Entire World on a Street in Queens

Now, having lived in Brooklyn for the last three+ years, as have many transplants from outside of NYC to Brooklyn or Manhattan, I've taken some joking shots at Queens. It's too sprawling, we say; it's too poorly serviced by subways, we say...all probably true, but it does have a wealth of worldly peoples, and may be the most diverse county in the entire world.

How diverse? Well, Astoria in particular, a neighborhood usually considered Greek by most New Yorkers (who don't live there), was the sight of an experiment by a gentleman-genographer named Spencer Wells. Genography is the study of how human genetic material has spread around the world through migratory patterns.

At the 30th Avenue Street Festival in June of 2008, right in the heart of Astoria, Queens, Spencer went around asking volunteers for a cheek-swab sample. He got 193 volunteers to pony up a sample of cheek-cells for his genetic research.

Out of those 193 volunteers, he was astounded to find traces of every single human migration--except one--known to human history. There were 22 people who had gone the least distance, genetically, having migrated from East Africa (where, genetically concerned, we all started) to a spot still considered East Africa, and most likely descended from those enslaved on this continent. There were 4 people whose genes represented an early migration from East to Western Africa.

There were 54 people who were descended from those who migrated to the Middle East. There were 10 from Southern Europe, by way of the Middle East. There were 33 from Northern Europe (also by way of the Middle East, which must be understood as basically a necessity of leaving continental Africa). There were 6 from South-East Asia and 1 from East Asia. There were 13 from South Asia (Indian Sub-continent).

There were 30 from Central Asia, 18 from Siberian native peoples (very similar to American native peoples) and, surprising to me, only 2 from the Americas. But, two people still count as representing another one of the major human migrations.

The only major migration from pre-history not accounted for in the 193 volunteers in Astoria is the usually-considered-the-very-earliest-human-migration, the now-called Khoisan tribes, having left there original spot in East Africa and moved slightly south and west, eventually being pushed to adapt in the harsh Kalahari Desert by the Bantu Explosion. If you've seen The Gods Must be Crazy, then you're familiar with the Khoisan, or at least with how their lifestyle would have been a century before the filming.

Not bad for a street festival in Queens.