Lost tribes and mongrels

I recall watching a TV programme in the UK a year or so ago, in which the idea was to take DNA samples from Brits who regarded themselves as being part of a unique, privileged island cultural heritage, which, for most of them, expressed itself in varying degrees of racism and longing for the old days of empire.

Their attitudes ranged from a slight but clear sense of superiority over other countries, to vehement hatred of the darker-skinned nations; from mildly comical to deeply unloveable. (I bet you can guess where I'm going with this one.)

Well, surprise, surprise! It transpired that most of the John Bull, England-for-the-English crowd had huge genetic inheritances from all sorts of people groups across the globe: Mediterranean/South European,  Middle Eastern/Arab, African and Asian. One particularly strident guy was visibly shell-shocked to find that he was 45% Middle Eastern. While it was quite funny to watch, it was also quite sad to see someone's sense of themselves receive such a mighty jolt.

We've also seen similar moments on genealogy programmes, where the truth about the past comes to light and shatters a family myth, or provides a white slave-owning ancestor for someone whose public and private view of their black identity has somehow included some notion of purity or undilutedness.

The truth is, we all inherit our genes from a big and dirty pool of ancestors. Most of us don't even know our great-grandparents, never mind any further back. And if you do the maths, you have/had four grandparents, so each of them had four grandparents, and so on back to the Garden of Eden or wherever you believe life originated.  It rapidly becomes an astronomically large number.

Can you guarantee that there was never any infidelity or illegitimacy in your family line? Or that there were no Jews or Moslems, or black Africans, or white supremacists, or murderers, thieves and sheep-stealers, or gays or any other grouping of society that you prefer to distance yourself from?  Of course not.  Even the great Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who couldn't look more like a member of the Aryan race, and sounds like a character from Brideshead Revisited, has a Turkish great-grandfather.

The programme also featured one rather aristocratic elderly lady who turned out to be 55% Chinese. She seemed unfazed by this information, and remarked that she had always loved Chinese art and culture, and perhaps this helped to explain why. What a fascinating thought, that such preferences might have a genetic determinant. Perhaps even our religious leanings can have a genetic correlation. Which Lost Tribes are your ancestors?