The Human Family Tree

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Description

Astoria, Queens, New York is the melting pot of melting pots, with a range of skin tones, heights, weights, hair types, and eye shapes, to say nothing of their beliefs, cultures, languages, and trades. But just how different are we? At a street fair in the heart of Astoria, on a sweltering July day, geneticist Spencer Wells and his team take DNA samples from this amazingly diverse group. These samples will show how a selection of New Yorkers: a waitress, a teacher, a councilman, a fashion model, and a mother, among many others, with ethnic origins as diverse as Thai, Puerto Rican and African - are all connected; that they, like everyone else on the planet, can trace their ancestry back to the same small group of Homo sapiens who began eking out a living in Africa less than 200,000 years ago.