The Journey of Man at 20

My, how time has flown...

20 years ago, on January 21st 2003, The Journey of Man premiered on PBS in the United States. It was a chilly midwinter night in much of the US, but I was in Dubai for an event celebrating the launch of 24-hour Arabic programming on National Geographic Channel Asia, where the show had already aired a month before. Although I was far away from the television audience that night, it rapidly became clear that a lot would change after the broadcast.

Many years of work had led up to that night. In January 2000 I was leading a small academic group at Oxford University studying human genetic diversity, focused primarily on the Y-chromosome - the piece of your genome that determines biological sex. It was proving to be a goldmine for the study of human migration patterns, and we were at the cutting edge of deciphering what it could reveal about how humanity had populated the world over the past 60,000 years. Our team had access to the incredible array of genetic markers being discovered in Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s lab at Stanford University, where I had done postdoctoral work before moving to Oxford, as well as an unparalleled collection of DNA samples from people across Eurasia that my colleagues and I had assembled in a series of expeditions in the mid-to-late 1990s.

I was contacted by a young TV producer in London, who was working on a documentary about race for the UK broadcaster Channel 4. She was interested in interviewing me about the work we were doing, and asked to bring a film crew out to the lab to capture us ‘in action’. I was somewhat suspicious about the motives, given the subject matter, but after talking to her about the overall focus of the series I agreed. It went well, but it was what didn’t end up in the final show that really caught her attention. In between our interview snippets I explained what our work was revealing about the spread of humanity out of Africa, across Eurasia and into the Americas. She was fascinated by the fine-grained details were we able to infer from genetic data, and said that she wanted to follow up with me.

We continued the conversation that summer, after she had moved on to Tigress Productions, then based in London’s Soho Square. I had several meetings with the executive team at Tigress, discussing how we studied genetic markers and what we were beginning to piece together, including what would end up in a scientific paper published the following year. December of 2000 saw me hopping on a flight from London to Sydney with one of the Tigress execs to pitch to commissioning editors from television networks around the world gathered at the World Congress of Science Producers. Right off the plane, jetlagged, we were into the event and talking to everyone about our concept.

Long story short, National Geographic Channel and PBS committed to funding the project in the spring of 2001. By that point I had taken a job at a genomics startup in Cambridge, MA - from where I was commuting back and forth to the UK where my wife and young daughter were still living - but once we had the signed television contracts I discussed the situation with my boss at the startup and we decided that making the documentary was something I couldn’t turn down. I agreed to continue as a consultant on the projects I was working on, and headed home to the UK. Filming started in August 2001.

The film crew in Queensland, Australia in 2001

The next year would be one of the most transformative of my life. Filming in a dozen countries on six continents over the course of a year, writing, re-writing, arguing about what to include and what to cut, and slowly piecing together the story of the greatest journey in human history. Learning to become a television presenter did not come naturally to me at all, but I grew into it (if you know the order in which we filmed the segments you can see my evolution as the production progressed). In the end, we delivered the films - one 90mins for NatGeo to allow for commercial breaks, the full two hours to PBS - in September of 2002. At the end of October that year the accompanying book was published in the UK, which we launched at the Royal Geographical Society in London. It was my first ever presentation on the ‘big picture’ of the human journey, and one that I would give in modified forms in hundreds of lecture venues around the world over the next two decades. Late November and early December 2002 brought a whirlwind world tour to promote the premiere of the show on the National Geographic Channel, with ‘media training’ (it’s as uncomfortable as it sounds) in Washington, DC, followed by events in the UK, India, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and finally Dubai. Dizzying, exhausting, and a very steep learning curve for someone who has always tended to be more of an introvert than an extrovert.

Some of the emails I received from viewers

The reactions to the show were immediate and very personal, and I saved the hundreds of emails I received from people who saw it. It was amazing to get so much positive feedback on something that had been such a focused effort by our small team of filmmakers, though it was admittedly a bit disorienting. The exceptionally positive reception did, however, lead to a fateful question from National Geographic: if you could do anything next, what would it be?

A very nice question to be asked, to be sure. I sketched out a vision of an international project to map humanity’s genetic patterns, involving dozens of scientists working with indigenous people on every continent to sample and study human genetic diversity at a scale that had never been done before - tens of thousands, and perhaps more than 100,000 DNA samples from around the world, analyzed using a standard set of genetic markers as part of an unprecedented database. It was a pipe dream, of course - until they said ‘let’s do it’. IBM came aboard as our partner, contributing over $30 million to the project, including computational resources. The Waitt Foundation contributed substantial funding for the scientific research centers. We worked with Family Tree DNA, a small genealogical DNA testing company, to build out their resources in order to test members of the public who wanted to get directly involved in the project and learn something about their own ancestry. And in April of 2005, we announced the Genographic Project to the world onstage at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC - the most ambitious scientific research project the Society had ever undertaken.

The project was an enormous challenge, lasting more than a decade, and it deserves a more thorough discussion than I have room for at the end of this post. It had an impact, both scientifically and in society more broadly - among other things creating the consumer genomics industry that has now seen tens of millions of people around the world test their own DNA to learn about their ancestry. Its genesis, though, was arguably in the very personal way that Journey of Man resonated with the people who saw it, leading them to ask questions about their own history, and the history of humanity more broadly. As I say in the the film, holding a drop of blood on the tip of my finger, “Inside this tiny crimson drop is the greatest history book ever written. It’s the story of a journey - the journey of our species - and each of us is carrying a unique chapter.”