The Ancestry Traveller project is my second meeting with high-tech sequencing and reading genetic information. In my synthetic motherhood project, I have been co-working with a forensic lab to predict the future look of my potential offspring. Ancestry testing allows us to do something opposite, to read the past (at least to a certain extent).
It's a fascinating creative opportunity being one of the 12 artists involved in the scientific and artistic aspects of the Ancestry Traveller workshops produced by the i3S team and Luisa Pereira, a Population Geneticist and the group leader on Genetic Diversity at the University of Porto.
In the last decades, the idea of “ancestry” has become one of the most important and popular notions in human population genetics. On this notion stands genetics perspectives on the origins and history of contemporary living populations. However, ancestry has several meanings and outside of genetics, the idea commonly informs practices related to identity, kinship and family history.
Growing up, I heard stories about my great-grandfathers on my father’s side who were convicts and political exiles from Macau and were exiled to Timor-Leste during the time of the Portuguese Colony. On the other hand, I discovered that my maternal grandfather’s ancestors were from Goa, India. Both sides of my family speak various languages, including Portuguese, Tetum, Indonesian, Hakka, and other Timorese dialects, which sparked my curiosity about my ancestral heritage.
Ancestry has become, in the last decades, a central concept in human population genetics. On this notion stands genetic perspectives about the origins and history of contemporary living populations. However, ancestry has several meanings and outside of genetics, the idea commonly informs practices related to identity, kinship, and family history.
Indigenous communities are the foundation of any scientific research investigating the cultural and biological history of human populations. Interactions with indigenous communities, with their agreement, enable researchers to collect data and indispensable knowledge to guarantee the long-term success of a project.
Human population genetics seeks to learn about modern humans’ genetic diversity and molecular evolution. The first step of any study is a good sampling to get the accurate landscape of the population. Within the project of Magalhães' voyage, this was a real challenge for the team in light of the pandemic.
Ancestry testing brings together interests in family history and genetics, a trend that is here to stay. But few people understand how ancestry testing works. In this article, we explain how a small sample of saliva can give us immense information about an individual's genetic history and how the size of databases can change details about our ancestry. Nevertheless, genetics is only a small piece of the puzzle of who we are.
It is extremely rare that a call for research projects allows us to apply our expertise in addressing a global symbolic historical moment: the circumnavigation by Fernão Magalhães’s crew. For human population geneticists, that 500-year-old expedition was amazing in enabling the first contact between so many diverse human populations. And that was the mote we followed to launch our project.
