[Gray Blazer]

Hemispheres!! or however you spell it. I told you I is ignorant.

[Gray Blazer]

Got your birth certificate handy? Just askin' !

My papers are in order, mein furher!

[Old Hiker]

My papers are in order, mein furher!

I vas ONLY follo-ink orrrrrr-ders!

[Pedaling Fool]

http://press.princeton.edu/releases/m7442.html


Geneticist Spencer Wells spends his life traveling the globe taking blood samples from men and women in order to unravel the secrets of the human story: Where did humans come from? How did they spread over the globe? How did different races evolve? In THE JOURNEY OF MAN: A GENETIC ODYSSEY (Princeton University Press), Wells answers those questions for the first time using the latest discoveries of human genetics. We talked to Spencer as he sat for a moment between trips to Lebanon and Tunisia:

1. You say that there really was an Adam--a common male ancestor for all humans. How did you find that out?

1. 
   We study a historical document carried in the blood of everyone alive today - DNA. Tiny spelling mistakes - changes in the DNA sequence - that occurred in the past can give us clues about genealogical relationships. If two people share a change, then they are likely to share an ancestor. If we look at the spelling mistakes carried by people all over the world, we find that ultimately all of us share a common ancestor. In the case of the male line, defined by a piece of DNA known as the Y-chromosome, this analysis allows us to trace back to a common male ancestor for everyone alive today. In other words, Adam.
   
2. Where did Adam live and what did he look like?
   The unequivocal answer is that he lived in Africa. Every piece of DNA in our bodies can be traced back to an African source. The Y-chromosome traces back to eastern or southern Africa, around 60,000 years ago. The present-day inhabitants of Ethiopia, Sudan and southern Africa carry the clearest signals of our earliest ancestry, signals that have been lost in the rest of us. So they give us a glimpse of our 60,000 year-old Adam. Adam would have been fully modern, both in terms of his appearance and his brain function. It is speculation, of course, but perhaps the San Bushmen of the Kalahari - who in many ways are a composite model of facial features from people all over the world - give us a portrait of Adam and his fellow early humans.
   
3. Why do you focus on men? What about Eve?
   It turns out that the Y-chromosome gives us two very important clues to the question of how we populated the world. First, it shows us our most recent common ancestor (Adam). This man lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago. The significance of this date is that it means that all modern humans were living in Africa until at least that time. In other words, within the past 60,000 years - only about 2,000 generations - our species has populated the entire planet. Clearly, we are all very closely related. The second clue provided by the Y-chromosome concerns the routes we followed in our migrations around the planet. Due to something I describe in the book as 'sexual politics', the male line gives us the best view of the routes followed. So, the Y - a piece of DNA that really doesn't do much more than to make men men - is one of the best historical documents ever written. Women also have a female history written in their mitochondrial DNA, showing the path to Eve around 150,000 years ago. For reasons explored in the book, the mitochondrial signal turns out to provide less resolution for studies of population history than the Y. Again, it comes down to a long history of sexual politics.
   
4. How does the genetic Adam relate to the Adam of the bible?
   It's interesting that both genetics and the Bible show that there is a common origin of humanity. According to genetic data we come from a single male ancestor. In the Bible too it is mentioned that there is a single male Adam and single female, Eve. I don't equate our results one-to-one with the biblical story, of course, because if you count back through the generations described in the Bible, Adam should have existed in 4004 BC, and our Adam existed 60,000 years ago. Also, our Adam and Eve weren't the only people alive at the time, just the lucky ones who left descendants down to the present day. But it is nice to know that we arrive at the same general conclusion: we're all related.
   
5. If we all came from a black man, how did men and women of different colors come into being?
   The accepted explanation for skin color differences is that we first evolved in a tropical region, in Africa. The tropical sun is quite strong, so the skin needed the protection provided by the natural sunscreen, melanin, which makes skin dark. When we started moving into the Northern Hemisphere 40,000 years ago, the sun was not as strong. Anyone who's been to London in February can tell you that! And because the sun helps us to synthesize Vitamin D, which we need to grow strong bones, we had to lose some of our pigmentation to allow enough sunlight through.
   
6. So what do our genes tell us about the biological differences between, say, Europeans and Africans?
   They are literally only skin deep. We are all African cousins separated by - at most - 2,000 generations.
   
7. Has research on genes told us something about the first people to arrive in America?
   Yes. Our data tells us that we could not have been in the Americas prior to 20,000 years ago, and the most likely date of entry was around 15,000 years ago. This is because the oldest Y-chromosome lineage in the Americas originated in Central Asia 15,000-20,000 years ago, and then migrated to the northeast, across the Bering Strait. If we were still in Central Asia 20,000 years ago, we couldn't have been in the Americas until after that date.
   
8. How do other scientists and the public react to your research?
   In general, there is more and more agreement among paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists and historians about the details of our past. I suppose one thing that some people still find hard to accept is that we left Africa so recently, and blitzed our way around the world, but it does seem to have happened like that. I urge them to read the book, where I discuss the archaeological, linguistic and climatological clues that fill in the details of our journey. It is a synthetic look at the past, not simply a genetic tale.

I'm a proud African-American



One day people will stop being fooled by nature's tricks, there's nothing different among us other than how we physically adapt to our environment and the culture that is born form that.

[JAK]

When we became homo sapiens is completely arbitrary.
When are we all going to stop being so specist?

[JAK]

Seriously though, I feel connected to different people in different ways on different levels. In some ways I am Canadian, which I suppose connects me with people on Vancouver Island and way up in the Arctic Circles, but it really is a bit of a stretch. I have alot more in common with folks in Maine, but not in all ways. I am more connected to people on the other side of the world that like to do some of the things I do, like sailing, and hiking, but geography is important also. I am a maritimer, and live on a river also, with rolling hills and forest and rural landscape, so in that respect I am as connected with people in places like Maine, Gaspe, the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland, places like Scotland and Scandanavia, and also parts of places like Russia, China, Korea, and Japan, and also places like New Zealand, and southern parts of Argentina and Chile I suppose. I don't mind small cities, especially in those places, as long as they are not so big that they lose their connection to the land and sea. About 1,000,000 is an upper limit for me, but my preference is 100,000 and even then I prefer living on the outskirts. I need to be able to step out my door and be able to hike in the woods more or less immediately, and paddle within a few hundred yards. But more than anything else I define myself as what most demographers today might call rural. I feel stronger connected to someone in Mali, living in a small village, and able to do some gardening or small farming or herding, and hiking, or whatever it is that they do, than I do with anyone anywhere living in a city, even my home city, if they just stay in it and don't get out of it.

So the most essential thing to me I guess is some sort of connection to the natural environment. When I think of Edinburgh Scotland, where my mother and 3 of 4 grandparents are from, I don't think of the cities over there. I think somewhat of language and culture, but only in connection with traditional ties to the land and how it shaped people, when people were more connected to it. I don't think much about genes. The land and sea over here is very similar, so in that sense I never really left, and in that sense the Scots and Micmacs are pretty much the same people for my purposes, in that the ancestors of my 1/16th part Micmac were not all that different in the way they lived than the ancestors of my 7/8ths Scots, or the other 1/16th whoever they were. It's the land that should shape and identify us more than anything else. That is what we should endeavour to remain most connected to.

[Lilred]

Key West has an official philosophy which most people down there live by.

"We are all created equal members of one human family"

When you're a teacher, you hear all kinds of things come out of kid's mouths. They still don't know how to censor their own words. I hear a lot of things mommy and daddy say through them. Adults know how to hide their bigotry, children not so much.

[JAK]

Well the problem is, those words can still be used to compell people to do bad things.

So no, I am not neccessarily one of you.
It depends on what it is that you would have me do.

[Gray Blazer]

My ancestors used to chase polar bears around the North Pole.

[JAK]

At what radius?

You see, I'm a radialist.

[Sailor (The other one)]

I'm a proud African-American

One day people will stop being fooled by nature's tricks, there's nothing different among us other than how we physically adapt to our environment and the culture that is born form that.

Me too.
Thanks for that JG.

[JAK]

http://press.princeton.edu/releases/m7442.html


Geneticist Spencer Wells spends his life traveling the globe taking blood samples from men and women in order to unravel the secrets of the human story: Where did humans come from? How did they spread over the globe? How did different races evolve? In THE JOURNEY OF MAN: A GENETIC ODYSSEY (Princeton University Press), Wells answers those questions for the first time using the latest discoveries of human genetics. We talked to Spencer as he sat for a moment between trips to Lebanon and Tunisia:

1. You say that there really was an Adam--a common male ancestor for all humans. How did you find that out?

1. 
   We study a historical document carried in the blood of everyone alive today - DNA. Tiny spelling mistakes - changes in the DNA sequence - that occurred in the past can give us clues about genealogical relationships. If two people share a change, then they are likely to share an ancestor. If we look at the spelling mistakes carried by people all over the world, we find that ultimately all of us share a common ancestor. In the case of the male line, defined by a piece of DNA known as the Y-chromosome, this analysis allows us to trace back to a common male ancestor for everyone alive today. In other words, Adam.
   
2. Where did Adam live and what did he look like?
   The unequivocal answer is that he lived in Africa. Every piece of DNA in our bodies can be traced back to an African source. The Y-chromosome traces back to eastern or southern Africa, around 60,000 years ago. The present-day inhabitants of Ethiopia, Sudan and southern Africa carry the clearest signals of our earliest ancestry, signals that have been lost in the rest of us. So they give us a glimpse of our 60,000 year-old Adam. Adam would have been fully modern, both in terms of his appearance and his brain function. It is speculation, of course, but perhaps the San Bushmen of the Kalahari - who in many ways are a composite model of facial features from people all over the world - give us a portrait of Adam and his fellow early humans.
   
3. Why do you focus on men? What about Eve?
   It turns out that the Y-chromosome gives us two very important clues to the question of how we populated the world. First, it shows us our most recent common ancestor (Adam). This man lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago. The significance of this date is that it means that all modern humans were living in Africa until at least that time. In other words, within the past 60,000 years - only about 2,000 generations - our species has populated the entire planet. Clearly, we are all very closely related. The second clue provided by the Y-chromosome concerns the routes we followed in our migrations around the planet. Due to something I describe in the book as 'sexual politics', the male line gives us the best view of the routes followed. So, the Y - a piece of DNA that really doesn't do much more than to make men men - is one of the best historical documents ever written. Women also have a female history written in their mitochondrial DNA, showing the path to Eve around 150,000 years ago. For reasons explored in the book, the mitochondrial signal turns out to provide less resolution for studies of population history than the Y. Again, it comes down to a long history of sexual politics.
   
4. How does the genetic Adam relate to the Adam of the bible?
   It's interesting that both genetics and the Bible show that there is a common origin of humanity. According to genetic data we come from a single male ancestor. In the Bible too it is mentioned that there is a single male Adam and single female, Eve. I don't equate our results one-to-one with the biblical story, of course, because if you count back through the generations described in the Bible, Adam should have existed in 4004 BC, and our Adam existed 60,000 years ago. Also, our Adam and Eve weren't the only people alive at the time, just the lucky ones who left descendants down to the present day. But it is nice to know that we arrive at the same general conclusion: we're all related.
   
5. If we all came from a black man, how did men and women of different colors come into being?
   The accepted explanation for skin color differences is that we first evolved in a tropical region, in Africa. The tropical sun is quite strong, so the skin needed the protection provided by the natural sunscreen, melanin, which makes skin dark. When we started moving into the Northern Hemisphere 40,000 years ago, the sun was not as strong. Anyone who's been to London in February can tell you that! And because the sun helps us to synthesize Vitamin D, which we need to grow strong bones, we had to lose some of our pigmentation to allow enough sunlight through.
   
6. So what do our genes tell us about the biological differences between, say, Europeans and Africans?
   They are literally only skin deep. We are all African cousins separated by - at most - 2,000 generations.
   
7. Has research on genes told us something about the first people to arrive in America?
   Yes. Our data tells us that we could not have been in the Americas prior to 20,000 years ago, and the most likely date of entry was around 15,000 years ago. This is because the oldest Y-chromosome lineage in the Americas originated in Central Asia 15,000-20,000 years ago, and then migrated to the northeast, across the Bering Strait. If we were still in Central Asia 20,000 years ago, we couldn't have been in the Americas until after that date.
   
8. How do other scientists and the public react to your research?
   In general, there is more and more agreement among paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists and historians about the details of our past. I suppose one thing that some people still find hard to accept is that we left Africa so recently, and blitzed our way around the world, but it does seem to have happened like that. I urge them to read the book, where I discuss the archaeological, linguistic and climatological clues that fill in the details of our journey. It is a synthetic look at the past, not simply a genetic tale.

I'm a proud African-American

One day people will stop being fooled by nature's tricks, there's nothing different among us other than how we physically adapt to our environment and the culture that is born form that.

I agree with the spirit of what is being said here, but there is still alot of misconceptions and over-simplifications in what is being said.

We did not have a single common ancestor 60,000 years ago. We might all have a common ancestor that lived as early as 60,000 years ago, and we likely did, but that is not the same as saying that he was the only male ancestor that we all came from. That is quite different, and highly unlikely. Similarly, just because it is likely that he lived in Africa, and was a common ancestor, that does not mean there may not already have been some other ancestors already living outside of Africa. I agree with the spirit of all this, but it is an over-genmeralization. The truth is alot more complex, and alot more beautiful.

The truth is that we are constantly diverging, but that we are also constantly converging. People are able to travel incredible distances even in a single year, never mind a single lifetime. Even with stone age technology this would be relatively easy to do then, just as it is today. In some respects, when there were fewer people, it would have been easier.

People have been travelling in and out of Africa for much longer than 60,000 years. It is a two way street. There is nothing particularly special about being in Africa, or out of Africa. That is what is so funny about articles like this. They attempt to dispell certain myths, but in the process of doing so they perpetuate these same myths somewhat, or create others that might be just as dangerous. The best thing to do is to try and make that clear, that we can dispell some myths, but in doing so create others.

What is Africa? What is Europe? What is Asia, or America?
These places and boundaries are somewhat arbitrary.

All generalizations ultimately fail, although they are still useful.

[Dogwood]

This new line of conversation is making my head spin~!
I'm gonna go to work now!

OR, you could go over to the Mall of Georgia and shop for the next month and still not see everything!

I recently drove through Buford GA(stopped at the REI after wandering around trying to locate it for 15 mins!) from the Atlanta/Alpharetta GA area on my way to Buffalo NY. I was astonished that the citizen's of Georgia favorite pastime has become shopping. Folks say NJ is packed with malls, stores, and bumper to bumper traffic. I'll tell you, NJ has nothing on GA in those departments.

Interesting aside JohnGault. Telling some of my family members, that are let's say less tolerant, they descended from a black man from Africa should go over well at the next family barbecue.

[JAK]

I think more to the truth is that the amount of genetic diversity we have today is more or less equivalent to what we might have if we had a single common ancestor 60,000 years ago. Apparently there was a period of drought about that time where the human population was greatly reduced, almost to the point of extinction, but a small population is not the same as one, and a vast majority of humans in one center is not the same as all. This might be a useful model, but the real truth is far more complex, and far more beautiful, and will always be largely lost in time.

Also...
Species generally do not evolve from just one mother and one father. Species are not spontaneously created through some single mutation. It is generally quite arbitrary, when we decide to say that a new species has begun. At that point, there is already a fair number of them, and they are still cross-breeding with other species. How this applies to humans is uncertain. It was probably well before 60,000 years ago, perhaps closer to 600,000 years ago, that there was enough diversity amongst humans that we might have arbitrarily sub-divided them into sub-species, as we do between all the various small cat populations today. But what if when several large waves of humans started migrating back out of Africa after 60,000 years ago they bumped into some remnant populations already out of Africa, just as the domestic cat is with wild cats in Scotland. Is this really a mixing of species though, or the reabsorbtion of one subspecies, or is it just nature doing its thing, diverging and converging, maintaining diveristy, more or less, and in an ever changing way, as it always has, and always will.

What is Africa?

[Old Hiker]

At what radius?

You see, I'm a radialist.

You got problems with bias plyers???

[JAK]

Going back 2000 years you could have as many as 2^100 ancestors of that generation, which is about 1,000,000. Going back 4000 years would bring the number to 1 trillion, and of course there were not that many of us back then, or even today. So two things are clear from this. Common ancestry, and inbreeding. If we go back way way further, but perhaps not as far as we think, we will find a third thing, which is sex with other species. The thing is, its all relative. Obviously, when these things happen, they are not such a bad idea at the time, and where would we be without them. lol

[canoehead]

The fun and experience you'll have won't depend on skin color. It'll be you, your skills set, and mental endurance out there. Sorta like the military but more options
Have fun
Peace

[Jack Tarlin]

Damn. This is fascinating....sort of.

Excuse me from deviating from the discussion and actually returning to the original poster's questions.

Saber:

Yes, you WILL have to hitch-hike on the Trail, but in truth, if you have problems getting rides anywhere, I'm not convinced that it'll be a racial thing. A lot of folks simply don't ever pick up hitch-hikers. In some cases, people don't like hikers. But then again, some folks go out of their way to give rides to backpackers, and let's be blunt, a black backpacker will be seen as something of a novelty in many places. You may well get rides from folks who are curious about you and your history (please don't be offended by this, it's just that there simply aren't that many black thru-hikers). In short, I don't think you're gonna have a problem hitching. Will there be the occasional rude gesture or something yelled out of a car by some jackass? Well, yeah, probably. But it could happen anywhere, not just on the A.T., and it happens to white hikers/hitchers, too. I'm not remotely excusing this behavior; I'm merely saying it doesn't happen more often on the Trail than elsewhere is all.

While there are a tiny fraction of businesses (yeah, like that bar in Maryland) that might be best avoided, this is certainly very rare, and I can't think of any towns or businesses where you'll need to be on guard.

Lasltly, in reading this whole thread, I see a lot of anti-Southern sentiment, and it's unfortunate. Speaking as a life-long Northener (but one who is well-travelled, including spending 3 months a year or more down South), the most bigoted folks I've ever encountered live in New England, tho in most cases, they don't have the balls to express their true sentiments until the object of their derision has left the room. So don't obsess about the South, I think you'll be surprised at how friendly and welcoming people will be.

Thank you for your service and have a wondeful trip!!