Toward the Primordial Slime

Swamette and Swami recently participated in National Geographic's Genographic Project. This past week we "received" our results. That is we could view the results and print them from The Genographic Project website. If you have an interest in genealogy (in a macro sense), history, anthropology or just want to have something to bore your friends with, this is it.

If you want the specifics and technical details you might want to roam around their site. Here, however, I can give you a quick overview of our results as interpreted after a few vats of fermented yak milk.

If you are a follower of Bishop Usher and believe that God created the world at 9 am on an October morn in 4004 B.C. --- you might as well stop reading now.

Up until this week Swamette had been suitably impressed that The Swami's ancestry on his mother's side could be traced back to the Earl of Arundel and at least to one of the Sureties at the signing of the Magna Carta. Well, Swami thought he had gone one better by having parts of his genetic code traced back to east Africa between 31,000 - 79,000 years ago. Not bad, I thought.

But no, Swamette has to show off. Her Haplogroup U5 DNA traces back to its oldest common ancestor at about 50,000 years ago. And it is descended (as I believe I understand it) from the much older Haplogroup L1 to between 150,000 - 170,000 years ago.

It is at this point that The Swami's great powers of logic, intuition, deduction, prestidigitation, distrimulation, charlatanism and other mysteries of olde allow us to see a more detailed tableau.

The Swami is confident that it would have been his ancestors who invented the wheel. This is a case of elementary logic: How else would the early nomadic tribesmen have utilized the drive-thru window at Og's Yak Burgerama. By simple extrapolation (and discombobulation) we can conclude that these same ancestors of Swami had to have mastered the making and use of fire to cook the yak burgers. It is as sure as that the knight follows the damsel.

Or as sure as The Swami follows the Swamette.