MANILA, Philippines - What do Filipinos have in common with the rest of the world? All of us have almost similar genetic composition — 99.9 percent of our DNA sequence is identical with any other person with only a minuscule fraction of 0.1 percent variation. Not only that, all humans — regardless of race, nationality or religion — can trace their roots to a common ancestor, back to the cradle of humanity, East Africa some 60,000 years ago.
National Geographic Channel recently premiered The Human Family Tree, an hour-long look at our collective genetic journey. What did our ancestors look like? At what point in our past did we first cross paths with the strangers living in our neighborhood? Now science helps shed light on these questions with a bold experiment: geneticist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Dr. Spencer Wells and the Genographic Project team set about collecting DNA from various nationalities worldwide — including Filipinos — to trace the original Southern Asians, among the first people to step out of Africa. The show travels back thousands of years via CGI to witness how our ancestors persevered and migrated.
The experiment took the Genographic team to the mountains of the Philippines where the indigenous Aetas, the first settlers of the archipelago, struggle to avoid the shrinking of their population amid natural disasters, loss of land, and pressure to assimilate. The Philippine Aetas are living proof of how fragile genetic lineage can be. “Indigenous people (like the Aetas) carry a particular trait that reveals details of humans who went and stay for a long time and didn’t mix a lot,” says Dr. Wells, who directs the five-year landmark Genographic Project. “It’s actually a glimpse to the lost world. Scientists believe that the Aeta are among the first humans who travel from Africa and walk through the island when the sea level was low during the Ice Age. When the ice caps melted and the sea level rose again, it cut off the Aetas from the rest of world.” Similar thing happened to modern humans who walked through the islands now separated by water.
Visit www.natgeotv.com/humanfamilytree or www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic to learn more about the program which premiered Sept. 26 on National Geographic Channel.