Tired

I’ve really overdone it.  I suspected, but denied it, until this evening when my back flamed into agony while I was out walking the dictator.  I’d mentioned a couple of little twinges and a limp that I was sure would fade with some sleep… I did sleep quite well last night, and had difficulty getting up this morning, so I was a little slow.  Jerry was his little high energy self when we were out, and I thought I’d try walking over to the dog park with the idea that he could run around off-leash and I’d sit… I got about halfway there when I realized that I couldn’t finish that walk, not if I were to walk back home afterwards, so I turned around and returned home. He didn’t seem to mind too much, as he was happily sniffing and exploring at the extent of the leash.  I fell asleep on my chair in the afternoon, and when I called my aunt I was yawning really hard!  When we were out this evening, I was being pulled along behind the mini-dynamo, and that was when my back sent up an alarm.  I’m now seated in my chair, propped up on several cushions waiting for my pain meds to kick in.  I’m happy to report that Don is almost back to himself; he ate a couple of decent meals and he’s actually watching football… 

I, like many other people, did a DNA ancestry analysis some years ago.  Actually, I did 3 different ones, and gifted some of my family members (my dad, aunt and brother) to be able to get more information.  When the results returned, I was unsurprised at the diversity of my ancestors, as we’ve long known that my family originated on multiple continents.  The initial report showed that I had links almost everywhere on the planet except the Middle East, Eastern Africa, Eastern Russia, Southern Africa, Australia and the Pacific generally.  I was very surprised that I had Scandinavian ancestry at more than 3%, but then my father’s profile shows a significant portion of Northern Europe and Scandinavian ancestry through his Scottish forebears (hence “Crosby”)  The Southern Europe (Iberian peninsula and Western Mediterranean) was unsurprising, as my mother’s side had a few infusions of Spanish and French bloodlines; likewise no surprises at the southern China and Indian, nor the West African, nor the “indigenous American.”  The addition of my family members was to fill in more detail on both sides of my genes.  Since my mother had already passed on, I used my aunt (her sister) as my nearest female collateral ancestor, and my brother, to provide a male comparison.  With my dad, of course that filled in details on his genes, but we also used him to link to one of my cousins (his sister’s child) so she had information on the male side, and compared against her mother.  The surprising thing for me was that my brother and I showed different groupings.  We both showed the same areas, but very different percentages of them.  

With the updates, the ancestry information tends to be further refined and narrowed to a smaller area, so instead of highlighting all of India, for instance, it now has narrowed to northern India into the foothills of the Himalayas.  As for my Western African ancestry, it originally covered almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, but has now been narrowed to the area from Guinea-Bissau to Equatorial Guinea, the hunting grounds of European slavers during that tragic period of history.  The least refined grouping is the indigenous American, as it seems that the genotype was spread across all of the Americas and north-eastern Russia  (my Russian links, which surprised me, are from the extreme eastern and western portions of the area, not the central areas.  I have no Slavic ancestry.)

What does this mean, then?  At a meta level, I interpret these findings to say that I (and by extension, my family) are fully human, as our ancestors gathered from almost every inhabited landmass on the planet.  If some narrow-minded racist tells me “go back where you came from,” I can truthfully say that anywhere I am is where my ancestors came from.  I can point out that my history is the history of humanity, and the result of many migrations over the millennia as groups of people sought food, or shelter, or were forced out by occupying nations, or were themselves occupiers, or any of the many reasons that humanity spread out of Africa starting almost a million hears ago.  There have been family legends that we’ve been both slaves and slave owners; others about couples from opposite sides of wars who married (and didn’t speak each other’s languages) and various others that I find utterly fascinating, even if they’re apocryphal.  

I know that there are those who do these analyses to look for links to royalty or to notable historic figures, or to prove ties to a particular ethnic group.  I was just curious to see how my family stories tied to my genes, and it’s great to find the links.  One of the companies also gives an approximate timeline of how far back a particular ethnicity was introduced into the genome.  I don’t show any more recently than the mid-1800s, meaning that the mixture that is me is made up of other mixtures.  I think that it would be fun, and enlightening, to learn more about the cultures that they left and how they shaped what I inherited.  I know, for instance, that my Indian ancestor married into a French-Spanish-indigenous family, and changed their religion, and their children didn’t learn to speak any of their languages.  We can talk about the generational impact of colonization and imperialism and what it does to conquered or minority civilizations, or about the maintenance of cultures in a truly oppressive regime or any of those dreadful things.  Another time.  Tonight, I’m just fascinated at the concatenation of events that led to me; at what had to happen so that someone with Spanish ancestry would meet and marry someone from southern China; or that a Scotsman would have Indian grandchildren or someone from Northern Europe would have descendants from Western Africa and that all of them would be intermixed with indigenous Americans.  I’ll also laugh scornfully at the stupidity of those who oppose “miscegenation” and talk about “separation of the races” like that’s at all possible.

With that in mind, I’m off to attend to my tiny boss who is butting at me and complaining of neglect… Good night!