Britain today is a real melting pot.
We have people from many different locations,
many different cultures, many different ethnic groups.
So where do they all come from?
We invited six well-known friends of the museum to have their DNA tested.
We all ask ourselves these questions from time to time.
Who am I? Where do I come from?
How did I get here?
I was pretty convinced that my heritage came from Africa,
but my mother is fairly fair skinned,
so I had always assumed that she had some European blood in her.
I don't know an awful lot about my family history.
I only know going back about three or four generations I think.
Whenever anyone has ever asked me, you know, where do you come from ethnically,
it's always been a very long answer.
Everybody wants to be able to
to look into their past and to see where we might have come from.
It connects you with a wider world.
We've all got a history contained in our DNA.
So scientists can look at thousands of markers
and track our evolutionary history.
And in particular, there are two lineages that can be looked at,
a maternal one from mothers to children
and a paternal one from fathers to sons.
Unless you're looking at the whole genetic code
you obviously haven't got the complete story.
But by looking at the specific lineages,
it's possible to reconstruct some of these journeys
that ancestors took in the distant past.
Everyone today descends from ancestral populations that once lived in Africa.
I'm quite stunned that it's possible to go back so far.
It's almost biblical in its field.
I mean, not quite back to somebody called Adam and Eve,
but sort of to a Garden of Eden.
About 60,000 years ago,
a small group of modern humans moved out of Africa and into Western Asia.
We don't know why they did that.
Maybe they were just following their food.
Maybe they were looking for new places to live.
Perhaps the group that came out of Africa was just a few hundred people,
perhaps a thousand people.
So it's a relatively small number of people
that are the ancestors to all of those non-African populations.
The thought of being in the world at that time
is just incredibly exciting.
Yes, it would have been perilous, it would have been dangerous,
yet there's a sense of this opportunity,
discovery that would have driven them on.
Not all modern humans left Africa.
Many of them stayed behind,
and then they dispersed and migrated within Africa.
What the maps showed was that life began in East Africa,
and my parents come from West Africa
and it showed a sort of gradual migration,
not very far at all, from East Africa to West Africa.
But the fact that it seems that I am 100% African makes me very proud.
Around 55,000 years ago,
within the population that had left Africa,
there was a major split in one of these maternal lineages,
one that produced two main divisions.
And one group largely stayed in Western Asia
and eventually migrated also into Europe.
The other group headed eastwards towards the Far East.
On my paternal side, it's a pretty straightforward story, really.
They end up eventually in southern China, and that's what I would have expected.
That's why I know of that history.
On the maternal side,
it's a slightly more complicated story it appears,
with them sweeping out and getting out as far as the Americas
and Australasia in the end.
The modern humans that moved out of Africa and into Western Asia
moved into an area where the Neanderthals were living, their evolutionary cousins.
They must have met, and there was some interbreeding between them.
And obviously it may not have been as pleasant as all that the interbreeding,
but you would like to think of it as a nice, pleasant coming together.
It was probably a bit grimmer than that.
But the idea that poor old Neanderthals were pushed to one side,
that they live on a bit in us and I'm glad there's at least
1.8% of them in me.
I wasn't aware that I'd have any Neanderthal in me,
although probably some of my friends and family would disagree.
I came out as quite Neanderthal.
I was quite surprised!
Dad said that my mum is a bit short and stocky,
so he imagines that the Neanderthal side of the family
is definitely hers.
The modern humans that remained in Africa don't show traces of Neanderthals
in their DNA.
Their ancestors never interbred with Neanderthals.
So there's no Neanderthal DNA there, except where there had been later
back migrations into Africa.
As it turned out, I had no Neanderthal ancestry at all.
Now, actually, with a retro spectroscope,
I think it would have been nice to have a bit.
At least 40,000 years ago, modern humans started to enter Europe from Western Asia.
Some of these groups came in very early as hunter gatherers and stayed there.
Other groups came much later with the spread of farming.
My maternal line are relatively late arrivals in Britain or Europe,
maybe only a few thousand years ago,
coming with the spread of agriculture up through Europe.
Whereas my father's line seems to have been here a bit earlier,
going up north towards Scandinavia.
So I like to feel that I look a bit like, I don't want to say I look like a Viking,
but look like a Scandinavian Germanic kind of look there
and I like the cold.
So maybe that's my father's line
I can follow back there.
My ancestors were the last to settle down.
So they were the most nomadic of those people.
And so I feel this affinity with a kind of people
who were constantly looking what's around the next bend,
what's over the next hill.
And I feel very much a connection with that.
If we look at the specific maternal
and paternal lineages, we can reconstruct specific migrations.
But of course we've got a wider genome, our whole genetic code.
And if we look at that, we get a much wider view of people's ancestry.
We can look at a pattern of their DNA makeup
and compare it with the pattern of populations all around the world.
The most surprising thing for me, is this 2% Native American,
and I can't begin to see where that might have come from.
Except my mother lived in coastal Wales and of course being near a maritime port
you have a huge influx of lots and lots of different people
and I sort of think maybe that might have changed things a little.
My closest marker is Danish,
which was a big surprise, you know, I mean, there was a Danish king after all.
in the 11th century.
So I mean, I might be of royal blood,
Royal Danish Viking blood, that would suit me.
Saying you're a Mauritian is like saying you're a Londoner really.
There is no ethnic basis for that population.
They're an island of people and that island,
because it was on the naval trade routes I guess,
has variously been taken over and run by pretty much every colonial power in history.
I guess that's what you're seeing in my genome, that diversity.
More recent migrations don't figure in the results.
But as techniques evolve, more detail will emerge about the paths taken
by both our ancient and our more recent relatives.
We're going to see some major advances in the next few years.
There's some really exciting science that's just happening right now.
We're living in a time where mass migration
is much more prevalent because of the technology we have.
And so the genomes in the future will be much more interesting.
Who knows what we're going to know in 10 years?
In 50 years? In 100 years? It might be a very, very different picture.
We're all mingled.
We've all, you know, been part of this
this small group of hominids at one point.
It shows, I suppose, a unity of the human population.
We are generally all part of one, big, I was going to say big happy family,
but we're not always happy, but one big family
that has found different places in the world to live in.