WEBVTT - Druid Like Me 0:00:15.170 --> 0:00:41.850 Pushkin are squeezing their way in between the stones. So 0:00:42.010 --> 0:00:45.530 there's there's people who are standing very quietly. There's somebody 0:00:45.530 --> 0:00:53.210 who's doing kind of calisthenic movements. It's a little hint 0:00:53.250 --> 0:00:58.730 of marijuana on the air. Bring forth new opportunities and 0:00:58.850 --> 0:01:05.050 beginning one equinox, I came to see the sunrise at Stonehenge. 0:01:07.090 --> 0:01:10.690 Every time someone says it's Stonehenge in a documentary, or 0:01:10.730 --> 0:01:13.210 at least the first time, there has to be a 0:01:13.330 --> 0:01:16.850 cosmic cord. Don't complain to me about it. I don't 0:01:16.890 --> 0:01:19.970 make the rules. I think I can hear somebody with 0:01:20.050 --> 0:01:24.490 a temple gong or a singing bowl or something like 0:01:24.530 --> 0:01:29.690 that on the equinox. Day and night are of almost 0:01:29.730 --> 0:01:33.210 equal lengths. So I've come to see the sunrise at 0:01:33.250 --> 0:01:50.890 stoneheng Let's go find where the tones are coming from. 0:01:50.930 --> 0:01:53.890 These days you can't get very near the stones out 0:01:53.970 --> 0:01:57.530 on the middle of Salisbury Plain. Visitors are kept at 0:01:57.530 --> 0:02:01.490 a distance to avoid damage. But British Pagans say this 0:02:01.650 --> 0:02:05.170 site is crucial for their faith. In the past, they've 0:02:05.210 --> 0:02:09.330 even fought police to get access to the stones so finely. 0:02:09.450 --> 0:02:13.290 The body that manages the site, English Heritage, agreed that 0:02:13.370 --> 0:02:16.410 on four days a year, people could be allowed to 0:02:16.450 --> 0:02:22.410 worship here. This is one of those mornings we invoke, 0:02:22.810 --> 0:02:30.730 Oh light of light, without a bright flame, before us, 0:02:31.290 --> 0:02:36.690 be before us. There's a crowd here, pretty much what 0:02:36.730 --> 0:02:39.330 you'd expect if you've ever hung around the British Free 0:02:39.370 --> 0:02:44.090 festival scene. There are robes and staffs and garlands of flowers. 0:02:45.090 --> 0:02:52.130 Within our hearts a flame of love. The head Druid 0:02:52.410 --> 0:02:55.770 is a benevolent looking fellow with a white beard and 0:02:55.890 --> 0:03:03.090 debatted Panama hat to our friends. If you grew up 0:03:03.130 --> 0:03:07.450 in England like I did, then Stonehenge is a powerful 0:03:07.570 --> 0:03:12.010 national symbol. But it's not a castle, or a cathedral 0:03:12.570 --> 0:03:16.610 or a stately home. It doesn't quite fit into official 0:03:16.650 --> 0:03:20.770 British history, the story dominated by the rich and powerful 0:03:21.210 --> 0:03:23.730 and as much welly as we possibly can. So it's 0:03:23.730 --> 0:03:26.330 just sounds really do sing with us, ladies and gentlemen. 0:03:35.010 --> 0:03:39.170 Something about Stonehenge leads people to think about great mysteries, 0:03:39.810 --> 0:03:45.730 about cosmic energy and aliens and lost civilizations. You could 0:03:45.770 --> 0:03:50.170 say it's come to symbolized mystery itself, the possibility that 0:03:50.250 --> 0:03:54.810 our ancestors held secrets, and if only we could unlock them, 0:03:54.930 --> 0:03:59.290 we'd find out the truth about ourselves. I came to 0:03:59.370 --> 0:04:04.050 Stonehenge with a question in my mind, whispering voice. Do 0:04:04.210 --> 0:04:09.330 the stones belong to me? My mother's English, but my 0:04:09.410 --> 0:04:13.730 father came to England from India. Stonehenge is a symbol 0:04:13.730 --> 0:04:17.010 of continuity of a people who've been here, as the 0:04:17.050 --> 0:04:22.410 phrase goes, since time immemorial. So it is Stonehenge part 0:04:22.490 --> 0:04:30.450 of my heritage? Could I be a Druid too? This 0:04:30.730 --> 0:04:34.650 is Into the Zone, a show about opposites and how 0:04:34.690 --> 0:04:38.290 borders are never as clear as we think. My name's 0:04:38.330 --> 0:04:42.210 Harry Kunzru. I'm a fiction writer, the kind who likes 0:04:42.250 --> 0:04:45.210 to research things, and I've always wanted a chance to 0:04:45.250 --> 0:04:48.490 explore some of the true stories. I've discovered stories that 0:04:48.530 --> 0:04:52.890 are often stranger and more affecting than fiction. In this season, 0:04:52.930 --> 0:04:54.530 I'll be finding out what it was like to be 0:04:54.530 --> 0:04:57.570 a punk behind the Iron curtain. I'll meet the inventor 0:04:57.690 --> 0:05:02.330 of the MP three. I'll investigate spiritualism and aliens and 0:05:02.490 --> 0:05:07.450 country music, the zones between life and death, public and private, 0:05:07.970 --> 0:05:13.650 east and west, signal and noise, black and white. I 0:05:13.730 --> 0:05:16.690 want to know why do we divide up the world 0:05:16.690 --> 0:05:21.610 in these ways? In this first episode, that division is 0:05:21.690 --> 0:05:28.930 personal it's all about natives and migrants. All my life 0:05:29.210 --> 0:05:33.610 I felt like I exist between places, in a gray zone. 0:05:34.130 --> 0:05:36.970 I'm a novelist in these days. I live in Brooklyn, 0:05:37.770 --> 0:05:39.810 but I grew up just where the east end of 0:05:39.850 --> 0:05:43.770 London fades out into the County of Essex. Essex is 0:05:44.290 --> 0:05:48.690 how to explain Essex. It has kind of a reputation. Oh, 0:05:48.730 --> 0:05:50.210 you went to a girl and said to the girl, 0:05:50.410 --> 0:05:53.490 Joe is a little boy. Up. Whip me up right now. 0:05:53.650 --> 0:05:58.410 I can actually understand what they're saying. That's the Estuarian accent, 0:05:58.570 --> 0:06:02.410 named for the place downriver from London. This accent is 0:06:02.450 --> 0:06:05.090 totally different from a London accent, and if I listened 0:06:05.130 --> 0:06:08.170 to it for too long, I start talking that way. 0:06:08.450 --> 0:06:12.330 Essex was my home until the age of eighteen. Essex 0:06:12.370 --> 0:06:16.090 was where I grew up during the Thatcher years. Essex 0:06:16.170 --> 0:06:19.490 boys and girls with their flashy clothes and bad manners 0:06:19.810 --> 0:06:23.130 at the bridge and tunnel crowd of London. There's a 0:06:23.130 --> 0:06:26.930 whole genre of Essex girl jokes. How does an Essex 0:06:27.010 --> 0:06:29.970 girl turn the lights on after sex? She opens the 0:06:29.970 --> 0:06:35.050 car door? Essex girls. Dad is Essex man, an old 0:06:35.090 --> 0:06:39.050 British political archetype used by Polsters as a shorthand for 0:06:39.090 --> 0:06:42.250 a particular kind of right leaning voter, someone from a 0:06:42.290 --> 0:06:45.330 working class background who made money and moved to the 0:06:45.370 --> 0:06:49.890 suburbs in the eighties. Essex Man brought Margaret Thatcher to power. 0:06:50.610 --> 0:06:53.690 In the twenty sixteen Brexit referendum about where the Britain 0:06:53.730 --> 0:06:57.530 should stay in the European Union, every single district in 0:06:57.530 --> 0:07:02.810 the County of Essex voted to leave. Essex to me 0:07:03.330 --> 0:07:07.210 is dancing to electro music at Illusions under eighteen's nightclub 0:07:07.250 --> 0:07:10.770 in It's been chased a subway underpassed by the neo 0:07:10.890 --> 0:07:16.690 Nazi Chingford's skins. It's the statue of Winston Churchill on 0:07:16.850 --> 0:07:20.370 Woodford Green, looking on as the local team plays cricket. 0:07:20.890 --> 0:07:24.170 It's seventeen year old boys rapping cars around trees and 0:07:24.330 --> 0:07:27.290 having gang fights on the golf course with sharp and dumbrellas. 0:07:33.970 --> 0:07:39.330 That's my English heritage. It's complicated, and now that I 0:07:39.370 --> 0:07:42.570 live in America, I don't usually get to talk about it. 0:07:43.610 --> 0:07:46.570 But recently I went to see an old school friend 0:07:46.690 --> 0:07:53.890 called shop Malark, someone I haven't seen since I left Essex. Oh, 0:07:53.930 --> 0:07:58.810 good lord Harry, how are you doing? Thirty years on? Has? Yes, 0:07:58.810 --> 0:08:00.330 it could have been. I think he's a bit scary. 0:08:00.690 --> 0:08:02.650 That's really scary. I'm actually still in touch with a 0:08:02.650 --> 0:08:05.650 fair number of people fro noticed, he says, Harry like 0:08:05.730 --> 0:08:10.170 the prince. My name is pronounced hurry Shops. Given name 0:08:10.250 --> 0:08:15.210 is actually spelt swap a n and for years he 0:08:15.330 --> 0:08:19.210 let people mispronounce it swap hand. Shop and I were 0:08:19.210 --> 0:08:22.090 close friends for a while, mostly when we were very young. 0:08:22.410 --> 0:08:26.930 I was trying to trying to imagine, imagine how you 0:08:26.970 --> 0:08:28.850 would be and then you know, thirty years is a 0:08:28.930 --> 0:08:32.170 long time. Well, we both got slightly less hair. No, 0:08:32.330 --> 0:08:35.810 I was bald at school, and remember you had very 0:08:35.810 --> 0:08:38.130 short hair. I mean I think my hair all fell 0:08:38.130 --> 0:08:40.530 out because I had that phase of jelling it all vertically. 0:08:41.010 --> 0:08:42.650 I mean I had that I was trying to had 0:08:42.650 --> 0:08:44.570 that's at high top fade that no one had explained 0:08:44.570 --> 0:08:46.530 to me that you couldn't do with Indian hair. Hair. 0:08:47.370 --> 0:08:49.530 It was always a problem for me as a teenager. 0:08:50.130 --> 0:08:52.090 Once I tried to die my inm blonde to be 0:08:52.170 --> 0:08:54.530 more like the casuals who I was trying to emulate. 0:08:54.890 --> 0:08:57.930 The boys who dressed in Italian sports were Fila track 0:08:58.050 --> 0:09:02.170 suits and Diadora gold sneakers. These boys had older brothers 0:09:02.170 --> 0:09:06.250 who ran with football gangs, the Gooners or the intercity firm. 0:09:06.410 --> 0:09:10.090 I didn't. And even the ultimate casual hairs dial, a curly, 0:09:10.130 --> 0:09:14.090 wet looked perm wasn't going to fix that anyway. In 0:09:14.130 --> 0:09:16.690 my late twenties, my hairlines started to receive and I 0:09:16.730 --> 0:09:19.050 decided to shave my head. And to be honest, it 0:09:19.090 --> 0:09:21.930 was a relief all in all that I had better 0:09:21.970 --> 0:09:24.650 hair luck than my old friend shop Malek. But we 0:09:24.690 --> 0:09:27.570 did have something else in common, something else that no 0:09:27.650 --> 0:09:31.450 amount of hair gel was going to change. We were brown, 0:09:32.450 --> 0:09:35.290 two of the only Asian kids in our very white 0:09:35.410 --> 0:09:39.370 Essex world. We were to use the insult that dogged 0:09:39.450 --> 0:09:43.730 us every day, Packies. I wanted to ask you about 0:09:43.730 --> 0:09:46.290 a personal memory die I have. I don't know which 0:09:46.690 --> 0:09:50.770 year it was. I guess we might have been eight 0:09:50.890 --> 0:09:54.130 or nine or something like that. I'll tell you the truth. 0:09:54.250 --> 0:09:57.250 I didn't run into Shop by accident. I'd taken a 0:09:57.250 --> 0:10:00.010 train to Boston to talk to him. Mainly it was 0:10:00.050 --> 0:10:02.730 to find out about his work at Harvard Medical School, 0:10:02.850 --> 0:10:05.290 which I'll get to in a moment. But also it 0:10:05.330 --> 0:10:07.850 was because he'd got out of Essex like I had, 0:10:08.050 --> 0:10:11.970 and gone far, far away. I wanted in particular to 0:10:12.010 --> 0:10:15.570 see if he remembered something, something that happened when we 0:10:15.570 --> 0:10:19.770 were very young. It was your birthday and there was 0:10:19.810 --> 0:10:22.650 and your parents took us to the cinema. I remember 0:10:24.050 --> 0:10:29.010 us getting off at Fowlers Square straight into a National 0:10:29.130 --> 0:10:33.850 Front rally. The National Front was and is a violent 0:10:33.970 --> 0:10:37.650 far right organization which campaigned for an end to immigration. 0:10:38.970 --> 0:10:42.290 Back in the eighties. NF members used to be everywhere, 0:10:42.970 --> 0:10:46.250 these big skinhead guys in bomber jackets. In sixteen hold 0:10:46.330 --> 0:10:50.090 Doc Martin boots telling you to go home. As a 0:10:50.130 --> 0:10:54.170 little kid, I found them terrifying. Some policemen basically became 0:10:54.650 --> 0:10:57.130 and immediately kind of took us away, and they were 0:10:57.210 --> 0:11:00.890 very concerned because we were a little getting a brown people. 0:11:01.610 --> 0:11:06.530 So it's interesting that you remember it. For me, all 0:11:06.570 --> 0:11:09.610 I remember from England was that general it was a 0:11:09.730 --> 0:11:14.010 very racist place and that that was the norm. It 0:11:14.050 --> 0:11:16.450 would not have been surprising to me that, you know, 0:11:18.170 --> 0:11:22.130 you could get beaten up fairly regularly for no reason 0:11:22.170 --> 0:11:24.170 at all the path except for this color of your skin. 0:11:24.650 --> 0:11:26.450 I don't know about you, but I never dared go 0:11:26.490 --> 0:11:29.090 to a football match because I would be putting my 0:11:29.210 --> 0:11:31.730 talk about this to people now who ask what football 0:11:31.730 --> 0:11:33.530 team my support, and I had to explain to him 0:11:33.570 --> 0:11:35.090 that it was not safe for me to go to 0:11:35.130 --> 0:11:37.610 a football game when I was growing up, and so 0:11:37.850 --> 0:11:40.050 why on earth would I be interested in a sport 0:11:40.090 --> 0:11:42.850 where I couldn't even attend as a spectator. So the 0:11:42.890 --> 0:11:45.010 amazing thing to me is that that was normal. The 0:11:45.170 --> 0:11:47.570 racism was just everywhere, and it was a normal thing. 0:11:47.650 --> 0:11:50.610 And I don't know about you, but I just tended 0:11:50.650 --> 0:11:52.890 to ignore it and just get on with the things 0:11:52.890 --> 0:11:56.130 I was trying to do. And perhaps even more scary 0:11:56.450 --> 0:12:05.730 is that that for me, I just accepted it. He's right, 0:12:06.370 --> 0:12:11.010 I just accepted it too. But Shop couldn't remember the 0:12:11.050 --> 0:12:14.050 incident of his birthday party, the incident that had been 0:12:14.090 --> 0:12:18.290 on my mind for thirty years. I distinctly remember the 0:12:18.370 --> 0:12:21.650 Union jacks in the distance around the base of Nelson's column. 0:12:22.330 --> 0:12:26.610 Shop's dad in a suit and tie, his mom's bottle green. Sorry, 0:12:26.770 --> 0:12:32.690 the police whisking us out of trouble. Talking to Shop 0:12:32.730 --> 0:12:36.010 did confirm some things for me Over the years, I 0:12:36.130 --> 0:12:38.490 tried to explain to people how it was back then. 0:12:39.090 --> 0:12:41.930 When he repeat something, turn it into a story. It 0:12:42.050 --> 0:12:45.490 can start to feel a bit hollow. Since making up 0:12:45.530 --> 0:12:48.290 stories is what I do for a living, I could 0:12:48.330 --> 0:12:54.810 start to wonder was I exaggerating about essex. No, I 0:12:54.970 --> 0:13:00.130 was never ever allowed to forget that I was a packy. Yep. 0:13:01.650 --> 0:13:04.530 I don't know about you, but my solution or to 0:13:04.650 --> 0:13:06.410 try and deal with this was to live as happier 0:13:06.410 --> 0:13:09.090 life as I could. And when I met racist people 0:13:09.210 --> 0:13:11.450 or my favorite thing to do was to try and 0:13:11.450 --> 0:13:14.570 make them laugh. If you made them laugh at something, 0:13:14.570 --> 0:13:16.290 they would see you in a different light, and I 0:13:16.330 --> 0:13:19.170 would like to cause that confusion in them because I 0:13:19.250 --> 0:13:22.010 felt they were wrong. These days, we have a language 0:13:22.050 --> 0:13:25.530 for it. All the little things that insults and the jokes, 0:13:26.090 --> 0:13:29.290 the stuff that cumulatively wears you down and serves to 0:13:29.330 --> 0:13:33.890 remind you of your low status. We call them microaggressions. 0:13:34.010 --> 0:13:38.170 And here I'd like to emphasize the micro things felt bad. 0:13:38.570 --> 0:13:41.370 They could have been worse. No one was spray painting 0:13:41.410 --> 0:13:44.370 slurs on our house or putting dog feasts through our 0:13:44.450 --> 0:13:47.490 letter box. Those things did happen to a friend of 0:13:47.530 --> 0:13:50.250 mine who grew up in Leicester, and I have some 0:13:50.290 --> 0:13:54.290 happy memories, mostly to do with escaping into books and music. 0:13:54.810 --> 0:13:57.690 I was a big science fiction fan. I read a 0:13:57.730 --> 0:14:01.410 lot of weird stuff, mostly in old nineteen sixties paperbacks 0:14:01.410 --> 0:14:05.130 that I found in charity shops. I remember reading Eric 0:14:05.250 --> 0:14:08.610 van denikin, the Swiss writer who proposed that in ancient 0:14:08.690 --> 0:14:14.810 time aliens who had visited Earth and helped people build monuments. Stonehenge, 0:14:14.890 --> 0:14:18.170 he said, was a model of the Solar system, built 0:14:18.210 --> 0:14:21.850 as a sort of road sign for passing spaceships, letting 0:14:21.890 --> 0:14:24.610 them know that there was intelligent life on the planet. 0:14:25.490 --> 0:14:28.450 I wanted that to be true when I visited Stonehenge 0:14:28.450 --> 0:14:32.250 as a kid and today, to be honest. If there 0:14:32.250 --> 0:14:35.610 were any spaceships passing by, I wanted them to take 0:14:35.650 --> 0:14:47.570 me with them back on Earth. A question that always 0:14:47.570 --> 0:14:51.970 made me anxious was where are you from? Often I 0:14:51.970 --> 0:14:54.770 didn't feel like trotting out the complicated story of my 0:14:54.890 --> 0:14:58.210 Indian dad's migration to the mother country, or how he 0:14:58.290 --> 0:15:01.090 met my English mum, and why I came to find 0:15:01.130 --> 0:15:05.130 myself a child in Essex rather than Kashmir. I wanted 0:15:05.170 --> 0:15:08.490 to be like everyone else, to be from here, like 0:15:08.530 --> 0:15:12.690 white people were the ones whose ancestors went back thousands 0:15:12.730 --> 0:15:16.490 of years, people who erected stones in a mysterious circle, 0:15:17.210 --> 0:15:21.770 people who had a home. I didn't know yet that 0:15:21.810 --> 0:15:25.650 this idea of an ancestral homeland was, as we say 0:15:25.690 --> 0:15:38.850 in Essex, total bollocks. A while ago I heard about 0:15:38.850 --> 0:15:42.450 a book called Who We Are and How We Got Here. 0:15:43.490 --> 0:15:46.570 The book is by David Reich, who runs a lab 0:15:46.610 --> 0:15:51.970 dedicated to analyzing DNA samples from ancient human remains. Reich 0:15:52.130 --> 0:15:54.450 is one of the pioneers of this kind of science. 0:15:54.650 --> 0:15:57.770 It's a completely new field less than ten years old. 0:15:59.450 --> 0:16:04.050 In twenty ten, the first five ancient human genomes were published. 0:16:04.650 --> 0:16:08.690 It started as a trickle of genetic data, but it's 0:16:08.730 --> 0:16:13.450 soon became a fire hose. In twenty fourteen, thirty eight 0:16:13.530 --> 0:16:19.370 genomes were published. By August twenty seventeen, one lab David 0:16:19.450 --> 0:16:23.690 reichs had generated data for more than three thousand samples. 0:16:24.410 --> 0:16:28.690 In seven years, We've gone from nothing to detailed portraits 0:16:28.770 --> 0:16:34.010 of thousands of ancient people. This mass of new data 0:16:34.250 --> 0:16:37.890 is allowing scientists to uncover all sorts of information about 0:16:37.930 --> 0:16:43.610 ancient humans, our ancestors. They discovered that farming had developed 0:16:43.610 --> 0:16:46.330 in the Near East more than ten thousand years ago, 0:16:46.730 --> 0:16:50.130 and not in a single place, but among several different 0:16:50.290 --> 0:16:54.410 human populations. They discovered that the humans who spread into 0:16:54.450 --> 0:16:58.570 remote Pacific islands around three thousand years ago were not 0:16:58.610 --> 0:17:01.810 the sole ancestors of the present day inhabitants, which is 0:17:01.970 --> 0:17:05.370 a very weird story, indeed, but one for another time. 0:17:06.330 --> 0:17:09.450 These scientists even discovered a whole new species of our 0:17:09.530 --> 0:17:12.810 Kamonid a quarter of a million years ago. It wasn't 0:17:12.850 --> 0:17:17.930 just us and Nederthals. There was a third population, the Denisovans. 0:17:18.810 --> 0:17:22.010 Their existence was completely unknown before the rise of this 0:17:22.090 --> 0:17:29.450 new kind of genetic archeology. Right now, migration is portrayed 0:17:29.450 --> 0:17:33.690 as an existential threat to settled people, and so reading 0:17:33.930 --> 0:17:36.650 Who We Are and How We got here felt oddly 0:17:36.730 --> 0:17:39.570 hopeful to me. The book seemed to be opening up 0:17:39.610 --> 0:17:43.410 another kind of history, one in which human populations are 0:17:43.450 --> 0:17:49.290 always moving and changing. In this history, movement and change 0:17:49.290 --> 0:17:54.210 aren't modern phenomena, and they aren't evidence of collapse or decline. 0:17:54.930 --> 0:17:58.810 In this way of understanding history, it's migrants all the 0:17:58.850 --> 0:18:04.130 way down. So I'm not a statistician. My background is mathematics, 0:18:04.170 --> 0:18:07.770 and guess who works at Reich's lab at Harvard. My 0:18:07.850 --> 0:18:12.930 friend from Essex Shop, Malik, and now informatation. Although I'm 0:18:12.970 --> 0:18:16.170 moving now more towards population genetic side of things. Back 0:18:16.170 --> 0:18:20.210 when we were kids, Shop was the class clown. Now 0:18:20.410 --> 0:18:24.650 he's a physicist who uses terms like coalescent simulations and 0:18:25.010 --> 0:18:30.250 proboscidian In ordinary conversation, I can't even say that Shop 0:18:30.370 --> 0:18:34.410 is the bioinformatics director of David Wright's lab, where he 0:18:34.450 --> 0:18:39.170 writes software that soughts billions of DNA sequences and creates 0:18:39.170 --> 0:18:43.290 an easily accessible database. It made me happy to find 0:18:43.330 --> 0:18:46.010 out what he'd done with his life, to discover that 0:18:46.090 --> 0:18:49.810 he was co authoring papers in the journal Nature, working 0:18:49.810 --> 0:18:52.770 on important science. And so we're trying to make a 0:18:52.850 --> 0:18:58.010 public repository of the world's ancient data. And we generate 0:18:58.050 --> 0:19:00.370 what more than fifty percent of the world's ancient human 0:19:00.410 --> 0:19:02.930 samples now, and in addition to that, we bring in 0:19:02.970 --> 0:19:05.250 all the external samples we can, and we're trying to 0:19:05.290 --> 0:19:09.210 eglomerate them into one giant portal that's available to anyone. 0:19:09.330 --> 0:19:12.690 The other voice you're hearing is David Reich. After I 0:19:12.770 --> 0:19:16.130 got reacquainted with Shop, Rich gave me a tour of 0:19:16.170 --> 0:19:18.250 their lab. There's not so much to see because you're 0:19:18.290 --> 0:19:20.410 not allowed to go into the most interesting places. We 0:19:20.970 --> 0:19:24.930 have two clean rooms, like any good lab. This one 0:19:25.050 --> 0:19:28.770 is a kind of machine for generating data. You could 0:19:28.810 --> 0:19:31.730 think of Reich and his team as early oil prospectors 0:19:32.050 --> 0:19:35.050 capering with glee by the side of Augusta. The stuff 0:19:35.130 --> 0:19:37.170 is coming out faster than they can deal with it. 0:19:37.810 --> 0:19:41.330 But like old time oil prospectors, they've had to work 0:19:41.410 --> 0:19:45.650 hard to make their fortunes of your problem. The technical 0:19:45.770 --> 0:19:49.130 challenge of this is that the proportion of the DNA 0:19:49.210 --> 0:19:52.410 that's present in these samples, that's the DNA you want, 0:19:52.410 --> 0:19:56.810 there's actually from the humans, is very small, isn't it. Yeah, 0:19:56.850 --> 0:20:00.890 it's a miracle there's any at all. So there's tens 0:20:00.970 --> 0:20:03.850 hundreds of thousands of times millions of times last DNA 0:20:04.010 --> 0:20:07.090 per Graham than there was when the person was alive. 0:20:07.210 --> 0:20:09.370 Why does the other DNA from a lot of the 0:20:09.450 --> 0:20:12.650 DNA that's there as usually mostly microbial from bacteria and 0:20:12.690 --> 0:20:16.290 fungi that colonized the bone after the individual died. But 0:20:16.610 --> 0:20:21.930 also it's a dead it's just not living bone anymore, 0:20:21.970 --> 0:20:25.570 and so the DNA is degraded, it's shattered, it's fragmented, 0:20:25.730 --> 0:20:30.130 it's been eaten over time. It's DNAs are an amazingly 0:20:30.170 --> 0:20:33.250 stable molecule, and it's really amazing that it's still around. 0:20:35.650 --> 0:20:39.810 What David Reich and his team have done is incredibly complicated, 0:20:40.090 --> 0:20:43.490 but it's actually a stack of small steps, and it's 0:20:43.530 --> 0:20:47.130 as much about practical problem solving as it is about 0:20:47.170 --> 0:20:49.690 some Eureka moment where a dude writes a lot of 0:20:49.690 --> 0:20:54.050 equations on a whiteboard. A lot of it is about industrialization, 0:20:54.770 --> 0:21:00.970 about taking time consuming methods and automating them. This has 0:21:01.090 --> 0:21:04.770 revolutionized how we think about the past, but it's a 0:21:04.810 --> 0:21:09.170 revolution that's snuck up on everyone. Bryke used to work 0:21:09.170 --> 0:21:11.890 in a lab run by a Swedish scientist called spun 0:21:11.970 --> 0:21:16.090 To Pearbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology 0:21:16.210 --> 0:21:19.810 in Leipzig. At Pearbo's lab, they were trying to extract 0:21:19.890 --> 0:21:23.330 DNA from a forty thousand year old human bone found 0:21:23.370 --> 0:21:26.090 in a cave in China. Even with a lot of 0:21:26.130 --> 0:21:29.850 computing power and all the armory of modern lab equipment, 0:21:29.930 --> 0:21:32.490 it was just too expensive to sequence the whole messy 0:21:32.530 --> 0:21:35.490 lot and search through it for the tiny traces of 0:21:35.610 --> 0:21:41.330 human DNA. How they solved this problem is I think 0:21:41.370 --> 0:21:45.690 incredibly cool. In the nineteen nineties, biologists had learned how 0:21:45.730 --> 0:21:49.050 to do something very smart how to use laser etching 0:21:49.130 --> 0:21:54.210 techniques invented for printing electronic circuits to attach millions of 0:21:54.330 --> 0:21:59.210 DNA fragments to silicon or glass wafers. David Wright describes 0:21:59.250 --> 0:22:03.410 it as an array of fish hooks, since DNA likes 0:22:03.450 --> 0:22:06.690 to bind to similar sequences. If you bait your hooks 0:22:06.770 --> 0:22:09.650 the right way, you can fish in a soup of 0:22:09.730 --> 0:22:13.890 ancient bone DNA for what you want. Reich saw the 0:22:13.970 --> 0:22:18.210 potential in this technique. He and his collaborator Inadine Roland 0:22:18.250 --> 0:22:21.730 adapted it so they could fish out not just one chromosome, 0:22:22.090 --> 0:22:25.570 but the whole gena in itself that would have been impressive. 0:22:26.250 --> 0:22:29.730 Then they hired a team of technicians to grind bones, 0:22:30.290 --> 0:22:34.170 and they began fishing using robots which could prepare ninety 0:22:34.210 --> 0:22:37.370 six samples at a time. And this is when the 0:22:37.490 --> 0:22:41.930 gusher of data began to flow. When you have a 0:22:41.930 --> 0:22:45.890 lot of samples, suddenly you can make comparisons and statistical 0:22:45.930 --> 0:22:49.650 inferences that simply weren't possible before. You can start to 0:22:49.690 --> 0:22:53.810 tell stories not just about one or two ancient individuals, 0:22:53.850 --> 0:22:57.970 but about whole populations. It's a completely different thing to 0:22:58.010 --> 0:23:00.010 be able to go back and time and actually with 0:23:00.090 --> 0:23:02.090 a time machine and see what happened, rather than to 0:23:02.170 --> 0:23:05.370 try to piece it together from the circumstantial evidence that's 0:23:05.450 --> 0:23:09.730 left behind. The Harvard team has made all kinds of discoveries, 0:23:09.730 --> 0:23:12.330 and they've had an impact on the way archaeologists think 0:23:12.330 --> 0:23:16.250 about prehistory in almost every part of the world. But 0:23:16.370 --> 0:23:19.850 for me, there's one huge insight, and it has to 0:23:19.850 --> 0:23:25.570 do with race, or more specifically Northern Europeans, you know, 0:23:26.610 --> 0:23:31.730 white people. Our idea of race is largely an invention 0:23:31.770 --> 0:23:35.650 of the eighteenth century. Since then, we've assumed that there 0:23:35.690 --> 0:23:40.610 are a few basic primal races African, Caucasian, and Asian 0:23:40.810 --> 0:23:44.050 and so on. People used to claim that these races 0:23:44.090 --> 0:23:47.890 had always been separate, even that they were separate species. 0:23:48.530 --> 0:23:51.290 And lately the story has been that after some kind 0:23:51.330 --> 0:23:54.890 of fuzzy out of Africa, business people settled in various 0:23:54.930 --> 0:23:58.890 parts of the world, separated out and gradually became different 0:23:58.970 --> 0:24:02.770 as they adapted to their various environments. Only when these 0:24:02.810 --> 0:24:05.690 so called pure races met and mixed did you get 0:24:05.890 --> 0:24:11.490 People like me are purity fetishists all over the world. 0:24:11.850 --> 0:24:15.210 I speak as the descendant of high caste Hindu men 0:24:15.450 --> 0:24:18.850 who wouldn't touch anyone of a lower caste, or even 0:24:18.890 --> 0:24:21.770 travel by sea in case they were polluted by what 0:24:21.810 --> 0:24:25.450 they called the black water. But if you're of Northern 0:24:25.490 --> 0:24:29.290 European descent and secretly like to think of yourself as 0:24:29.370 --> 0:24:33.050 a pure area or some such thing, then David Reich 0:24:33.250 --> 0:24:36.530 and Shotmannik and the rest of the ancient genetics community 0:24:36.770 --> 0:24:39.970 would like a word with you. They recently dropped a 0:24:39.970 --> 0:24:44.410 bombshell in a paper innocuously titled Genomic Insights into the 0:24:44.490 --> 0:24:48.050 Origin of Farming in the Ancient Near East. We computed 0:24:48.170 --> 0:24:54.050 squared allele frequency differentiation between all pairs of ancient West Eurasians. 0:24:54.050 --> 0:24:57.610 What this paper is saying is that around ten thousand 0:24:57.690 --> 0:25:02.130 years ago, there were four different populations in Europe, and 0:25:02.250 --> 0:25:06.050 that these four populations were as different from each other 0:25:06.690 --> 0:25:10.410 as modern Europeans are from modern China. Knees cover bott 0:25:10.410 --> 0:25:12.730 of the value of point zero nine through point one 0:25:12.810 --> 0:25:16.450 three seen between present day Western So just by eyeballing people, 0:25:16.770 --> 0:25:20.130 you'd be able to identify the four different groups. You'd 0:25:20.130 --> 0:25:24.610 probably think of them as races. You'd see hunter gatherers 0:25:24.650 --> 0:25:28.770 with dark skin and blue eyes. You'd see farmers with 0:25:28.890 --> 0:25:31.930 light skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. And then there 0:25:31.930 --> 0:25:36.650 were other different dark skinned farmers. You'd also see migrants 0:25:36.730 --> 0:25:40.810 from far to the east with startling blonde hair. Then 0:25:41.650 --> 0:25:46.410 over time these populations mixed, and by the Bronze Age 0:25:46.450 --> 0:25:52.010 those four races had disappeared. Western Europeans began to look 0:25:52.050 --> 0:25:57.850 like they do today. We have a huge racial vocabulary 0:25:57.930 --> 0:26:00.730 for mixed people, mostly dating to the era of the 0:26:00.730 --> 0:26:08.690 Atlantic slave trade. Mestizo, Mulato, mity, half caste, creole, Octuran, 0:26:09.170 --> 0:26:14.210 drew all words describing the blending of two ingredients in 0:26:14.290 --> 0:26:20.810 some particular proportion, pure white and something else. The phrase 0:26:21.010 --> 0:26:24.450 older people used for me when I was growing up 0:26:24.650 --> 0:26:29.010 was a touch of the tar brush. What David Reich's 0:26:29.010 --> 0:26:32.330 research tells us is that the people we colloquially call 0:26:32.530 --> 0:26:38.010 white are not quote unquote pure. They're a hybrid population 0:26:38.450 --> 0:26:41.690 that didn't exist a few thousand years ago. I'll say 0:26:41.770 --> 0:26:46.330 that again, white people didn't exist a few thousand years ago. 0:26:46.970 --> 0:26:50.530 Calling yourself white isn't a statement about your basic biology. 0:26:51.410 --> 0:26:55.650 It's a statement about politics. Perhaps you're listening to this 0:26:55.770 --> 0:27:00.010 and you're not white. Perhaps you're thinking, ha ha. White 0:27:00.090 --> 0:27:02.890 people are a new invention. I, on the other hand, 0:27:02.970 --> 0:27:05.570 come from an ancient folk whose wisdom gave us the 0:27:05.610 --> 0:27:10.850 Pyramids or the Rigvada or whatever. No. No, So I 0:27:10.850 --> 0:27:14.050 think there's an idea that we have that intuitively, that 0:27:14.090 --> 0:27:16.730 we learned from our childhood, because our cultural memory is 0:27:16.770 --> 0:27:20.490 actually very shallow, that the population structure we see around 0:27:20.570 --> 0:27:24.250 us today is somehow a reflection of something that's very agehold, 0:27:24.330 --> 0:27:27.690 that goes back not just thousands, but maybe tens of thousands, 0:27:27.730 --> 0:27:31.850 or even in some people's minds, even longer years, reflecting 0:27:31.890 --> 0:27:36.810 the population structure we see around us today, maybe even 0:27:36.850 --> 0:27:58.490