 My name is Corey Dade, and thank you, Vince, for that introduction. And welcome to the first, the scene setter here for today, the first session of the day, understanding the ancestry of African Americans. And as Vince said, my name is Corey Dade. I'm a contributing editor at TheRoot.com. And we're here to talk about, obviously, the ancestry of African Americans. And as many of us know, the history and the ancestry of African Americans has been a difficult and sometimes tortured work in progress since slaves were brought here to this land. Slavery, the Middle Passage, and subsequent oppression here in the United States severely limited our ability to learn about and understand and even properly document our ancestry and our history here in the United States. And so now we have the advent of DNA testing. We have websites like ancestry.com and all these different methods by which more people are digging into their roots, so to speak. And they're finding more about themselves and the complicated or the complex racial histories that they had and that they never thought exist. And this is not just for African Americans, of course, but any Americans. And that research also holds untold potential for science, for understanding health disparities, but also their ethical concerns. So who better to discuss this than a historian, a geneticist, and an anthropologist? We're going to have a pretty informal discussion here, a fluid discussion. And from here we're going to take questions from the audience. So without further ado, I'll introduce our panelists, and each of them will tell you a little bit about themselves and their work. First we have from my near side to the far side, Professor Sarah Tishkoff. She's an associate professor in the departments of genetics and biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a geneticist. And we have in the middle here Professor Linda Haywood. She's a professor of African American Studies, excuse me, in history at Boston University. She's the historian. And we have the resident anthropologist, Professor Michael Blakey, who's at the College of William & Mary. And he also is the director of the Institute for Historical Biology at the College of William & Mary. Please round of applause for them. So we're going to start in the middle with our historian, Professor Linda Haywood. Would you please tell us a little about yourself and your work? Well, I'm Linda Haywood, and maybe I should start about how does a historian get involved in genetics and anthropology. We are scared of those things because we like dates and we like the past and so on. And I think I should start by saying when I taught at Howard University for 19 years, beginning in 1984, I was told, oh, you said you're an economic historian of Africa. No, you're going to be teaching African diaspora. And I spent 19 years teaching my core course, the African diaspora. And I really had to force myself to learn more comparative history and much more about the African American experience I'd been an Africanist studying at Columbia University. But this was not only what was important. Issues of identity were also important because I had students who, you know, I would see a young man in the back of my class and he'll be looking at me and not taking any notes. You know, after class I would say, you know, look, young man, you should be taking notes. Or we have midterm and final. And he says, you know, Dr. Hayward, this is the first time in my life that I've had a black professor. So I'm just looking at you and my whole world is being changed. Okay? So I knew that I was having an impact. Just my being there, I was having an impact. I think this pushed me to learn more about my own identity and my own. So I would ask, send back to my Grenada where I grew up. I was born in Trinidad but grew up in Grenada. Sent to my old aunt to say, what do you know about our background? I need to let the students know that I have an identity and situate that within the African diaspora. And I'll speak more of that later in the discussion. But also at Howard, I got the, you know, opportunities to do a lot of things in connection with the genetics and biology and anthropology. This was the African burial ground to get to participate in that. And I thank Dr. Blakely for teaching me more about, in fact, you know, how to think outside the historical box and to look at skeletons and try to understand, you know, dentition and so on. I'm no expert, but I am very much part of that language. Thirdly, when I went to Boston University in 2003, I became involved in some of the media and other information that Dr. Henry Lois Gates became involved in. And then I really had to know about the African background because this was what was important. If you're doing African-American lives and you're trying to identify individual roots of African-Americans, not only did I have to know the American story from the genealogists, I had to know the story of their biological background, their genetic background. So I had to begin reading things that I'd never read before. And I had to go and study much more deeply the African background to the Atlantic slave trade. Exactly which groups of slaves were coming out? Where were they coming from? What are the ethnic groups, et cetera? So in a certain sense, these years of that experience have made me much more, history is much more interesting. It's now not only personal, it's communal, it's national, it's identity. It's part of my being part of the African diaspora. And that's about the background I'd like to give. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Tishgolf. Is that on? Yeah, I think it is. Okay, so I thought I'd just give you a little bit of background also about myself and what got me into this area of research interest. So my background was actually in anthropology. That's what I started out as at UC Berkeley. And I was there at the time of Alan Wilson if anybody has heard of him. And he really helped to found the field of molecular anthropology and got me really excited about that. So I wanted to use genetic methods to address questions about human origins, about where we come from. And so for that reason I went on to get a PhD in human genetics. Now at that time I was working in a lab, Ken Kidd's lab at Yale, and he had a partner, Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford. And together they had a pretty amazing, diverse set of DNA samples from around the world. Now in Africa they had two groups, which everybody was using as the so-called representative African population. Whenever they did population genetics or evolutionary studies, those groups happened to be two central African pygmy populations. They couldn't be less representative, as it turns out. So as part of my thesis, what I wanted to do was look at the variation that existed amongst the different African populations. And to my surprise, I wasn't expecting this, I found so much more variation between any pair of African groups that I was looking at, than I would see between Africans and say East Asians for example. And I realized that we had greatly underrepresented the amount of variation in Africa. So after that, once I was a postdoc and then I went to South Africa to do research for a while, and decided that I wanted to return to also my anthropology roots and wanted to do field work in Africa, largely because nothing existed. There were almost no studies of human genetic variation in Africa. So part of my experience for the past 15 years or so, myself, my students, and African collaborators have been doing field work throughout Africa, studying not only to collect blood samples, but looking at phenotypic variations in different traits, things like anthropometric traits or cardiovascular or metabolic that can also have disease implications. And so my focus has been really the history of Africa and the African people. And then from that, without that history, I'd feel like you can't know that much about, you can't really know about the history of the African diaspora. Until we get that settled a bit more in Africa, that's gonna really inform us. Thank you, Professor Blakely. Well, it's a real pleasure to be here and to introduce myself as someone who began his career here. When I was 15, I worked upstairs on 50 skeletons analyzing the health of two populations under Donald Ordner. And a lot has happened since. In graduate school, my fundamental field is physical anthropology, human biology. But I never felt that was enough. It's not really meaningful to me just to look at human biology. I don't think I can understand it unless I know the cultural context, the social context, and the economic context of living populations. So I worked on issues of psychophysiological stress. The cultural and, again, social context of past populations. So I'm a bioarchaeologist, biocultural, biohistorical. And the African Burial Ground project that I directed is interdisciplinary, involving historians, geneticists, and archaeologists. The bioarchaeologies, physical anthropology, skeletal biology is at the core of it. And the Institute for Historical Biology is one place, a space, where we look at the interplay of biology, culture, and history. One of the, for me, one of the best places to look at that interplay is in the history of biology itself. And so I was also back here working on the perdlishka papers studying how genetics and biological anthropology had evolved, how evolutionary theory had evolved within society, its purposes, its influences. And it's clear to me that as the sciences separated from their religious roots, as we really go from the monastery to the academy, as it were, they brought with them certain ideas about knowledge that are very much based in Christianity. So that natural science takes on a certain authority. Nature takes on an authority not unlike God. Natural scientists have in their hands a method for ascertaining absolute presumed objective truth. And all of that was, these are ideas, not necessarily facts. And all of that was put in the hands of an ideology of eugenics, of race, whose purpose was to establish that the inequities that existed in society were actually natural inequalities, and that we just have to live with that. So this is a way of integrating those things. So when I look at genetics, and I'll talk a little bit about history too, I see a field that's had this problem. And I look at we are as a people enamored with genetics in a way that turns us away from a strong critical scrutiny. We believe that DNA is who we are. And yet in genetics today, there are the ideologues and there are the skeptics. And on genetic ancestry testing, the skeptics are telling us that we have no evidence that these tests work. We can take the work of Turi, who often what happens is that it's statistically more likely that an individual will be related to a population that has the highest percentage of that individual's, of a particular gene or haplotype found in that individual or a series of them. And by that, Turi found that Thomas Jefferson is Somali. But the same gene has fairly high frequencies, though not as high in other parts and I think the press and I don't know, maybe the researchers clean that up a bit by making him, his ancestry Middle Eastern, which is biblical, right? And possible. But all of this is really very, very flexible. Ely, Jackson and Jackson found with respect to looking at Gullagicci, that with the haplotypes that they were using, I'm sorry, Y chromosome, not the MTDNA that Turi used, that 10% of the, of African Americans might be able to, 10% of the findings would allow one to show even a region in Africa associated with African Americans. That means 90% of the findings are an error. And a 90% error is not some information. That's something else. There is no study that tells what people are really looking for, which is their recent history, according to the recent work of Royal, they want to know their recent history, last 200 years, 400 years. There is no study that tests with people who know that history, the accuracy of using DNA on them. But we believe. Let me say, in closing, at the same time, African Americans have always been faced with this problem, resulted from slavery's attempt to destroy their humanity and their history and family lineages, have created a historical tradition, historical institutions, as we know. The Journal of Negro History, early on. And we might have to settle for understanding that African Americans represent nearly all of Africa, much of Africa. And so our children are uniquely, if you will, have cultural characteristics that come from all of those places that can't be claimed. But they can't understand them. They don't know names like Wolff or Ebo or Yoruba or Moors or Malagasy. They don't know what those words mean. Because there is still virtually no African American and African history in the public schools. Even in Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, throughout the state of Virginia. And so this is where one finds one's history. So the abuses of the past continue. And we need to think about what we might do about that. Thank you Professor, and thank you panel. So the first question, we want to set a baseline here. This is all about understanding who we are, of course. But as our panel alluded to, or really said there was no illusion at all, actually, they're very specific. They're challenges to understanding that history. And this is a question for each of you and we'll start with Professor Tishkoff. So what are the challenges to understanding the ancestry and where are the holes and what are the consequences? What have been historically the consequences of not being able to understand that history? Okay, so as the geneticist here I'll talk about some of the genetic I think challenges. And I think one of the biggest ones, and this is one where I've tried to fill a bit of a gap, is just simply not having the data. And so a lot of the issues I think that arose particularly with some of the early genetic ancestry testing. Those that were looking at mitochondria DNA just since we're starting the day off I should say that's a genome that's within the mitochondria of the cell through the maternal lineage. So mom will pass it on to her son and to her daughter, but then it gets passed on the next generation just through the mom. Okay, so you can trace it back to a common ancestor. And then you can also look at the Y chromosome which is passed on from father to son every generation. And then we can look at the rest of the nuclear genome which we get from both parents. Now the difference is that most of the mitochondria and most of the Y chromosome is not recombining every generation. You can trace them back to actually a single common ancestor. But the rest of the genome is being shuffled every generation. But you have to remember every piece has its own evolutionary history. It's telling you a little different piece of the puzzle. And when you trace back mitochondria DNA or Y chromosome, you're tracing one ancestor out of hundreds. So if you look just in the past a few centuries, all of us think about us. We have our mom and dad. They have their parents. They have their parents. Go back a few hundred years. You have hundreds of ancestors. Go back a thousand and you have thousands of ancestors. But those tests that are often relying on mitochondria DNA and Y chromosome, they're looking at one of those. And then they're going to look at a database. And so what they tell you is going to depend on that database. And until we do a really broad survey of Africa, you can get a very biased result. Secondly, these tests are based often on what is the prevalence of this lineage in a particular region. It's very hard to trace back to any particular ethnic group in Africa. Now, I'll give you a couple of exceptions. I study a lot of the hunter-gatherer groups like the sawn click-speaking populations in southern Africa, the so-called pygmies in central Africa, some hunter-gathers in east Africa. Some of them have very unique lineages. I could probably tell you if you have those lineages that you trace back there. But otherwise, it's very challenging. So nowadays, what we're doing more and more is starting to look at the rest of the nuclear genome. And it's particularly challenging to look at. And we use a lot of statistics and probabilistic methodology to do that. So I would say, remind me again, the original question is what are the challenges, right? The challenges and what the consequences have been of that. Yeah, so the challenges are much of what we do, our field. People often don't realize it is about probability. We use statistics and probability. And it's not exact, as you said. And what I try to do, what I find most exciting is when I look at the history of Africa, for example, is trying to integrate that data with the archeological data or the historical data and so we have to keep in mind that we still have a long ways to go to develop proper statistical methods to be able to interpret this data. And then the data is rapidly changing. So now we can sequence entire genomes getting much more challenging. I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Professor. Well, as the historian, I know that all of Africa, we do not know the history of various African groups. But during the Atlantic slave trade, we have a very good idea of which parts of Africa were involved in the trade. In fact, sometimes we have very precise information on exactly which groups of Africans were captured and brought out, for instance, the first group of Africans who came to North America to Virginia. We know that they came from Angola. We know the war that was fought. The conditions under which that war, those wars were fought. The actual areas and the extent to which these areas were integrated into the Portuguese colony which the Portuguese were the ones who brought those, or captured and brought those Africans from Africa. In addition, we also have some idea of the linguistic and historical events in Africa. We, as Africanists, had to study the Bantu migration and there's a lot of new evidence about the Bantu migration. In fact, just this week I read another article on the edge of Bantu expansion, metroculture, DNA, Y chromosome and lactase persistent genetic variations throughout Western Angola. And what they are firing out is that some groups, you know, males with a white chromosome seemed to be more stable. The women were being brought in. As a historian who have done Central Africa that precise area, the Ovinbundu and Southern people Danieke, etc., I can tell you that the Ovinbundu during the 19th century were bringing into that area people from the Luvali were bringing in those people from the South so I could explain and they were bringing in women because they were using these women as wives and as slaves. If we work closely with the historian, the historian can in fact provide some of that precision that what we are saying now the geneticists might say or the ethnographers and biologists might say, well, we know the history. One other example. Three different DNA companies did my mitochondrial DNA. They all turned up the same set of populations in Africa that I had this mitochondrial DNA match with. My closest match, the Fulani from Guinea-Bissau. My closest match was Guinea-Bissau but there are Fulani's that go from the footer Jalon area in the Senegambi area all the way to northern Nigeria where they are known as Fulani in the Senegambi area in northern Nigeria, Fulani. So if you have this not only that I could tell you precisely what wars that were being fought jihadi wars that were being fought in that footer Jalon area and to the capture of a young woman who the French took to Grenada. I can tell you that. So I am not as skeptical of those DNA. Now I have plus effect as I am reading more and I said all lactate persistence and lactate deficient. Yesterday I had this thing. You know my family? I'm black. I'm supposed to have lactate deficient. I drink milk. I drink milk every morning for my whole life. Okay, for my whole life I'm still drinking milk. Okay. Then they had these things. You know as a black person an adopter told me that you cannot have in fact osteo because this is really Asian and European. Guess what? When I was in my 30s I was diagnosed with osteoporosis. I have to take tablets to strengthen my bones. Where did this come from? Maybe some sort of... I have European and me too, 17% so I'm saying that every one of you could in fact begin to do your own research and you can take these, put them together. Family history, you put together the history, the African or the European history you put together those little things and you begin to get a sense that you fit somewhere. That's where my identity fits. So no skeptic could tell me well you're not related to the full base. Yes, I carry that marker. I don't know which woman it is but I know I carry one marker because we cannot see everything as she said. All the things, the only thing that you can possibly say from your female ancestors going all the way back. That's what I know as a certainty. So I'm not a skeptical. So when I assert to people my identity I said yes, somewhere in Fouta Jalon my ancestor was captured and brought to Grenada and I think we should be doing much more of that joining with the historians to try to figure out and narrow the possibilities. They'll always be skeptics. You are not going to get everything complete. But you're going to have some more certainty than just telling me you come from the bush of Africa. I did not. My ancestors did not come from any bush in Africa. Africans had history. Thank you. Can I say? We have shots fired already. This is good. The historian scores one. We're going to hear from Professor Blakey but we're going to bring it back Professor Tishkoff wants to weigh in. Let me say that it is by the study of history that you understand Africans have history. Not by the study of DNA. And that history is fascinating and should be available to all of our children. I'm interested in that although the SOLs require what looks like really extensive West African history that that be taught in Virginia schools none of my high performing William & Mary students knows anything. But somewhere between that and the teacher in the classroom it doesn't happen. So I've enjoyed that history. I know that Africans have history. There are a lot of folks who don't but it's about whether they've been taught history or not. They also say if you use the same method you'll always get the same result. Compare the same haplotype against the same comparative database and you'll always get the same result. So if we were to use this SDR haplotype that was used he will always come back Somali. But if you apply some historical limits as I imagine are done and say well let's leave out the Africans he will always come back somewhere in the Middle East. If Jefferson were alive today he would also probably disregard the skeptics because that sounds right to me. Now I know my relationship to my ancestors. I've heard and talking around the country from a couple of people who've sent in the Aspartoo genetic ancestry test and gotten completely different results. I know with the African burial ground and some could accuse us of starting this business of ancestry test because we were working in on skeletal populations with regard to this and I remember Jeff Donaldson the artist and Congressman Hilliard said well you know if you could do this with living people you know that would be really powerful. I think somebody said you'd make a lot of money. We said well we don't think it works like that. We don't think we can do that. But let's keep open the conversation. And when our first test was done we did it with individual skeletons that also had African cultural traits, way speeds, file teeth and a significant number of these came back as Europeans and Africans and Native Americans. We had to think about well how could that be. Then our geneticists Kittles and George tweaked their pipette skills and took three, that was with one apple type, the three L1, L2 and L3 apple types randos for 40 individuals and they all came up West African. And we look to you and I think well in your history you may emphasize Central Africa more than I would West Africa. No I do West Africa too. I do West Africa. Who says but there should be Central Africans in here in New York in this period. So we wonder where are they? Maybe is this the West African part of the cemetery. What we realized is that these comparative databases were accrued by the history of genetics research that had been done and none of the geneticists had an interest in had asked the question what is the origins of African Americans. So when they go to Central Africa like Luca Cavalli-Sforza he is interested in what? Not complex societies that are involved in international trade. They are interested in evolution again it gets back to this thing. So when you compare a database that might have DNA related to them to the African burial ground to that database nobody from Central Africa who could be related is at home to welcome them. And so we said okay as Fatima Jackson began to do we need to find the comparative database. Still the problem of probability is there the same problem I said with respect to Jefferson is and the problem of probability that can make the data lie is always there going to be there. And the way to find out I think ultimately and I can't emphasize this more too much. The only test of whether these work to answer the questions that people actually have about their last couple hundred years 400 years of ancestry is to take populations maybe their wall of who have griots who know their history maybe their royal families in Europe or Asia who know 200, 300 years of history their history. And test the same thing you use on random African Americans on them and see how reliable it is. It's a tool that is science. It is skeptical and it has never been done. Thank you professor. Professor Tishkoff. So I just want to say that I am not at all surprised that you have full B ancestry. This is not a surprise to me. And the reason why and I'll say from the genetic perspective what we found is that I was involved in a very large study I think the largest to date of African genetic variation. And then we also looked at African American populations and we found a significant not huge amount but significant amount of full B ancestry in the African American community. So that to me doesn't entirely surprise me. Now it was funny what you said about lactose tolerance because as a matter of fact that's one of the things my lab has studied. We found new mutations that regulate lactose tolerance in Africans, mainly in East Africa. So this is a trait that's adaptive and it rose to high frequency in populations who practice pastoralism and daring. Now the full on E or full B practice pastoralism right. And we're actually studying that group because it turns out that they can drink milk and they are lactose tolerant. Now interestingly that group they do not have the East African variant they have the European variant. Now they probably have other variants that we still have yet to identify. So I was just saying that I'm not surprised but a lot of people as you said make these generalizations. Nobody know people from West Africa can't drink milk. And this is a great example where you have to look within Africa there's a lot of different cultures and a lot of different genetic variation and then also touching on what you were saying Dr. Blakey is that you're absolutely right much of what we interpret is dependent on the database. Now one of the issues that I'm concerned maybe some others will talk about this later today has to do with the data being made publicly available. So as a research scientist one who's also getting money from NIH and NSF I'm obligated and I also believe for moral reasons I make my data publicly available. Okay. Now that does mean that the companies can then grab it and use it to make some money. Oh you like that. Okay. I've always tried to think of ways that we could put some of that money back to the people who contributed but as it turns out it's quite complex. So we made this publicly available. Now many of the companies aren't going to do that. This is their priority this is what their priority database that they have. And so if we don't share that data it's going to be very hard that's why different companies are coming to different conclusions. So I just wanted to make that comment. Can I have one second to just the thing is Angola is one of the least you know tested countries in Africa. Cameroon and the areas around there is one of the highly most tested. So when people have certain markets they're going to say this is L.C. you know Metriconville and they just tell them oh you're from the Cameroon. We know that no slaves were coming from the Cameroon in fact Cameroon entered the slave trade after America started you know exporting you know they stopped the import of slaves come from what is today the Cameroon. We got to know that history, and I absolutely agree. History, African history should be taught at every level as European history is. And I am too, you know, my students the first time, oh my gosh, these words, Wolof, oh, I said look, you learn about Asa Versan, you know, I can't even pronounce it, all these different words, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to learn it. It's like a language you're learning. If you learn German, there's some words in German that give you three pauses to say. So don't tell me African words are too difficult. I think there's some biases. Some biases about African, and we gotta get that, and you cannot get that starting at the college level. And specialize, right now we have a decreasing number of students taking African history at college, I'm telling you, and forget it. It's very prominent among people of African descent. They don't take the course. I am telling you, I've taught for all these years, and I can't understand why it is that this reticence to sort of enter that field, you have to expand your mind if you are going to know what you are and rarely be comfortable with yourself. It's interesting to say that professor, I remember when I was in college, I was in a African American history class, and it was majority, the majority of the class was one of those huge lecture halls. Majority of the students there were African American, or they were certainly black from the diaspora. And they were the ones not taking notes often. There was a conceit among the black kids that they knew this history. So they were there to get an easy A or B, and that the white kids who were there, they're the ones who had to work, they're the ones who had to study, so let them study. It took failing maybe one test for them to figure out that this is real. So I'd like to end to that point, I'd like you all to weigh in on this. There is this notion that America's, it's a false notion of course, is in a post-racial society, so there's that. But even beyond that, discussing race, not so much racism, but discussing race, racial differences, racial diversity, has become snakebitten. Not just discussing racial oppression, but race in general. There's this notion I don't see race, which is, you're personally just idiotic. We should see race, we should see cultural variations, and understand them and appreciate them. The idea is not to be colorblind, the idea is to take all the tableau in and work it into you. So as you all have done your research, can you all talk about whether or not you have seen sort of this societal pushback? Coming out of the civil rights movement, for example, there was this sort of explosion of African-Americans entering the workforce, African-Americans entering academia, and even the history of African-Americans starting to become, and the scientific research of African-Americans starting to gradually become a little bit more prominent. But can you all talk about any societal pressures or resistance or fatigue you all are seeing to your work? And let's start with Professor Tishkoff maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there seems to be a continued interest, I think, in learning about human evolutionary history, African ancestry, African-American ancestry. So I don't think there's a fatigue yet so far in that area. But remind me, what was the first part of your question again? Well, just looking at, are you all seeing anything? You asked about the concept, though, of race, right? And whether, so that's actually, I think, important. Whether that resistance to discuss race in America influences. Well, and that comes up a lot, actually, in a lot of the classes that I teach. So I teach both at the undergraduate level in University of Pennsylvania, and I have taught at the medical school level. And in the medical school course, we try our darn best. They really resist it at every level. But we're trying to teach them about genetic variation and why they should know about population genetics. And one of the things I talk about is race. And a lot of people have been afraid to even mention it. Because either it might offend somebody, and you're going to get some negative reaction, and so on. Or people will say, race doesn't exist. But the reality is, most of the doctors out there are putting in their charts. So they're asking you, when you go to the doctor's office, how many of you have been asked, what is your race? They're putting it down there. They're taking that into consideration. So one of the things I tried to talk to them about is, first of all, it's very problematic. Because race has, by definition, both biological and cultural annotations. There has been this horrible intertwining through history. It's also been used often in a very abusive way so that it's now very difficult to talk about that. And what I explained to them is what we really care more about perhaps is ancestry. But what you want to know, knowledge about ancestry, and if you don't have any knowledge about ancestry, self-identified race can be informative at times as a physician or perhaps as a biomedical researcher. There's no doubt about it. Because there are going to be some diseases that might be more prevalent in certain populations, there might be different risk factors, and so on. I don't think we can simply ignore it. At the same time, you have to be careful of, I call it racial profiling by doctors or anybody else. Because what they forget is, I think you were saying, you're lactose tolerant, right? Many of the doctors would just assume not. And again, let's say somebody came into the doctor's office and they're suffering from anemia. And the doctor might say, they self-identify as African-American. So the doctor immediately thinks, ah, you must have sickle cell trait or some G6PD or something that's very common in Africa. Now, had that doctor asked that person about their ancestry, going back maybe a couple generations or whatever, they might have said, well, actually, I have a grandparent who's from Italy. Okay, so ah, maybe they have thalassemia. Maybe that's what I should have been looking at. So they can misdiagnose things. If they're ignoring that, and ultimately, I think as Carlos Bustamante is gonna talk about and some others, the ultimate goal is to be able to say at any region of the genome, what your ancestry is, or maybe at any particular gene. Because that's gonna be much more informative in terms of making medical diagnoses and maybe for proper treatment and things like that. We certainly are not in any post-racial anything. Because what I see is that there's a burden of race in America. And look, I am, even though I'm from the Caribbean, yes, we have race there. But as I tell people, okay, my race, so I saw these Brits, but what I was getting in my Caribbean history is about the Caribs and Arabs and Iraq and so on. And, you know, we were not directly burdened with the discrimination, inconstant. And you come to America, I go to my church, and I'm not gonna mention anywhere. And, you know, people will say, oh, you're Episcopalian. They don't expect to see me there. My great-grandmother was an Episcopalian. So obviously I'm going to be Episcopalian unless I go and follow my aunt, who is now a strict seven-day adventist. She doesn't do anything on a Saturday. What I'm saying is that, you know, what I'm saying is that we shouldn't categorize people. And we have to break through that. And the only way we can break through that is to start with the children at the very young age, to make all populations. America is not made up of just Europeans. Native American and various kinds of Europeans. You know, there was a time when the Irish was black. I hope you know that. There's a time that I could tell you, if I look in the document in the 1623, 1625, you know, master rules and on some of those deeds, and guess what I'm seeing? Six Irishmen, five Negroes. So there's two categories. These were just people who were not English. The Irish were not English in those days. We become, you know, Americans. And the white, Southern Europeans and the others who were marginal to the core English have become American. But I think we ought to accept that we have to always work towards, you know, the post-racial and in fact, always be conscious that we're doing it. So in my class, my students who come at the end of the class, I wanted them to tell me as this young man last semester, I was so last year, I was so happy. He's a young, a white student, Dr. Hayward. Why did not I learn this African-American history in elementary and high school? He said, this is American history. This experience of what African-Americans went through is in fact part of American history so I could understand myself and my place. That, to me, is a validation of the teaching, the core, you know, redoing the way in which we approach the teaching of history and in fact, make African-American history part of, you know, the legitimate on the same level as, you know, American and European history. And you know, you say something, Professor, go ahead, I was gonna throw to you on something. Well, this is maybe reinforcing but to also relate this conversation clearly to some of the things we've been talking about, there are no racially private genes. There are no genes that are exclusive to a race. There are no ethnically private genes and there are no regionally private genes. We all share our genes in different proportions. But a misunderstanding about that is part of what would seem to be the power of the idea of genetic ancestry in people's minds that this is a gene that goes only with, you know, the fulani. But it is also a way of searching the ancestry but one has to do that, you know, in a very qualified, careful manner. Very often the ancestries we're looking at are thousands of years old. Have nothing to do with the slave trade, you know, in the immediate sense of it. Racism certainly exists. Race exists as a cultural construct. Racism, there are much evidence that it is thriving in the inequities that are increasing upon income groups and so-called, you know, culturally defined racial groups. And research that focuses on that would help us understand that, you know, things like hypertension, diabetes, and other chronic diseases that are increasing or changing over time are doing that because the society is increasing and changing over time. That they vary by these groups does not indicate the genetic basis of these diseases. There is no evidence of genetic basis for African-American hypertension but any physician will tell you, of course, it's true. It's not. It's been disproven several times. Takes our attention away from what might be seen as evidence of racism. The stresses and the poor adaptation to them with poor foods and obesity and so forth that contribute to hypertension and diabetes represent the oppression of those people. Instead, it becomes, you know, something genetic. So, and then I do want to just add one more example of how this sort of feeding frenzy can occur when you combine, let me also follow up on the issue of history in schools. The absence of an African and African-American history in schools may be the most profound expression of the continuance of the production of white supremacy in this country. It is direct, it is blatant, and what are we doing about it? When I was in high school in Coolidge High School up the street here, we organized in the late 60s, and got out of there in 71, to have black studies. We had African music, we had African-American literature, we had a number of things. Kiswahili, I took two semesters, Kiswahili. African history. When my group left, three years later, was removed. I went up there not long ago and find they don't have these African-American students with an African-American principle do not have African-American history. That's not just accidental. That is an institutional, that is institutional racism. Professor Tishko. Yeah, I'm gonna move away from that last part, but just one comment from a genetic perspective about you were talking about that there aren't any population-specific or population-private genetic variants. And I would say that's not entirely true nowadays with the more sophisticated genetic technology and particularly sequencing. And what we're finding is, you are absolutely correct, that most of the genetic variation we see is shared amongst. We all have a fairly recent common ancestor in Africa within the past, I don't know, 50 to 100,000 years. And all modern humans share an ancestor 200,000 years ago in Africa. And we know that most of the genetic diversity is within populations relative to between. So there's no doubt about it. But as we're getting into sequencing technology, for example, we're starting, we are starting to find variants that are private to either ethnic groups, self-identified ethnic groups. But then again, at the level of the individual, right, each of us is unique at some level. That's what makes us us, right? But we are starting to find some. And I think that as, and another example is lactose tolerance. So when you have natural selection acting in different regions of Africa or different regions of the world, that can shift variants to perhaps very high frequency in one region and very low or absent in another. So these genetic variants we find for lactose tolerance in East Africa, they are only in East Africa or in places where there have been migrations, such as into Southern Africa, very, very specific. So I think that because of natural selection, you can get some population-specific variants. And with today's sequencing technology, we're finding more and more. And I would argue that hopefully there'll be discussion later today. I think the sequencing technology may enable us to do a little bit more fine-scale resolution of trying to determine ancestry. Although as I think some of you alluded to, it may be somewhat dissatisfying. Because what is going to happen, and we've already have a hint of this, is that you may be able to, right now, when we look at West Africa and we look at people who speak Niger-Cortifanian languages, for example, they are genetically very similar as a whole. When you start looking at a more fine-scale level, we can start seeing some subtle differences. But there's been a lot of migration in West Africa, right? That's part of the issue within the last few hundred years. But let's say we could even identify some variants that are maybe not specific to an ethnic group, but maybe a region possibly. And then if we were to try to look at African-American genomes and look at any particular region of the genome, what are we going to find? We're going to find that at this particular region, they can trace back to that region, or ethnicity in Africa. And at this region, they can trace to another. And at this region, they're going to trace to another. I mean, that's what, is that going to be satisfying? That's what I want to know. The people are going to find that satisfying. And am I telling you anything you didn't already know, right? I think what some of us are concerned about, and I agree with Dr. Blakely, that in fact that these variants in the genetic coding is then subsumed under the issue of race. And that in fact, racial identifying blacks is having, that's what I think the concern is. That if you go, because if you do not educate the public, we just fall back on what we know, the categories we know. And the categories we know, black, white, is the attic of all of these, which have been abused in the past, and which were socially constructed. So we have to be. So Americans have become more comfortable. Right. Going with what they're familiar with, which are these racial constructs. It reminds me of an article I found that you were in Professor Haywood in the LA Times. The writer, who's white, talks about their family origins. And I think the last name was Mozingo. Mozingo, yeah. Mozingo. And so he was able to trace, there was one person in the family who knew the origin of that name. You can imagine which continent it came from. But he kept it quiet. He would not, he published a regular newsletter to his family about their family history, their origins, et cetera. And some elders in their family asked him to keep that information quiet. They had daughters they wanted to marry off and they didn't want to get shamed by that information and ruin their chances of a good marriage. They had, right. And they had been told that name was Italian. They had been told that name was anything other than African. Mozingo, all right. Can't be African. And so not only did this writer go and find the history and realize that they did descend from Africa, at least that part of their family, but he was able to find that name actually descended from an African prince, but more specifically from a slave. And it was one thing for them to realize that they had African ancestry and even identifiable African ancestry. It was another thing for this white family to come to grips with the fact that they had descended from slaves, African slaves here in America. And of course, Professor Haywood is quoted in there explaining the historical origin of Mozingo and what part of the continent they're from. And the fact that just by virtue of the fact that that name came through the middle passage to America signified that this person was literate and knew enough to keep their name. And the fact that they're literate implied even more than that, suggested even more of that based on history. So it got to how moored people are, especially whites, to separating their own lineage from non-whites here in America and that seems to have ruinous consequences not only just for our understanding of our own historical background, but even when we talk about understanding our genetic coding and even the health implications of that. Can someone jump in on that please? Well, I can tell you that the new article and I just came upon it a few days ago, even though it was published in 2011, Melangean's a multi-ethnic population by Robert Roberta Estes and he is in fact one of those Melangeans. These, I'm sure you've heard about the Melangean. You know, they were, we believe, in a certain part of Virginia where some of these Angolans, some of those early Angolans as racial coding got into place with slavery not being, with women, slave women and men not being allowed to marry whites which they had for a certain time, domestic indentured servants, a white indentured servant, married a black slave. It took place, not a lot, but took place. That's where you find in the, Obama's maternal ancestry has that rule. In any case, what we find is that when the sort of, as American history became more racialized, these Melangeans had to make decisions about where they would lie in the social ordering and some of them decided to become white and that's where his family ends up. But some of the Mozingo's are in fact, non-white blacks and they end up in the black population. So there's a fascinating set of movement now on the part of young descendants of these families to sort of try to find, where did my, in this case, where did my name come from? And the family secrets and that's why it can be very unnerving. And for those who don't know what Professor Haywood is talking about with Obama, his maternal ancestry has been traced to the person who's regarded, and this is the white ancestry of course, the white American ancestry, has been traced to the person who's been identified by some records as the very first African slave in America, dating back to the 1600s, before actual slavery as we knew it took over the colonies and certainly the South. But I was gonna say, the dynamic of passing, anyone who's African-American knows the story of passing. I have it in my family generations ago, people who are light enough they pass, that creates a whole another dynamic. So if you are seeking medical care, if you're looking at your own history, if you're trying to get treated for something, they assume that you're Caucasian, they assume that you're white, and as you put it, Professor Tiskoff, the medical care changes, perhaps for the worst. I'd like to shift now a little bit. Dr. Blakey sort of alluded to this earlier about sort of the popularity of us trying to find out more about our ancestry, ancestry.com, you name it. And that a lot of this work that this panel is talking about is work that goes back thousands of years, or that's at least the effort. But many of us here in America, especially if you're African-American, wanna know about our history 300 years back. And can we talk about sort of the popularity of this type of testing and the ethical issues and the accuracy issues. What are the problems there, potentially? Well, let me, if I could get right to that, but I do wanna say with regard to the blockage between, against our tax dollars being used to teach all Americans the history of Africa and African-America, I have a project called Remembering Slavery, Resistance and Freedom. It's a partnership of William and Mary, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Virginia General Assembly. And we've talked to people all over the state. And we're coming to an understanding that there is a contradiction between the narrative that whites cling to of the virtue of their ancestry, of the sort of valor of what is framed as American history and African-American and African history. That African-American history of the history of the end of slavery, and you can read Jefferson and he will tell you that these were the people who built the country in the colonial and early antebellum period, that they were abused, that they prevailed with their humanity despite that and so forth. So, but if you write that out, you have a very clean, valorous white history in which it appears that white people are really creating everything and sometimes they can decide to give other people part of the national wealth. So, that barrier, that contradiction has somehow to be broken because it is clearly standing in the way of the truth. With regard to the, I would just say one example, because we're here to kind of stimulate discussion, I guess. So, I've talked about the power, the awesome power of this almost godliness of natural historical explanations, and i.e., therefore, DNA. And if you add with that celebrity, marketing, business, and the television program, and the imprimatur of even an English professor from an elite university. You get what the geneticist, Jeff Harrison at Oxford used to call, although I'm using his words a little differently, used to call big magic and high sorcery, is how he described statistics, big magic and high sorcery. So that Oprah Winfrey, some of you know this story, working in South Africa can be told authoritatively that her background is Zulu. Yes, but you know we corrected that, she's spelling. We did correct that on film. Is Zulu, can obtain that result from the DNA testing. And- She didn't do a test. No, she just asserted that she was Zulu. She did not do a test for Zulu. Well, I was reading something. Actually, I will tell you online that said she did do a test. Okay. The audience is saying she did do a test, the results have not come back yet. So she's preemptively asserting her Zulu heritage. Oprah Winfrey's test. Oh, I'm finding Oprah's roots. John Thornton and I were the historians who were sent the information, genealogy, the DNA results. And then we had to frame a context in which the closest match that she had for the region. And that's how we identified the group today called Pelle in Liberia as the most possible likelihood of her maternal ancestry. And this is what Oprah received from Skip. So I don't know if you've seen the video, but please see it, finding Oprah's roots and the earlier video, African American Lives. And John Thornton and I and other historians as well. But we were sent all the, that is why we had to try to be more familiar with all your scientific as historians. So we did the best we could in terms of the historical, the history of the slave trade, the regions that were supplying slaves a certain region, the historical names of people that, you know, linked to the present day names of ethnic groups today. So that's why we gave Skip a list of 50 possible ethnic names that had there. We gave the names in the slave trade period and the regions in Africa where they are today. So I think we are, if we can have more, you know, organized collaboration, setting up an institute and so for this, that's where you would have much more precision and much more possibilities. Secondly, I wanna take this opportunity to say, I think that we should think seriously about looking at the DNA roots. I'm not going to dismiss it. What I'm saying is we can use that to give stories, historicize Africa presence here. That's what would in fact allow, you know, a much better comfort level with the African background. And we have stories that we can give. We have historical developments that were taking place at any one time when you find these various ancestries. Then you have to say, let's look at for an African story that we can contextualize this. So if you go to the Smithsonian African life, you would see the story of the Mayflower from the Gold Coast where John Thornton and I helped to develop that particular story. You can have other stories, but you have to have the historian who is trained in Africa with African history. Because sometimes when we have it from the American side, people afraid to do African history, you have a lot of distortions. Thank you, professor. If we can pause for just a second, we're running short on time. If you have questions, we're gonna try to get some in. Please line up at either mic on either aisle, okay? Let's come on now. Let's not wait, because we're gonna have much time. Come on and start asking the questions, or line up and I'll start taking your questions and we'll go back to Professor Blakey. Go ahead. You were- Well, I was just saying that apparently I'm in error about that. There was a misinformed about the Oprah Winfrey story. Nonetheless, you, the same problems, and I give Jefferson is my example of these same problems that persist. Whatever those societies that are possibly related to Oprah Winfrey or anyone else are possibly related, but you can't know for sure. And there's also the, so, and with your tests, you know, I don't think you would think that your background is just full of. No, because I don't have my father's background. I mean, say, I sent it to my brother. I say, I want to know. So I know that somewhere in Dahomey, some guy gave that Y chromosome to my father's family. So you just have to do, you can, you're only given a limited series of, you cannot know every ancestor. Why don't take the one that has the nearest possibility of accuracy and then run with it and do what you can. I'm not a fool, babe, but I might go back and put a gel on and say, give me my little village here and my cattle. I want my cattle. What's your African equivalent of 40 acres in a mule? All right, why don't we pause and take a question? This gentleman here, please. You hear me? Are we working? Yes. My name's Heath Keralakum, I'm a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences. I want to, I think everyone would say this has been very engaging, utterly remarkable. You all have allowed us to correct some things with our own beliefs, especially myself. That said, the subject of teaching African American history in schools, there's an education technology company right here in the district who last month, right before the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, launched their platform. They're called Everfi. I don't know if anyone here is familiar with them. Everfi launched the 306 platform. If you go to Everfi.com, I happen to attend that product launching and they had their first black mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama. He spoke and there were other things discussed. 306 is symbolic of the Lorraine Motel number that Dr. King was shot in front of. And it's also symbolic of, during the Harlem Renaissance, there was a space 306, I believe that was the address for where some heady people met in the black Renaissance movement there in Harlem. So I just wanted to throw that out there, that this is an effort launched by Everfi and it's something to get behind. Someone you should be able to contact and some technology you can push as well. So I wanted to put that out. Thank you, not so much a question, more like a plug, that's okay. All right, we have a question on this side, please. I have another just comment. I wanted to read something, a quote from Oprah Winfrey that opens up an article in Chance, a magazine of the American Statistical Association. The article is called is Oprah Zulu, sampling and seeming certainty in DNA ancestry testing. I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African because I feel so at home here. Do you know that I am actually one? I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested and I am a Zulu. All right, thank you. We're looking for a question somewhere in here, somewhere. Well, obviously that is not new to me but I thought we corrected it. Thanks, Professor. Madame, your question. Fatima Jackson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Howard University. And I think it's wonderful that you've got the panel. These are all my friends. I think in terms of setting the stage for understanding ancestry of African-Americans, we have to understand that African-Americans are an amalgamation of African peoples with modest gene flow from North Atlantic Europeans and Iberian Europeans and Native American peoples. That means there's going to be complexity in our heritage and the techniques that are developing can only help us better refine but the techniques, the genetic techniques have to be combined with anthropological knowledge, with historical knowledge and ultimately the people who we're discussing have a say in their identity. This is very important because identity is more than just the science. It's also the culture, it's also the sociocultural constructs. So I don't have a question for you but I do wanna say one more thing in terms of Oprah's Pele ancestry. The problem is that these mitochondrial DNA haplotypes are 80,000 years old. This is before any of the ethnic groups that we're talking about ever existed. So there's a mismatch between the timeline of the genetics and the ethnicity of the groups. In fact, Oprah's DNA, which I've seen, matches a number of groups, about 30 different groups in Africa. So we choose which one we want. Thank you. But we know that no South Africans came to America as slaves. So it's not just two's in any one. We then eliminate those that are, in fact, outsiders, outliers. Right. Thanks, professor. Question over here. Yes, my name is Emma Ward and I represent the 102,000 seniors that we have here in Washington, D.C. What I would like to know is if you all have ever targeted our group of seniors who have a wealth of knowledge and because we are retired and 60 and above, doesn't mean that we're still not here ready to do things. We have very few groups who contact us to try to get us involved. So I'm here to suggest that you get us involved in some of the things that we can help you with. When I go and I go to the schools and I talk to the students about Harriet Tubman, I want to weep when they ask me, is she still living? I mean, this is real. And you asked them about the states and the United States, they don't know it. I said, how can you become president if you don't know history? You have to know history. So one of the things that we are suggesting again, let us have one minute, 60 seconds in it. That's all we need. I can ask you in one minute, who am I? And I can tie it in. We can tie it in with a black history person or we can tie it in with our history from Washington, D.C. up into Canada. So I'm suggesting to you get in touch with our D.C. office on age in here. And every state, we have, well we have 44 states now, where we have one representative who represent the seniors and these are the things that we need to let them know. We need to talk to them, they need to talk to us. Thank you. And the oral tradition has always been important in the black experience. Let's take this question over here, ma'am. Hello? Hi. Yes, I have, I'm the president of the Southern California Genealogical Association, which has numerous interest groups, including African American and Chinese. Many of the issues you're talking about of trying to make connections back to a homeland are present in both of these groups. And we need resources. So is there some way that I can get some resources that could be available that would help us? I'm with the group that runs the DNA Interest Group as well. And so I'm hearing this. Money. We're getting more data, et cetera. So. Any ideas from the panel about grants? No, I'm not looking for money, I'm looking for books or something people can read. So I can get better educated, so I can help. Okay, I thought you meant financial resources to continue to work. Okay. Well, certainly I think what I find is that high schools and lower levels of education, rarely the textbooks are like 20 years behind. Right. What do you find in college? So we need more interface and I could suggest that we develop a common bibliography and I could get a list of books together for that, the type of things on the Melange. That's one. Secondly, I think young people here need to begin to take advantage of the technology that you have on your cell phones and so on. There are a lot of apps now available. In fact, one that my own daughter just finished an app with a British company timeline of the Civil War. And when she began her involvement as one of the producers, in fact the core producer for the actual materials that are there, she called me and I said, make sure that in that you have the African-American experience in the Civil War. So in that app, and I could give you the name of the app, it's just five something, but what is important is that she has a whole section on African-American and it's wonderful to kind of compare day to day in every state what the African-American presence was during the Civil War. We need more of that, so we need people who are in technology, who are in the history to begin combining a little company, that company you talk about, let's get together and form this thing where you have the technology that young people are now, they're not going to read a lot of history books, but they're definitely going to get involved in the apps and learn that, so those stories that I'm telling you about could be dramatized in a way through the app, so that's the suggestion I have, and especially for people with funding to look into creating apps of African-American, African and European history, because the Europeans, Chinese, they were coming in all at the same time, so it's like the immigrant project on tech, that's what it has to do. America's made up of immigration immigrants. Thanks, Professor, we have a question over here. Yes, good morning to those on the panel and good morning to those in the audience. My name is Eugenia Pinkney and I'm a student with Trinity University here in Washington, D.C. My question is directly towards Dr. Touchoff, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, but I noticed something that you had stated earlier and I just wanted to know if you could elaborate a little bit more about it. You mentioned that you're doing research and study from a standpoint of the medical side of DNA and tracing our history back directly or precisely finding out exactly where we come from. I want to know your web, I'll let you know your web address where I can find more information about it, and also too, how is that really, how's that going at this point as far as actually finding accuracy and precision as far as finding out the African history as far as exactly where we come from? I know you had talked about the Y chromosome that you've already gone back from 100 years, from 1,000 years, is that, how is that really being accomplished right now? Where's the setting of that's taking place? Thank you, Professor? Yeah, so it's an ongoing effort by many different research groups and of course it takes a lot of funding, a lot of money nowadays, our funding is in serious trouble thanks to sequestration and other things like that. Hopefully we'll be able to continue, but so as I was saying, one, my group and a few others are going to Africa to study the people there, because if we don't actually go to Africa, there's no resources, there's nothing, many of the people that I work with or study, they've never been included in any studies before, they're being completely left out and that also has negative consequences for them in terms of better biomedical healthcare and treatment and things like that. The other interesting thing is I find that in Africa, when I do my research, they care more about their ancestry, they love knowing about their ancestry, they have no problems with that, they want to hear about it, they say, wow, that reminds me, the my grandparents said, yeah, you know, are these two ethnic groups, they used to intermarry and so on and in terms of, I think you were asking what's sort of the state of what we know? Rephrase again, you wanted to know. Well, you said you've been doing this research for about 19 years, is that correct? Going down to South Africa, finding information regarding the wide chromosome as far as finding out genetic information, as far as relating to the medical field, as far as helping or assisting us and I guess you... Okay, I'm having a little hard time hearing, but do you mean you want to know resources where you can find out those? Yeah, two things she wanted to know since you make your information, your data publicly available, where she could find that, but also basically what your progress is and being able to look at the genetic coding that you're finding in Africa and attach it to health disparities, disease, you name it, the medical implications of it. So first of all, in terms of the data that we're making publicly available, this is a huge problem in terms of the layperson being able to access it. Even other scientists have a hard time being able to do this. This is a major problem across our field. Each one of our labs, there's many people here, we all have labs, we're studying something in Africa, we're depositing it, maybe in a public database, maybe in our own database, but it's very hard to get them joined together and you either have to do it yourself at your lab, it's very time consuming, there are very few public databases, but one thing that NIH has done, one of the missions of NIH is to make sure that there are publicly available databases. So I deposit all of my data in something called DBSNP is one of them and another one is called DBGAP. Anyone with the knowledge could go out there, but it's not super accessible to the layperson. It would be very, very challenging and I get people writing to me all the time saying, can you help me? Can you tell me more about my ancestry? And I have to point them to some company and not one in particular to say, well, there's a lot out there and just be cautious about how you interpret this. It's usually what I say, but there is a lack of that. I wish we had more of that. And in terms of progress being made to look at disease, my own group, for example, is very interested in trying to understand genetic and environmental risk factors for diabetes, metabolic disorder, cardiovascular disease, for example. And if you can compare, say, people who are living an indigenous lifestyle in Africa to those who are living a westernized lifestyle here in the US or even in urban areas in Africa, we may be able to learn something to distinguish genetic and environmental factors because when I study some of these groups that are living very remote regions, living an indigenous lifestyle, I do not see diabetes. I see almost no obesity. I see very little cardiovascular disease. Then these people move into the city, even in Africa, they move into an urban area and boom, it's just going up, shooting through the roof, the rate of these diseases. So there are efforts by NIH and others and hopefully continued funding so that we can be studying that. Well, let me, I went through this. Professor Blakey, and then we'll, I think we have room for one last question over here after Professor Blakey. Thank you. It's that, you know, very often, I remember when there were issues about Native Americans wanting to have the right to determine the disposition of their dead and the 18,000 Native American skeletons here at the Smithsonian. Colleagues at the Smithsonian said, well, you know, we can learn so much that would help them. We can learn about diabetes and so forth. And you know, I said, there are no methods in skeletal biology and paleopathology to get at any understanding of the etiology of diabetes, of the genetics of diabetes. Very often, we see our, as I don't know if I suggest this about the human genome project, you know, that it did a great job of describing the human genome which needs to be done to take further steps. But the promise that people thought it had was put fee to give us the answer to the causes of all kinds of disease and social problems, which it has not done. So, you know, I think this is kind of, you know, Professor Tishkoff, you're suggesting also by what you're saying, that the cause of diabetes may not have anything to do with genetics. It has to do with what you're calling Western lifestyle and the differences in rates of diabetes have to do with one's condition within that industrial capitalist Western society. Or the interaction of the genes in the universe. Well, of course, if all biology is made by genes, of course there's an interaction, but the differences may have nothing to do with interacting with variation in genes. So, I think it's important to show the efficacy of these ideas about health. As it is to show the efficacy of the ability to show recent ancestry, not 80,000 year old, not 1,000 year old ancestry, but 500 year old ancestry by sampling all those people. Now I think sampling all those people is important in sort of circular, in working that out. But there is a point now where some tests can be made and the feasibility of doing that can be established better so that we know whether this research is going to serve the purpose of health, is going to serve the purpose of African American ancestry or evolutionary interests that geneticists have that have nothing to do with that. And then finally, I would say there was the woman who spoke earlier. I just hope that genealogists do not give up their archival research, that they do not give up collecting oral histories as I've seen them do. You know, one of my sort of my, the thing that stirs my blood about the African lives thing that I was beginning to talk about with Oprah Winfrey is that a number of these celebrities throw out precious family histories because someone has given them the word of God in a genetic assay that as I have emphasized, we have no evidence of the validity of and the evidence we do have shows that we are often misled. Thank you, Professor Haywood. If we can pause, wanna give as much opportunity for questions and this is the final one we have here. So you may get a chance to score another point. Hang on. Okay, hi. Can you hear me? I'm Bonnie Shrack and I want to thank Miss Haywood. First of all, Dr. Haywood, for the suggestion of an institute where we could get a better combination of historical and genetic genealogy research. That's a great idea, especially as applied to African-American history. I have to say with Dr. Blakey that I have a lot of differences and that when you're talking about quotes such as saying that Jefferson's matches would be in Somalia, that sounds like probably a very old publication perhaps. There's been incredible progress in the resolution of our knowledge of the white chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. And I just want to cite a paper here. Increased resolution of white chromosome haphyl group T defines relationships among populations of the nearest Europe and Africa by Mendez et al. That just came out in 2011. And a quote from that, just very, very brief, says that most likely Thomas Jefferson, based on his matches in their extensive data, it supports the hypothesis that this belongs to an ancient rare European white chromosome lineage rather than ones that recently migrated from the Near East. That's state-of-the-art science. The data were there in 2007. The problem is that the same problems that existed within genetics existed within craniometry. That there's overlap between all these populations. It's always a matter of probability. And there are a number of other problems that I've talked about. I've been doing the science for a long time. They are here with regard to the nominal capacity of genetics promises for 100 years. And they are often not kept. And they are not kept in this case. Demonstrate that a person who knows 200 years of his family history can be typed accurately. That science has not been done. OK, just let me add, and thank you for your comments. OK, we are working on that. One thing from the former questioner mentioned about the availability of these databases. I read a few weeks ago that, in fact, the NIH, I think, on the case of Henrietta Lacks and that they, in fact, have now the family is now part of, in fact, the decision making to, in fact, make her cells, lack cells all over. And in fact, the book that came out on Henrietta Lacks I actually use in my class. And it's for those young students, reading a journalist very well done and the way in which the family is engaged and what they found about the family is just fantastic. That's how you bring the DNA and those family stories. And you contrast it. My students are going to contrast that with the autobiography of Ralph Bunch, a much more clearer kind of an academic. It's fascinating. There's a lot that we can do to bring these stories. And there is now things available from both the science and the humanities from the journalists. Many of those are journalists doing their biographies. That's all. Thank you very much. Well, I'm going to do the journalist thing and be bossy. We have to end this Professor Tishkov, Professor Blakey, Professor Haywood. Thank you so much for a good start to this day. Round of applause for everyone. And we're going to wrap it up here. Of course, they'll be here all day. So if you want to buttonhole them in the corner, I won't be there to defend them.