-Alan Watts
Inside all of us lies a hidden history, the story of an immense journey told by our DNA. Deoxyribonucleic Acid is the biochemical molecule at the heart of the reproduction of all life, plants as well as animals. And since the discovery of its structure in 1953, scientists have pieced together the epic narrative of how human beings populated our planet.
Where do you come from?
"Cuimhnichibh air na daoine bho'n d'thainig sibh." ("Remember the people whom you come from." -Old Gaelic Proverb)
Some years ago I was persuaded to do a yDNA test for genealogical reasons. The primary object was to validate a Garvie family tradition that the Garvies of Perthshire were indeed descendants of John Garbh Maclean of Coll. I was curious. What did my yDNA tell me about my own "long journey"?
Like countless generations before me, I have been consumed by the questions, "Where have I come from? Why am I here? Why now?" I have approached these questions in previous blogs but I felt it was time to tackle the topic again.
When I first read the introduction to Bill Bryson's, A Short History of Nearly Everything, I was transfixed reading the paragraph where he says...
"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of you forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you."
I don't think anybody has said it better than that! Hence my interest in my ancestry and genealogy.
Close Genealogy
This much I knew of my paternal line with a certain degree of confidence: I was born in Ladysmith, Natal South Africa. My father was born in Johannesburg. His father, my grandfather, in Knysna. His father, my great grandfather, came from Aberdalgie in Perthshire, Scotland. His ancestors in turn, I learnt, came from Perth, Kinnoull, and Scone. The further back I went in time the more did my ancestral history merge into tradition and legend and increasingly, the mists of myth.
Perthshire tradition had it that the Garvies were descended from John Garbh, seventh MacLean of Coll, through one of his sons, probably John of Totronald. This son was wounded at the Battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, and did not return to Coll. His three sons (or grandsons) rented Upper Balgarvie, Lower Balgarvie, and Mill of Balgarvie in the parish of Scone, Perthshire from the Earl of Mansfield. Their descendants were tenants of Muirtown, Haggis Hall and several other farms near Perth.
(According to a letter from J C Garvie Macleod to the editor of the Oban Times, Spenthorn, West Park, Leeds. Date unknown. Also see A E Garvie, Memories and Meanings of My Life, 15.)
In Agents of Change, Scots in Poland 1800-1918 by Mona Kedslie McLeod (Tuckwell Press ISN#1 86232 081 0 ) page 116 we find...
"The Garvie brothers were descended from the Macleans of Coll. Backing the wrong side in the first Jacobite Rising of 1689, they forfeited their lands, adopted their nickname 'garbh', the Gaelic for rough or strong, and moved to Perthshire in search of a living. By the end of the eighteenth century Perth had become one of the centres of the developing linen industry and was enjoying a building boom..."
To date I had not found historical genealogical records to confirm this. I still wanted to know where I came from! So I resorted to DNA analysis. My yDNA Haplogroup turned out to be: R-M207 Subgroup: R1b1b2-M269
Y-chromosome DNA (yDNA) is a type of DNA that is only carried by men and is inherited directly from their fathers. Men who share a common paternal ancestor will have virtually the same yDNA, even if that male ancestor lived many generations ago. Theoretically then, sooner or later, as more data becomes available and more matches come to light I should be able to deduce whether there are Garvie links to the Hebrides and specifically to the Isle of Coll or not. Was it just accident that in a way I had come geographically full cycle and now stay where the last of the lairds of Coll died?...
Coll was home to a branch of the Clan Maclean for 500 years, not all of which were peaceful. In 1590 the Macleans of Duart invaded their cousins on Coll with the intention of taking the island for themselves. A battle was fought at Breachacha Castle where the Coll clan overwhelmed the Duarts, chopped off their heads and threw them in the stream, which is still known as "the stream of the heads". The Macleans of Coll retained their baronial fief and Castle of Breachacha until 1848 when Alexander Maclean of Coll emigrated to Natal, South Africa where he died unmarried.
This more distant biological journey in time is as interesting and fascinating as that of my immediate documented ancestry. We carry within us the genetic material and possibly coded memories that go back to creation itself!
Deep Genealogy
When the last Ice Age began to abate ~13,000 years ago and living conditions slowly improved across Europe, localized populations migrated from west Asia R1b1b2-M269 moved primarily throughout western Europe, creating opposite geographic distributions which are still evident today. R1b1b2-M269 is found at very high frequencies (50-80%) throughout western Europe particularly the Celtic populations in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, especially the Hebrides. Geneticists are pretty sure about the broad details of this remarkable migration of Celts. It is reasonably well documented for instance in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b1a2_.28R-M269.29
Even Deeper Genealogy
Haplogroup R is defined by a DNA marker known as M207. Everyone who carries this marker today descends from a common paternal ancestor who lived about 30,000 years ago in west Asia. To date, over thirty subclades of haplogroup R have been identified, of which, R1a1-M17 and R1b1b2-M269 (historically called R1b3) are the most well described. Both of these subgroups are indicators of European ancestry with haplogroup R1a1-M17 most representative of Eastern Europeans and R1b1b2-M269 most characteristic of Western Europeans. Originating in the regions of modern day Turkey I saw correlations with the Keltoi and the diaspora of nations alluded to in Genesis and Josephus.
.PNG)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Further back, as members of the human family, all people living today can trace their earliest paternal ancestors to populations that lived approximately 100,000 years ago in eastern Africa and possibly southern Africa described as the "Cradle of Humankind" where as providence had destined I would spend a number of years of my life working probing the night skies tracking spacecraft. These early humans became spread throughout the African continent, and beginning ~50,000 years ago, a series of complex migrations moved them out of Africa into regions of Asia and beyond to eventually populate every major area of the world.
Very Deep Genealogy
Some have suggested there might have been, startling as it may sound, an inter-galactic intervention at some time in the distant past or, possibly occurring all the time! Molecular biologists have been perplexed by segments of DNA that appear to be older than the Earth itself suggesting an origin beyond our Solar System.
Dr. Francis Crick, Nobel Prize Winner and one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule suggests in his book, Life Itself: Its Origins and Nature (1981), that primordial life was shipped to Earth in "spaceships" of some kind. Crick makes this startling proposition: "Life did not evolve first on Earth; a highly advanced civilization became threatened so they devised a way to pass on their existence. They genetically-modified their DNA and sent it out from their planet on bacteria or meteorites with the hope that it would collide with another planet. It did, and that's why we're here."
Terming his model "Directed Panspermia", Crick suggested that a "spaceship" carrying "large samples of... microorganisms" was sent to the Earth billions of years ago by an extraterrestrial civilisation - either as an experiment, preparation for colonisation or a genetic Noah’s Ark of some sort. (Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. "Directed Panspermia", Icarus, 19, 341 (1973), quoted in David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight)
Zecharia Sitchin, at the other extreme, suggests a much later Mesopotamian intervention based on his reading of Sumerian texts and the first eleven chapters of Genesis, speculating in his Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries and elsewhere, that humans were biologically engineered about 6000 years ago. Sitchin's views, though no less extreme than Crick's, are generally disregarded by the scientific community but have become popular among the general public as evidenced by the unusual demand for his numerous writings.
Sumerian Version: Ningishzidda, Enki and Ninmah create Adamu
It is speculated by both rational scientists and mavericks that our DNA could be encoded with messages from these other civilizations. Ancestral memories par excellence, beyond our wildest dreams, could be encoded in our very DNA. Unknown cosmic entities may have programmed our genetic make-up so that when we reached a certain level of intelligence, we would be able to access this information, and they could therefore "teach" us about ourselves, and how to progress. (For more about so-called "Junk DNA" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA. On "DNA Activation" see http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf.) Human DNA appears to be a lot more pliable (eg. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21091066) and mysterious (eg. the DNA Phantom Effect http://www.thescienceforum.com/biology/1144-dna-phantom-effect.html) than previously thought.
Photo: NASA
Back in those glory days.... Some people asked....were you alone out there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we know what we saw out there. And we couldn't really say anything. The bosses were really afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets. So we had to keep quiet. And now we only see these things in our nightmares or maybe in the movies, and some of them are pretty close to being the truth" (NBC TV 6th March 2001).
Potent words! Tongue in cheek? A Freudian slip? An intentional admission? (See http://www.enterprisemission.com/glenn.htm) Or are we standing on the very Threshold of an exciting new era, the Kingdom of Heaven itself? I would not be surprised! In fact, we always have!
At times I had to tread
Where not a star was found
To lead or light me, overhead;
Nor footprint on the ground.
I toiled among the sands
And stumbled with my feet;
Or crawled and climbed with knees and hands,
Some future path to beat.
-Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis.
©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za
