"Greg Egan - Mitochondrial Eve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

step along the way, the new travellers interbred with those who’d gone before,
and came to resemble them… dozens of separate maternal lines can still be
traced back along the route – and then down through history again, along
different paths.”

My very closest maternal cousins, he explained – those with exactly the same
mitotype – were, not surprisingly, mostly Caucasians. And expanding the
circle to include up to 30 base pair differences brought in about 5 per cent
of all Caucasians – the 5 per cent with whom I shared a common maternal
ancestor who’d lived some 120,000 years ago, probably in the Levant.

But a number of that woman’s own cousins had apparently headed east, not
north. Eventually, their descendants had made it all the way across Asia,
down through Indochina, and then south through the archipelagos, travelling
across land bridges exposed by the low ocean levels of the Ice Age, or making
short sea voyages from island to island. They’d stopped just short of
Australia.

So I was more closely related, maternally, to a small group of New Guinean
highlanders than I was to 95 per cent of Caucasians. The magnifying glass
reappeared beside the globe, and showed me the face of one of my living 6000th
cousins. The two of us were about as dissimilar to the naked eye as any two
people on Earth; of the handful of nuclear genes which coded for attributes
like pigmentation and facial bone structure, one set had been favoured in
frozen northern Europe, and another in this equatorial jungle. But enough
mitochondrial evidence had survived in both places to reveal that the local
homogenisation of appearance was just a veneer, a recent gloss over an ancient
network of invisible family connections.

Lena turned to me triumphantly. “You see? All the old myths about race,
culture, and kinship – instantly refuted! These people’s immediate ancestors
lived in isolation for thousands of years, and didn’t set eyes on a single
white face until the twentieth century. Yet they’re nearer to you than I am!”

I nodded, smiling, trying to share her enthusiasm. It /was/ fascinating to
see the whole naïve concept of ‘race’ turned inside out like this – and I had
to admire the Children’s sheer audacity at claiming to be able to map
hundred-thousand-year-old relationships with such precision. But I couldn’t
honestly say that my life had been transformed by the revelation that certain
white total strangers were more distant cousins to me than certain black ones.
Maybe there were die-hard racists who would have been shaken to the core by
news like this… but it was hard to imagine them rushing along to the Children
of Eve to be mitotyped.

The far end of the trolley beeped, and ejected a badge just like Cousin
André’s. He offered it to me; when I hesitated, Lena took it and pinned it
proudly to my shirt.

Out on the street, Lena announced soberly, “Eve is going to change the world.
We’re lucky; we’ll live to see it happen. We’ve had a century of people being