Dear Eve

Dear Eve,

When I recently got the box with the kit and the map, I also remembered the silver gift from years back. The silver gift was a bracelet from a Tibetan lady whom I did not know. I was wandering by her wares in some sort of flea market in Nepal near the border with Tibet when she asked me for a lipstick. When I told her I did not have any, she asked me for perfume instead. I had neither with me then. I smiled to say goodbye to her and turned my back when I felt her hold my wrist. I turned around and she had a silver bracelet she was giving to me. I hardly wear jewelry so I told her in sign language that it was very pretty but I did not want it. When she insisted, I reached into my pocket to pay for it but she stopped me. Instead, she put the silver bracelet on my wrist and locked it. When I insisted to pay for it, she held her palm up to me to say "no" and then made a tracing gesture of my face in the air between us and then traced hers and held her palm out like a bridge from her generous soul to my surprised but really grateful one. I concluded that I must have looked like someone dear to her, like the family she left behind.

We all look so different now, Eve, that we are fascinated when we find people who live thousands of miles from each other without moving in their lifetimes, looking like family. I now write to you down through time – 150,000 years since you were born in Africa. While travelers now trust their travel agencies to chart their itineraries without a hitch, one of your descendants, with an "Adam" through which all men now who are living can trace their ancestry, and your small band of Africans, dared to move out of a continent 60,000 years ago and charted the course of all human populations around the world. And you did this against unimaginable odds, amid an Ice Age that necessitated that you move in order to survive. You were the ultimate "Lonely Planeters" who would shame even the most daring and record-holding explorers now. Out of Africa, your lonely band first walked along the coastlines of continents to reach India and then Australia. That was a journey that could take just over 24 hours now by plane but it took you about 2,000 generations to do so. That is what we know so far about the reach of your first band of footsteps out of Africa.

But 60,000 years down the line, Eve, and we are still exploring in far more ways than just with our limbs. In search of our own deeper connections with the rest of the human family around the world, we now look again to the journey you made as well as the subsequent ones that your descendants made. A group that has framed it in their mission to explore and to honor and support those who do, The National Geographic has found a way and they sent me a kit to help them do that in a journey not of limbs, but of cells.

That is why this box I just got from them has a swab kit and a migration map. I am participating in the Genographic Project, a project of the National Geographic, IBM and the Waitt Family Foundation. It will sample 100,000 DNA from populations around the world to help them chart the original journeys that the first humans undertook since they left Sub-Saharan Africa 60,000 years ago. Spencer Wells, the geneticist who had been tracing the human family tree, is banking on DNA to draw for us a more complete map than the one they have included in the box, that would depict the undulating waves of human migration through human history. It is a story older than the most ancient of human recorded memories, much older than any of our philosophical, cultural or religious beliefs. DNA is a double coil in the nucleus of each of our cells that Wells graphically described as when linked and stretched altogether, will span a reach from the Earth to the moon and back 3,000 times! DNA slightly changes as it is passed down through generations but it leaves a trace that men can find in their Y chromosomes and women in their mitochondrial DNA or mDNA. These traces are the markers, or what Wells called the "clocks" inside us that could tell us about our human story back in time.

I wanted to be part of the telling of the story. So an hour after lunch one day, I swabbed my cheeks with the scraper for 60 seconds and deposited the sample into one of the specimen tubes. I set my alarm for eight hours later when I have to do a second swab and deposit to another tube. I did this so amazed and grateful that we now can connect ourselves with deep human history armed with cotton tips. I sent out my samples to The Genographic Project. They gave me my secret number with the kit. This number is my key to logging on to the results of where my ancestors found themselves trying all sorts of ways to interact with Nature, what we call now as "culture" and will give me clues as to how my ancestors, your descendants, ended up in various parts of Asia. The results will get more detailed as the project progresses.

There are groups of people around the world who have withstood the pressure to move and leave their long-held places and these stable groups, Eve, and their DNA are crucial to the project. They have been victims of many things in history – including the movement of other groups and the changing perspectives and principles in our current way of life that are so alien to their concept of place and home. The Genographic Project deeply respects the rights of these indigenous peoples to be informed before freely deciding to participate or not. Their DNA, as with the rest of the 100,000 samples, will only be for charting the human journey and not for any other purpose. These samples will be discarded when the project ends.

I like this project, Eve, because I can somehow talk to you through it. This is one of those projects where science is not only defensible but poignant. Wells said it best when he said that by doing this, we put on record, cell by cell, how all humans really belong to just one family. All OF US. All six billion of us living now and the 100 billion people who ever lived. This will show that concepts of race and color and even beliefs that we hold over our heads now in smugness came so late in the human story and even superficial compared to the deepest and oldest truths about what we all hold in common throughout the lifetimes and journeys our ancestors have treaded to get us all where we are. Because of your story, we should think again before we tell people that they do not belong where they are.

Your journey, Eve, gave me my silver charm bracelet. Thank you. It traveled in our blood down the ancestral line that you began. Rest now, you have traveled far and wide.  – Maria Isabel

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(Note: You, too, can participate in The Genographic Project. Log on to www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic to find out how.)