I’ve spent most of my professional life thinking about the future, but lately it’s the past that’s been on my mind—specifically, my own family tree. I know next to nothing about my ancestors. Both my mother’s family and my father’s came to the United States as part of that great migration of European Jews to the New World that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: my father’s family, like Isaac Asimov’s, originated in Russia, and my mother’s in a part of Poland that was then under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither of those countries kept very careful genealogical records of Jews, who were not regarded as full citizens, and many of such sketchy records as did exist were destroyed in World War II.

So what little information I have about my ancestors goes back no farther than my grandparents’ generation—people born in the 1870s and 1880s. Three of my grandparents—my father’s mother and both of my mother’s parents—lived on into my adulthood. But my father’s father died before I was born, and I didn’t even know his first name until a couple of years ago, when I found it among my late father’s papers while searching for my own birth certificate. Beyond that all is darkness.

Last week, spurred by some sudden genealogical curiosity, I phoned my only living relative of a previous generation—my mother’s younger sister, who is now eighty-four years old—and asked her about the names of her grandparents. She turned out to have no information about her father’s side of the family, since they all stayed in Europe except for her father, my grandfather. But she was, at least, able to tell me the names of her maternal grandparents and a little bit about them. (They both died in the early 1930s, before I was born.)

That’s probably about as far as my researches into the past are going to go—the Silverberg side of my ancestry will remain a mystery except for my paternal grandmother’s first name, and I will know a tiny bit more, but not much, about my mother’s family. Other Americans, of course, those who are descended from Western European ancestors, particularly English ones, have access to much more information. My wife Karen’s stepmother, for instance, is a May-flower descendant and a Daughter of the American Revolution; she still lives in a house that has been in her family’s possession for two hundred years. On the other hand, her second husband, Karen’s father, was one of those Jews brought from Europe to the New World as children who never even knew the names of their own grandparents.

Then there is my friend Hilary Benford, the sister-in-law of science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, who has compiled a Benford family tree going back to the seventeenth century. Greg and his twin brother Jim are descended from British settlers of the American South, and so their family history has been relatively easy to trace. I have a printout of it on my desk. You will be interested to know, I hope, that the ancestors of the author of the Galactic Center novels include such people as America Jefferson Benford, Alabama Nelson, Robert E. Lee Nelson, Philpott Marquis Karner, Tatum Shalisa Benford, Meantha Matilda Wabbington, Hassell Nimrod Callaway, Druid Jones, and Crulius J. Styron. (Hilary insists that she has not made any of these names up, and I suppose I must believe her. But, really—Crulius J. Styron?)

I feel vaguely envious of the Benford ancestral list, which fills seven pages. (Opal Minnie May Benford! Caledonia Styron! Cicero Amos Nelson!) But actually it’s a pretty minor deal compared with that of the British royal family, which goes back to William the Conqueror and onward into the past to the first Dukes of Normandy. There is many a twist and turn in that genealogy, naturally—the present crop of royals is descended from a German branch of the family, and before them came the Stuarts, a bunch of Scots, and their cousins the Tudors who ruled before them were Welsh, etc., etc. Still, William’s blood flowed in them all. And even the British line is small potatoes next to that of the reigning dynasty of Japan, which claims descent from the prehistoric sun-goddess Amaterasu. Since even the Japanese concede that Amaterasu is a mythical figure, the claim to an unbroken line of descent may be a bit tenuous, but I, with my pitiful three and a half generations of genealogical information, am certainly in no position to challenge it.

Now, though, comes an opportunity for all of us, not just the British and Japanese royals, or the Benfords and genealogically impoverished people like me, to trace our ancestries clear back to paleolithic times. Imagine it—a family tree stretching fifty thousand years or more into the past! (What if I discover that I’m a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth? What if the Queen locates a Neanderthal branch of the Plantagenet line? What were the first names of the Cro-Magnon Benfords? Fun and surprises for us all.)

The benefactors who hope to create this fount of information for us are of impeccable lineage themselves: nobody less than the National Geographic Society and the IBM Corporation. The project will be aided by such institutions as the Laboratory of Human Population Genetics in Moscow, the Center for Excellence in Genomic Sciences in India, and the Center for Genome Information at the University of Cincinnati. Together, these groups will seek to assemble, over the next five years, a gigantic genetic database that will use thousands of DNA samples to track the routes of ancient migratory peoples out of the ancestral human home in East Africa and onward to Europe, Asia, and eventually the Alabama of the Benfords and the New York of the Silverbergs and Asimovs.

The plan is to collect one hundred thousand blood samples from indigenous peoples around the world for genetic analysis. (“Indigenous peoples” are what the National Geographic Magazine used to call “natives.” “Indigenous” means “native to,” but we can’t call them “natives” any more, just “indigenous peoples,” through the same mystifying semantic process of political correctness that makes “colored person” improper and “person of color” acceptable.) The DNA information from this database will, it is hoped, provide a picture of early human migration routes throughout the world

How do you and I and the Benfords enter into this? Well, for $99.95 any of us can obtain a DNA kit from the National Geographic—two swabs and a pair of plastic vials. You scrape a few cells from the inner wall of your cheek and mail them in, and the researchers will locate your position on the ancestral human family tree that is now under construction out of the samples being taken from the indigenous peoples. The money paid for these kits will go to finance the indigenous-population research (and, we are assured, a portion will be set aside for a fund that will help to preserve their cultures).

Some migratory paths have already been mapped. About fifty thousand years ago, men with the Y chromosome marker known as M168 (women do not have Y chromosomes) headed north out of East Africa. Some fifty centuries later these wanderers generated the M89 mutation while living in Arabia. That genetic marker still can be traced via Central Asia into Europe, and is found in many modern men of European descent.

The new human-genome project hopes to uncover many more such migratory-route markers, and thereby to determine such things as the original home of the Chinese people or the location of the homeland of the Indo-European language from which most languages spoken in Europe, the Americas, and much of Asia are derived. Another possibility would be tracking the genetic path of the invading armies of Alexander the Great that swept through Persia, Afghanistan, and India twenty-four hundred years ago. Certain villages of fair-skinned people in northwestern India claim to be descended from Alexander’s troops, but are they? DNA evidence may answer that question.

Naturally, this being the furiously politicized twenty-first century, no sooner was the project announced than it came under attack. Certain indigenous peoples believe that they have always lived in their present homelands, a fact that might not be borne out by DNA analysis. “We already know our history,” said the leaders of one Northwest American Indian tribe in 1996, when an awkwardly non-Indian ancient human skeleton turned up near their reservation and scientists called for study of it. “It is passed on to us through our elders and through our religious practices. If this individual is truly over nine thousand years old, that only substantiates the belief that he is Native American. From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time.” Plainly they won’t be interested in cooperating with a project that might provide them with historical information about themselves that differs from their own tribal lore.

Certain self-styled advocates for indigenous folk also have assailed the enterprise, calling it a “vampire project” because it will extract valuable information from the blood of endangered tribes while offering nothing in return. People concerned with privacy issues are worried about having the information put to sinister commercial uses. Some anthropologists say that searching for genetic differences among populations is tantamount to racism. (Should we deny the existence of genetic differences between populations? Is it purely a matter of miraculous providence that so many tall blond people are indigenous to Scandinavia and so few to China?) And a few scientists are complaining that the samples collected will not be made available to every researcher who wants access to them, only to those who are part of the project.

Despite those arguments, I think much that is of great interest and importance can come from this work. I won’t learn the names of my great-great-grandparents, but perhaps we’ll find out at last whether Homo sapiens interbred with the Neanderthals, or whether European and Polynesian seamen reached the Americas in early prehistoric times, or where the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia came from.

On the other hand, I—who have managed to get along pretty well in life with scarcely a clue to my family history—wonder whether the chief outcome of the project may simply be a loud scientific and political uproar. I think I’ll leave the final word here to that grand sage of science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, who had this to say in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long: “This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.”

 

CORRECTION:

 

In a column on serialized novels that appeared in Asimov’s October-November 2005 issue, I erred when I said that “Asimov’s has serialized just three novels in its entire history—one by William Gibson, one by Michael Swanwick, one by Robert Silverberg.” In fact six serials have been published here—a second one by Michael Swanwick, a two-part serial by Frederik Pohl, and Harlan Ellison's I Robot, a novel in screenplay form.