At last came the DNA analysis. He had rubbed the inside of my cheek with some cotton pads and had sent them for analysis. I paid just over 80 euros (prices keep going down) and waited three weeks. A map of Europe, Africa and Asia arrived and a burst of supposed origins: Iberians, the first inhabitants of the Peninsula; Celts from Scotland, Ireland or Wales; there were also influences from Italy and Greece, and Ashkenazi genetic material, coming from central and eastern Europe: Austria, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania. Finally, part of the DNA came from North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. DNA analysis can go even further and determine the hominid and the region of Africa it came from, but I considered that matter less interesting than the more recent history of my genes and left that analysis for another day.
Deciding to examine one’s DNA for ancestry does not seem to require thoughtless audacity. However, many fear doing it and, if they finally ventured into it, they doubt that they would dare to make the results public. We live in a world where even your genes can be used against you, but claiming ignorance out of fear of the truth has never helped much. For those who look Caucasian (Japanese and Indians, for example, have other concerns), the fear is based on having non-“white” genes. A concern without historical justification, since there is an abundance of evidence of the emptiness of the white man’s soul, whose interaction with other races often showed the violent reverse of a civilizing mission, which reached genocidal voracity. And because, I don’t mind emphasizing the obvious, the origin is in Africa. Something that is known but not assumed.
The results of my DNA analysis are diverse, although not as diverse as they appear at first glance, and they confirm that I contain multitudes (the expression is Whitman’s). That diversity, more common than purity, should be a vaccine against racism, but it is not always the case. In America, white supremacists examine their DNA like asking a magic mirror: “Who is purer than me?” They want to confirm that they are Aryan or of strictly European origin; and when they receive results similar to mine, they deny them like someone who abjures an exorcism. Frequent excuses are the contamination of the sample with other DNA and the misrepresentation of the results by the “omnipotent Jews”, their “archenemies”. They will never accept that, given the minimal genetic variation among humans (0.1 percent), the biological meaning of the word race is questionable.
The DNA also emphatically shows how the hallmarks of the ancestors who populated the Peninsula over the centuries have been superimposed like the geological strata of a mountain, where each band represents a different race and area of Europe or Africa. . However, although the analyzes came with a list of countries, the results could be explained by invoking only one: Spain. One more example of how the zip code complements the genetic code.
In this sense, the origin of the Iberian genes, the large percentage of the DNA (66.3 percent), needs no further explanation: it is Spanish. The explanation of the Celtic genes (10.8 percent) may be found in Asturias, without having to resort to the United Kingdom or Ireland, whose citizens could be genetically descended from the inhabitants of our Peninsula and not the other way around. The Italian genes (10.6 percent) may come from admixture that occurred on the Peninsula when we were a province of Caesar’s Empire (although my second surname (Margareto) suggests my maternal family may have immigrated from Italy). The Greek genes (5.7 percent) would come from the navigators who founded Ampurias or Mainake. There was little surprise with Africa, because the percentage (1 percent) is less than the Spanish average, which is around 10 percent. These genes could have been integrated during the 8th to 16th centuries, or with a greater probability later, because the mixing of the North with the South was more intense after the end of the war. Ashkenazi genes (5.6 percent) may have joined the others during the 13th or 14th century. It is curious that these genes do not have a Sephardic origin, the majority group of peninsular Jews… In any case, the predominance of the Celtiberian (77.1 percent) confirms the studies that indicate that the civilizations that arrived in Spain after they did not contribute much genetically, despite the great cultural impact.
Just like telescopes, which look into the past of the Universe, a look at the genome reviews the history of Spain. But there is more. Steinbeck said, in “Of Mice and Men”, that “perhaps in this cursed world we all live in fear of our neighbor”. Well, DNA testing, at a fundamental level, makes us look at others with less fear.