We are family

When we were living in Luxembourg, my wife and I made a trip to the north of the country, an arduous 45-minute drive or so to investigate one of the roots of her family tree.

There were businesses and gravestones with her family name on them, and it was fascinating to wander unknowingly around a beautiful and quaint part of the world in which a portion of her DNA probably still resides. Those clever biologists inform us that our genetic material is a reshuffled and mutated version of our parents’ genes who in turn received their goods from their parents and so forth, all the way back beyond the dawn of humanity, beyond mammals, and animals, and plants, to a single celled little beast who unwittingly played a key role in the ridiculously complex and slightly absurd chemical chain reaction that we call humanity.

It is a poetic way to look at things, if a touch unwieldy. As we plowed around the countryside of Luxembourg looking for sociological remnants of a biological connection uncovered by my wife’s prodigious uncle, we felt a bit more connected to this foreign landscape, and a touch reflective about the people not so deep in her line who ventured across an ocean and deposited their DNA on a new continent. In America those genes were shuffled with others from across the world, a fascinating experiment in breeding that somehow happily resulted in each of us. And then, through an improbable quirk of fate, my wife and I boarded an airplane to return to this land of her ancestors and wonder what life was really like for them. It is quite an amazing and hugely unlikely story all told.

Because my wife understands fully that she married a nerd and for whatever reason is not inclined to discourage that trait, a few years ago for my birthday she gave me a genetic testing kit from National Geographic’s Genographic Project. The project has the humble goals of helping to “answer fundamental questions about where humans originated and how we came to populate the Earth”. After sending them a cheek swab they tell you about your genetic markers and how you fit into the great human migration story. Nothing is very specific of course, but it does a fine job of teaching the deep history of humanity, and notes the incredible fact that the common direct paternal ancestor of all men alive today was born in Africa about 140,000 years in the past.

A few years ago we had the opportunity to travel to east Africa, to the very heart of where scientists have uncovered where our species first diverged from its brothers and struck out on a genetic journey of improbable importance. The Great Rift Valley is an awe inspiring site, and in Tanzania you can watch the iconic African animals wander through their home on the floor of the valley, with the upper reaches of the ridge towering high above you. It was one of those trips that make you happy to be a traveler, to see a place radically different from your own home and yet feel a deep and meaningful connection to it. This is especially enhanced if your mother and father raised you under the ethereal glow of Nature and Nova on Channel 7. The animals were spectacular, but truly what struck me about the place were the folks living there, the relatives of the people who did not flee Africa during the migrations of humans as they spread across the world. Like many places we traveled, people who had no reason to show us kindness did so, and their love of children and their understanding of the preciousness of family and friends seemed to be at the forefront of their actions. Once again we were humbled by the kindness of strangers and the realization that no matter how distant our relations, we are, at some level, part of the same family.

And this, I think, is the greatest gift the ever-probing scientists have given us. Regardless of where you travel, of what the countenances look like as they peer back at you, of the food that is eaten or the manner in which people grieve; we are tied together, bound by our understanding of love and loss and pride and thirst. By the sweet taste of food after letting yourself get a little bit too hungry. By the shot of adrenaline when you accidentally almost drop something. This is written in our DNA. And the simple understanding bequeathed upon us by the intellectual children of Gregor Mendel provides a concrete and testable knowledge of that feeling we get when we meet a suffering child’s eye and understand that this is in fact our problem — a family problem.

I try to think of all people that I encounter in this regard. To see the world as my wife and I saw that small corner of Luxembourg, wondering how strangers may be related or what similarities we have deep inside our cells. It makes the world a lot smaller, and our place in it much more connected. And, given that there are now seven billion of us floating through space on our little blue planet, I think that it is time we began focusing on what binds us all together, instead of the differences that can drive us apart.

Pete LaFrance grew up in Palmer and has moved back to the area after a number of years living abroad.