‘A Genetic History of the Americas’ with Jennifer Raff
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
MS NOW, Chris Hayes
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The human genome actually is an archive of our population histories, all of our ancestors who have |
| 0:05.6 | contributed to our genomes. You can look at their histories just basically by sequencing DNA or |
| 0:11.6 | genotyping DNA, looking at specific variants across the genome and using population genetics then |
| 0:18.0 | to work with that DNA and compare it to other populations and other individuals and say, okay, |
| 0:23.2 | I can see which or I can recreate the point at which these lineages last share to common ancestor |
| 0:28.9 | and you can kind of do that going further and further back into the past. |
| 0:35.7 | Hello and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host Chris Aes. |
| 0:44.6 | So a few weeks ago my family and I were vacationing in Arizona. We went to the Grand Canyon, |
| 0:49.0 | then we went to Sedona, which is sort of the Red Rock region, which was completely amazing. |
| 0:53.6 | And one of the most incredible parts of the Sedona trip was going on a number of hikes, |
| 0:57.5 | one of which culminated in kind of going up into these rocks and finding this cliff dwelling |
| 1:03.3 | that have been inhabited by indigenous people that lived in that part of Arizona. |
| 1:08.3 | The Spanish called them the Senagua, which just means without water. Obviously that wasn't the |
| 1:12.0 | name they had for themselves. They left the region around 1425, we think, because basically of a |
| 1:18.4 | drought, they were sort of chased out, but their descendants are, we believe the Hopian Navajo |
| 1:23.5 | people who of course are still in Arizona today, the Navajo Reservation, one of the largest, |
| 1:28.4 | if not the largest in the entire nation. And I got to say that being out there and seeing, |
| 1:36.0 | we went to two different cliff dwelling rooms, it really blew my mind. I guess I sort of feel like |
| 1:40.8 | when I look at places that get a lot of water, have fairly temperate temperatures, I think to myself, |
| 1:46.3 | okay, like I can start to conceive of how one would scratch out a living if you had to make a living |
| 1:50.9 | without all of the conveniences of modern industrial capitalism. You could grow some corn, |
| 1:57.9 | you'd have to make a structure, you'd have to burn some heat for wood, but being in a place that |
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