ANCESTORS

Exploring our complex genetic and cultural heritage.

Zalloua, a Lebanese-born population geneticist, uses the ancient crossroads of the Levant as his touchstone, demonstrating not only how the world’s arbitrary geographical divisions tell only a small part of humanity’s origin story, but how the very concept of East versus West is equally artificial and misguided. “Do not look for DNA to tell you who you really are and where you belong. It is a fallacy!” says Zalloua, a scholar at Khalifa University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Zalloua skewers the commercial fad of genetic ancestry testing as grossly oversimplified, its purveyors using such terms as “origin,” “ethnicity,” “identity,” “heritage,” and “race” interchangeably, “with little or no attention given to the complexities and dynamics that underlie these concepts.” Writing with economy and authority, Zalloua believes this disregards the vastly more important cultural attributes that constitute the core of someone’s heritage. An identity is a “basket of memories and collectibles” continually added to and carried wherever one goes, an ever-evolving concept shaped by events, exposure, and interactions. There are no tests that can define “origin.” The author argues that while we cannot ignore genetics, we must look beyond it to the forces of migration and the intermingling of cultures, among other factors at play. His intermittent forays into detailed genetic markers and terminology can get a bit heavy going for the layperson, but Zalloua can also be profoundly personal, writing with verve and feeling, even as he provides capsule histories of African and eastern Mediterranean communities and startling evidence that upends many of the most treasured assumptions about our cultural identities.

A survey of population studies that is insightful, persuasive, and unfailingly humane.