Reading Things- Mitochondrial Haplogroups
Today's reading involved a little bit of a trip into my previous research on mitochondrial DNA, in the form of two very old articles titled "Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution" and "In Search of Eve". For anyone curious enough to go down this rabbithole, the Wiki article on haplogroups is a nice little jump-off point.
Human innovation in search of solutions has never ceased to awe me. The paper on mtDNA and human evolution was written nearly four decades ago, and at the time, the ability to even extract and somewhat quantify DNA was considered revolutionary. Today, extracting DNA (or even to some degree, sequencing it) is an everyday lab activity (in those with the equipment/spec to); much like looking at slides under a microscope, or washing glassware. This wasn't the case all those years ago, the best technique they had was restriction mapping--essentially cutting the DNA at specific marker sequences and looking at how big/numerous the fragments were. This Wiki page probably explains it better, but that's the long and short of it. Obviously, the chopping up and piecing together like a jigsaw puzzle is a pretty arduous and inexact task. Yet, this was considered state of the art at the time--a technique researchers would seldom carry out in the 2020s.
Sequencing DNA these days is more or less an automatic process: you dump all your DNA in a sequencer and it spits out a (almost) perfect string of DNA that you can compare between cells and all that jazz. Any genomic study aims to recruit thousands of participants. The original "Eve" study had 147. It begs the question: would newer detection technology change when Eve existed? Would a higher number of people be needed to figure out when Eve came about? It's highly likely Eve is still African, but would it change the area, the timelines, our perception of who Eve was?
Tangentially, as I think of these neatly documented signatures in our DNA, weaving a story of how humans originated, how they moved, how this little piece gets passed on, mother to daughter, I think of how language travels with tribes of humans. I admit, my knowledge of linguistics is fairly cursory, but i think of the languages we've lost, and those that seemingly came out of nowhere. Somewhere in my head, it feels like the patterns in human movement might overlap with those in the movement of language. Somewhere, maybe there's a way to superimpose them both and fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
There has been some chatter around human connection, reaching out and blogging on Bear these past few days (and potentially way before). The reason I turned to blogging was in hopes of finding this connection, of people reaching out, some sort of a call into the mountains hoping someone answers. For some reason, the idea of a Mitochondrial Eve is comforting- in which we all share a common, findable? ancestor from aeons and aeons ago. It hints to our connection to the rest of the world, something implicit, something we're born with. I like to think of it as a tiny little symbol of what we owe to each other, a miniscule amount of time, a smidge of courtesy, or, just maybe, a tiny detour from the daily humdrum of our lives to connect with each other.
On a completely unrelated note:
Something a friend said to me today reminded me of the Arcane quote: "There is no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit."
This is a conversation I would like to remember.