Genetic Ancestry Quotes

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.

The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race - a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes.

Paleontologists do not have to search for famous "missing link" from which humans supposedly came, and current great apes. This link is simply the socialist - because he has both monkey genes.

I haven't actually checked my family tree, but Rutherford is a very old Scottish name, so I've probably got Scottish genes a few generations back.

Traditional ways of distinguishing populations are irrelevant in terms of genetic code.

You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.

Then, of course, through the umbilical link we all tumble backwards down the spiralling DNA staircase to one common ancestor in Africa, and before that some bunch of curious monkeys. Down and down we go unto the sea, unto the dust, the single cellular dust. What impulse drove one cell to become two? What yearning pulled the fish on to the land? What caused apes to walk upright? Some invisible magnetic pull. Is there a difference between attraction and intention? Where is evolution taking us?

I read that all dogs have wolf DNA in them, which seemed preposterous because my dog, Tucker, is... afraid of plastic bags blowing in the wind. I thought, 'How can Tucker have wolf in him? How can this be?' So I started researching it.

It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.

Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

Iceland is 50 percent Celtic blood, from the females that they stole from us, which is why our country has only got dogs left. It was a joke! I'll never be let back in Scotland again!

Other people have talked about chimpanzees being a window into the past, which I suppose is true, in a way.

I've always been fascinated by what you can learn from looking into your DNA.

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother.