Back in middle school, I won the alphabetical lottery when I was partner up with Lisa Mack, the absurdly hot new chick to the school as lab partners in science class. Unfortunately for me, one of the first experiments that year was that we swab our cheeks, put it underneath a microscope to see all the germs living in your mouth. Not surprisingly after seeing all the germs that came from my mouth, we never made out while slow dancing to More than Words at the proceeding eighth grade dance.
I bring this up because I had flashback to traumatic experience while watching The Human Family Tree where the National Geographic Channel swabbed the check of about a hundred Queens residents that partook, it wasn’t to see how many germs they had but to get some DNA that they could then trace their heritage. And the results of the five year study were so interesting it almost made me want to swab my cheek for the first time since middle school. Almost.
The result, airing tonight at 9:00 traces everyone back to a tribe in Africa and in much detail shows how are human family tree branches out slowly until our ancestors found their ways to as far flung places as Europe and South America thousands years before fuel made it easy to travel by ground, water or even air. And really who better to narrate how we are all connected than Mr. Six Degrees himself, Kevin Bacon.
If there was one compliant to be had about The Human Family Tree is that we don’t get that much reaction from the test subject and any reaction is saved for the final eight minutes of the program. And by then you almost forget the African-American model may have more in common with Southeast Asians in the study than those Africans that never left (or the group that left Africa then found itself back to the continent) by the time you get his reaction which is fleeting anyways as they then go on to the next subject’s reaction. Check out a preview of the show below and the Human Tree map:
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