Our Journey

Producer: Stephen Rice

Liz Hayes has just been to the ultimate family reunion.

An incredible journey through time that began with Liz’s mum and dad in Taree, New South Wales, and ended with her long-lost relatives in the heart of Africa.

Like many Australians, Liz caught the ancestry bug and decided to research her family tree.

But as usually happens, Liz soon hit a dead end.

After a few generations, all the written records simply dried up.

Then science came to the rescue. Turns out, we all carry our family history with us, a secret code hidden in our DNA.

And that code eventually took Liz back 2000 generations - more than 60,000 years - to where we all began.

Special features:

Slide show: Liz Hayes traces her history in Africa

Additional information:

For information about the National Genographic Project in Washington, DC, or to buy a DNA ancestry testing kit (cost USD 99.95) go to: www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

For information about the Niaux Caves in France, including how to arrange a visit, go to: www.ariege.com/niaux/

For Genealogy research, 60 Minutes used the services of Worthington Clark www.worthingtonclark.com

Full transcript

INTRODUCTION, LIZ HAYES: I have just been to the ultimate family reunion - an incredible journey through time that began with my mum and dad in Taree, NSW, and ended with my long-lost relatives in the heart of Africa. Like many Australians I caught the ancestry bug and decided to research my family tree. But, as usually happens, I soon hit a dead end. After a few generations, all the written records simply dried up. Then science came to the rescue. Turns out, we all carry our family history with us - a secret code hidden in our DNA. And that code eventually took me back 2,000 generations - more than 60,000 years - to where we all began.

STORY, LIZ HAYES: Africa - a landscape of staggering beauty and home to some of the most fantastic animals on the planet. And it's here that so many of our childhood dreams and stories began. But the greatest story here is man. You may not know this, but we all share a common ancestor - a man who lived here, on the savanna, 60,0000 to 70,000 years ago. I'm directly related to the descendants he left behind, and so are you. The proof is in our blood - a secret code hidden in our DNA. A map that shows each of us the journey of our ancestors out of Africa.

SPENCER WELLS: It's almost magical. Think about it. I mean, you can rub something on the inside of your cheek and send it off to a laboratory and there's some sort of alchemy goes on and we can tell you things about your past that perhaps you never knew or never suspected, so, it is - it is amazing.

LIZ HAYES: It's the secret we all carry?

SPENCER WELLS: Yeah. It's inside nearly every cell of our body.

LIZ HAYES: Scientist Spencer Wells is a DNA detective and I've entrusted some of mine for his forensic examination. Spencer's going to tell me the story of my family - a story that, as it turns out, I barely know beyond the first chapter. I grew up on this dairy farm in northern New South Wales. My family name was Ryan. We've lived here for more than 100 years and it's here my extraordinary journey begins. This is your dad?

BRYAN RYAN: William Oscar.

LIZ HAYES: Quintessential Irishman, isn't he. He looks absolutely Irish to the core. My parents, Bryan and Pat Ryan, don't know much about our ancestors apart from photographs and memories of immediate family members. This is the whole family.

BRYAN RYAN: My grandmother, my mother, my eldest brother Jack.

LIZ HAYES: Who's that, is that you, is it?

BRYAN RYAN: Have to be me, being the youngest.

LIZ HAYES: This is quite a family tree, Dad. How the hell are we going to find any of these people? I mean, it's really difficult to know who's who, to be honest. If we trace the scant paper trail, it seems both Mum and Dad hail from Tipperary, in Ireland. By and large, we're Irish stock. That's what you're telling me.

PAT RYAN: Yes, yes.

LIZ HAYES: No doubt about that?

PAT RYAN: Well, I don't want to face the firing squad if I make a mistake.

LIZ HAYES: Mum needn't worry. Seems nearly every Ryan in the world comes from Tipperary, and our mob from a tiny village called Cullen. This is dairy farming country - no surprise there - and there are still plenty of Ryans here. Christopher Ryan and his wife, Joan, welcome me into their home as if I'm a long-lost cousin. No matter where you walk around this place, you'll find Ryans?

JOAN RYAN: You will, you will. You don't go far across the field, another Ryan, You don't go far up the road, another Ryan. Any direction you go.

LIZ HAYES: Not much has changed on these farms in 150 years. What do you use him for?

CHRISTOPHER RYAN: To herd them.

LIZ HAYES: Oh, for herding. And I get a sense of what life might have been like for the original Ryan who packed up and left for Australia. I know from the written records that my great-great-great-grandfather, William Ryan, was born and baptised here, in Cullen, Tipperary, in 1816. And that when the opportunity arose William, a groom and coachman, set sail for Australia when he was 25. But of his mum and dad, William and Norah, I know so very little. Like so many others tracing their family tree, I've discovered there simply aren't any more written records. William and Norah are probably buried here, but the graves are so worn and weathered even that which is written in stone has been lost forever.

SPENCER WELLS: Trying to build a family tree. I mean, you trace back through the generations and everybody hits what they call a brick wall eventually and, you know, for some people, that happens within a generation or two and for some it happens 1,000 years ago or more. But eventually everybody hits that point where there is no written record. And, so, how do you get beyond that? Well, you're carrying that story in your DNA.

LIZ HAYES: Spencer Wells is a geneticist who's set up the Genographic Project, a 5-year mission to map mankind's family tree.

SPENCER WELLS: I've got some really exciting news! Come take a look at it I'll show you. If you look at this particular position, see that change from C to T - that's the marker!

LIZ HAYES: Our DNA is made up of a string of letters. But, every now and then, nature produces a glitch - a marker that gets passed onto our children. By following these signposts through the remaining populations of ancient ethnic groups, Spencer Wells can work out how the human family spread across the world. Basically you're trying to find Adam.

SPENCER WELLS: And Eve! Yeah, I mean the ancestors of all of us.

LIZ HAYES: And, so, begins the next story in my journey, as I use my own DNA to travel to a time and place I'd never have imagined.

SPENCER WELLS: So, before you were in Ireland you were probably among some of the first people to make it into Europe out of probably Central Asia or the Middle East...

LIZ HAYES: Let's go back 500 generations. That's 15,000 years. My ancestors hadn't arrived in Ireland yet. But the DNA in my blood tells of an extraordinary journey. My ancestors came from central Asia, following the herds of animals they had learned to hunt. They lived in places like this, the rugged mountains of south-western France. But who were they and were they so very different to me? Well, to answer that, you have to go deep underground to find the messages they left behind. It's huge!

YANIK LE GUILLOU: It's a big cave.

LIZ HAYES: In the Niaux Caves in the Pyrenees, archaeologist Yanik le Guillou is leading me in the footsteps of my ancestors.

YANIK LE GUILLOU: 10,000 years ago, they've decided to walk, to walk for more than 800 metres, in the dark of the cave, with very little light. And to go to a very special-shaped chamber.

LIZ HAYES: It's amazing to be here, isn't it, to, to see where so many thousands of years ago somebody stood and drew a painting?

YANIK LE GUILLOU: The place is the same. In most of the caves, the place is the same. Time has stopped and all those things are... give a lot of emotion, that's sure.

LIZ HAYES: They're like postcards from the Palaeolithic. These were people like us, able to use their imaginations and think and act creatively.

YANIK LE GUILLOU: They were great artists. I'm sure they have pleasure, pleasure drawing this eye for example, this buffalo eye. Maybe from where you are, but sure from where I am it seems practically the bison is looking at me.

LIZ HAYES: So where did these early Europeans come from? My DNA journey takes me back in time to the vast hunting grounds of Central Asia, where my nomadic forbears roamed 35,000 years ago, following a grasslands superhighway that stretched across the continent.

SPENCER WELLS: Basically following food. It's interesting to speculate that, perhaps, we have some kind of genetic predisposition to wanderlust. That we get bored easily and we want to check out what's over the next hill but, in all likelihood, it was simply following the game.

LIZ HAYES: And, before Europe, before Asia, well, that's where my journey ends and where it all began - the home of my ancestors and yours, Africa. Well, I was, I was a black woman?

SPENCER WELLS: Yeah, you were. Now you have this direct genetic connection to the people living there.

LIZ HAYES: I do indeed. And it's a fascinating thing to tell my immediate family that we're all San Bushmen at heart.

SPENCER WELLS: That's right!

LIZ HAYES: These are my very long-lost relatives from 2,000 generations past - the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Remarkably, DNA detectives like Spencer Wells can pinpoint with certainty that it's from this African homeland all modern man evolved. Only a few of these nomadic tribes survive, but little about them has changed. And the seeds?

NEELTJIE BOWERS: She said you must swallow it. And it must come out when you go to the toilet, so it can grow again. It's very important to swallow it, to help with nature. She is saying the melon makes you nice and fat and you need to be fat before you start a long journey.

LIZ HAYES: Thank you! Neeltjie Bowers is one of only a handful of white people who speak their remarkable click language. She grew up on a farm here in the Kalahari with Bushmen kids, witnessing their incredible ability to live from the land, the way they have for tens of thousands of years.

NEELTJIE BOWERS: Just their survival skills - it amazing. You would walk in the bush, you'll see flowers and trees and - but when you go with them and you concentrate on it, it's amazing that you can get water and food and medicine and everything from the bush that we don't see.

LIZ HAYES: They they really are self-sufficient?

NEELTJIE BOWERS: Totally, yah. Bushmen can survive anywhere in the Kalahari.

LIZ HAYES: If we are all from the San Bushman, how come you don't look like one and nor do I?

SPENCER WELLS: Well, we have adapted to the climate as we've moved around. But, the best guess is that we had darker skin when we lived in Africa - It gets a lot of sunlight and so we had to have a natural sunscreen. It's a little hard to comprehend that these are my true beginnings, the origins of us all. It's extraordinary, given we're so different.

PAT RYAN: I suppose we've been watered down, that's why!

LIZ HAYES: Watered down? And for the San Bushmen, whose existence hasn't changed for centuries, it seems to make sense as well. Well, we're we're now being told that, you know, even I, you, I, all of us, are ultimately descendants of these people?

NEELTJIE BOWERS: He says he didn't realise it but, to him, it makes sense that there must have been a beginning for us to get this - to be this many people.

LIZ HAYES: While this has been a story about my family, it is, in fact, everyone's story.

A truly epic journey out of Africa. And what's even more remarkable about this journey is not so much the differences it reveals between us, but what we all share.

SPENCER WELLS: What's clear is that, if you look underneath the surface, we're all incredibly similar. 99.9% identical at the genetic level.

LIZ HAYES: Which is amazing, isn't it?

SPENCER WELLS: It is. We're all effectively members of an extended African family.