The Long Journey of My Little Y Chromosomes

From a young age, I wanted to trace my family’s history, hoping to get back to the very beginning of modern mankind – seemingly a ridiculous and impossible task! However, inspiration came to me in the 1950s whilst serving in the Royal Air Force. I was stationed for two years at Castel Benito in Libya, which was situated on a sandy, unmetalled road leading from Tripoli into the Sahara. Many times, it intrigued me to see people passing our camp on foot – some with shoes, some without, all with differing skin colours and facial features. I realised many of them must have walked hundreds or even thousands of miles across the desert towards Tripoli, hoping for a better life. A few of them obviously came from tropical Africa, with their ebony skin; some were the Tuaregs and other tribes of the desert, with their much-weathered dark-brown skin; and others were the Arabs of North Africa, with their lighter olive-brown skin, all in comparison to the former colonial Italians, with their tanned white skin. I was determined then to learn all about human migrations and the evolution that went along with them.