Authors: Ramona Koval
By this stage I'd long accepted that my experiments with Alan's DNA had not been conclusive: I would not be able scientifically to confirm my relationship to Max. But ten years had passed since I sent off my DNA sample, and it was now possible to send another sample of cheek scrapings to a laboratory in the USA running the Genographic Project. Samples from people from all over the world were being collected and analysed for both Y chromosomal geographic movements (the Y chromosome is handed intact from father to son through all generations) and those carried on mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells, handed down from mothers to both men and women.
While I was unsure about who my father was, I was certain about my mother. And I was entranced by the idea that whatever genes were inside the mitochondria of my Ur-mother were in every cell of mine, too. Even more exciting was the discovery that geneticists could now trace the mitochondrial genes to particular geographic regions and communities, and offer a paleoanthropological theory about the journeys that had been undertaken by human populations with those particular markers, all the way back to the groups of
Homo sapiens
who ventured out of Africa between sixty thousand and 125,000 years ago.
Granted, it was at quite a remove from my here-and-now, but it was consoling to imagine the certainty of the connection. My mitochondrial DNA was given to me by my mother and to her by hers, as far back as I could visualise. And if the genes could tell me a story of travel and settlement, it would be more than the search for my father had revealed.
Some months later, when the results of the test came back, I learned that my mitochondrial DNA was derived from, led directly to, a woman whom scientists had named Katrine (or K), one of seven âmitochondrial Eves' described by Bryan Sykes in his book
The Seven Daughters of Eve
.
Sykes imagined that K, the woman I was connected to by an unbroken chain of female relatives, would have been on a great plain now covered by the North Adriatic Sea, around fifteen to twenty-five thousand years ago. It wasn't hard to imagine her descendants following bands of game animals eastwards for twenty thousand years and ending up as Khazars at the end of the first millennium CE. I looked at the map, and traced her journeys and those of her descendants.
I scoured the literature for anything I could find about this K group, and to my surprise I discovered I had another, more recent relative to meet. And a male relative, at that. On the direct line of mitochondrial genetics from K to me was Ãtzi the Iceman.
Ãtzi was the body, now rather withered and desiccated, that two German climbers found frozen and half-covered in ice in September 1991 as they descended the Fineilspitze in the Ãtztal Alps, near the ItalianâAustrian border. He was well preserved but clearly had been there for a while, judging by his clothing and equipment. Subsequently he was dated as being between five thousand and 5,350 years old. Because his body had been deep-frozen so long, it was possible not only for his DNA to be recovered but also for paleo-forensic experts to work out all kinds of things about him, by analysing what he was carrying when he died and the state of his body.
I found pages devoted to Ãtzi on the website of the museum in Bolzano, northern Italy, where he is now housed. As I stared at his creepy form I found myself looking for traces of myself in his hair and what was left of the shape of his face. How bizarre to be combing this corpse for evidence of connectionâbut he was a long-lost relative, and I was obsessed with finding myself a branch, any branch, of a family tree to perch upon.
I was not alone here. A large percentage of people with the K connection are Ashkenazi Jews: 1.7 million Jews alive today share the same genetic fingerprint. Brushing the 1,699,999 others aside, I read what I could about my old cousin Ãtzi. Years of experts examining his body have given us a marvellous reconstruction of his story and especially the last day or so of his life.
For a Neolithic man forty-six years was elderly, and Ãtzi was shortish at 152 centimetres tall. He had broken a couple of ribs in the past; he had arthritis, some fleas and intestinal whipworm; and he had cuts on his hands and torso. But what he would have been most bothered by on his last day was the arrowhead deep in his shoulder which, in addition to a head injury, caused his death.
Analysis of isotopes and enamel in Ãtzi's teeth and bones told of his growing up in the Eisack Valley and spending his adult life further west. The day before he died, he swallowed some pollen from around the Schnals Valley, and then had another meal which contained pollen from a lower region. His last meal, eaten three hours before he died, was high up again, near a sub-alpine forest.
He was wearing three layers of skins and grasses, a belt holding up his loincloth and leggings, a goatskin jacket, and a bearskin hat. The stitching on these items of clothing was carefully tailored; his shoes were made of skins of calf, deer and bear, and lined with grass. He had with him a large copper axe with a handle of yew wood; a longbow staff and arrows; a dagger and a sheath; a bark container for charcoal; and a belt with flints, tinder, and a tool for working on the arrows and unfinished longbow. He was also carrying a string net, perhaps for trapping birds.
Like Max, he was tattooed. He had fifty-two markings at various points on his body, including a cross on the inside of his left knee, and numerous parallel lines above his kidneys and across his ankles. They were not produced with needles but by rubbing charcoal into fine skin incisions. There was speculation about these being found at points of wear and tear on his body, and possibly where medications may have been applied or at acupuncture points. But there they were, more mysterious and less shocking than Max's marking, and on a man to whom I could claim to trace a definite line of descent.
Ãtzi might have been a herdsman driving sheep and goats around his valley, well prepared for hunting and gathering some of his food, repairing his tools (his damaged arrow shaft) and clothing, and spending days away, making campfires at night. But in his last few days he'd been on the run, descending from up high, possibly to his settlement, then leaving again to scale the mountain to a much higher level. Wounds on his hands and head tell of a fight just before his death. His pursuers must have caught up with him, the arrow was shotâand now I could see it behind an unhealed wound, in an X-ray sitting on my computer screen.
Analysis of Ãtzi's clothing, broken arrowheads and knife revealed the blood of four people: two different individuals on his arrow, a third on his knife blade and, on the left side of his jacket, the fourth. One theory is that he shot two people with his arrowhead and carried the wounded body of another on his shoulder. A rival theory suggests that he was the object of a ritual sacrifice: otherwise, why had he been left with such a valuable axe? Here he was on my screen, an accident of time and weather and nature and luck, having preserved his last few days in the vessel of his body; and here I was, nearly five and a half thousand years after his death, trying to piece together his story and relate it to my own.
A few years later the Genographic Project was offering an even more detailed analysis. I sent them another sample. After waiting a few months I got the result. I could claim an identification as a member of the subclade K1a1b1a. I shared this subclade with a fifth of other Ashkenazim, seldom with other populations, although it was present in some Romani groups. Was I now a gypsy, too? Ãtzi and I shared the mitochondrial marker 10978G, in common with everyone in the K1a1b1a subclade.
I read in the report's accompanying notes that âmost members of this group stem from a group of individuals who moved northward out of the Near East. These women crossed the rugged Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia, and moved on to the steppes of the Black Sea.' How did they do it? Who did they travel with, and what did they take with them? The trips would have taken many generations, after establishing a camp and settling into an area, hunting it out and moving on. I could be as sure of my connection with them as I was with Mama, the mitochondrial DNA link unbroken.
Following this line of thought, I began to think that it might not matter who my father was. I could imagine myself fifty thousand years back, connected to women who lived around the Mediterranean and whose offspring found their way up to the Volga region, through what became Persia and southern Russia. Or perhaps they were already settled there and met a Jewish trader from the south, coming up through Turkey with an eye on the Silk Road, the geography of multiple genetic mixing over centuries. I have no idea when any of them might have set off.
The Ur-mothers were deep in the past, yet it seemed to be a solid connection to think about
.
Pinning down exactly what a feeling of connection meant was tricky. When I met Australians overseas, I felt connected by shared language and some shared aspects of culture. Provided they were not too different from me, I could feel they understood me a little, at least. But what about a Romanian woman who had the same subclade connection to the foremothers through mitochondrial DNA: was there more to connect me with her than with a random Englishwoman who shared my language and perhaps my cultural references? This business of identity was fraught with both confusions and delicious possibilities.
The results in the report reflected not just the mitochondrial DNA from my K1a1b1a line, but the rest of the DNA in my cell nucleus, too. I learned that my genes derived from populations around the Mediterranean (fifty-seven per cent), Southwest Asia (twenty-three), Northern European (seventeen) and Sub-Saharan Africa (two).
The largest component was the signal from the Neolithic populations expanding outwards from the Middle East about eight thousand years ago from the western part of the Fertile Crescent. The next component was picked up when ancestors moved from the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent, as Europeans mixed with those from Southwest Asia. The smallish seventeen per cent Northern European fraction is most likely from the earliest hunter-gatherers of Europe, who were making a late transition to agriculture. The two per cent Sub-Saharan African fraction was found mostly in Bantu speakers, but small numbers are found in Tunisian and Egyptian populations. Perhaps the strangest results of all were the distribution of my hominid genes: 1.8 per cent Neanderthal, 3.8 Denisovan, the rest
Homo sapiens
.
I learned that my gene distribution was most like a reference population of current-day Bulgarians, followed by a population of current-day Lebanese. This, I felt, accorded with what I'd discovered so farâmy lineage derived from a group of Middle Eastern Jews who travelled across Turkey and into the Caucasus and the south of Russia, mixing a bit with the indigenous women there, thus picking up my K1a1b1a mitochondrial DNA from my mitochondrial mothers, and forming the cultural and religious foundations of the Ashkenazi population that I trace my more recent family history from.
I thought about how tanned I could get in summers past, a nod to my mostly Mediterranean skin. And about my two per cent Sub-Saharan African genes, and whether my curls were from there. Since Max and Alan and their families were all from the same small region of Eastern Europe as the rest of my family, we were all as related to each other as any second or third cousins could be.
I was relieved to have so few Neanderthal genes, as some people have up to three per cent, although I was worried that this was a speciesist attitude of which I should not be proud. I didn't find the reconstructions of their appearance from skeletal remains particularly attractive, but evidence from Neanderthal burials suggests that they may have been sympathetic beings who cared for their injured confreres, and buried their dead with ritual and flowers. They seemed simple, and sweet. I reproached myself. Dad's voice came back to me:
You can pick your friends but you can't pick your relatives!
And wasn't I trying to do just that, engaged in a giant act of brushing aside those relatives with whom I could not make a connection and searching for people who might stand in their place? As fascinating as I found the story of Ãtzi and the last days of his life, I knew that the five thousand years since his death had sanitised the story for me and made it hard to feel genuinely connected to him, despite our common genes which I carried in every one of my cells.
My desire to fill out Max's story took me back to a time which was much better documented, but which also contained the horror and fetid smell of recent events. I was drawn, despite my misgivings, to immerse myself in it once again.
I NEEDED a thread to follow through the labyrinth of Max's Auschwitz story. All I knew of my quarry was the tattooed number on Max's arm: 76200. I'd been searching the archives for testimonies of men who were in the same âtransport' from the ghetto in MÅawa to Auschwitz. I'd found Leon Kruger, whose number was 76370; Rubin Soldaner, 76619; and several others, all numbered in alphabetical order. Order was everything:
Alles in Ordnung
.
Kruger made a point that struck me. He said that after he'd spent some time in the camp, his number showed that he was âan old-timer'. It was a miracle to live in Auschwitz for a day, much less a month or a year. Even German soldiers viewed such an old number with something like respect. The man who had this number inked on his arm must be tough, strong and lucky. So Max was tough, strong and lucky, too.
Rubin Soldaner was one of Max's fellow witnesses in the Paulikat trial, but I might have missed his testimony had I been looking for his name in the Yunis memoir of MÅawa, where he was referred to as Reuven Soldanar. I was constantly being led off track by careless or phonetic spellings, and changes of names and identities. Soldaner emerged as I searched for mentions of tattoo numbers I had arbitrarily chosen to be between 76000 and 77000. I was unnerved to be using the Nazi classificatory system for my research, but what else could I do?