It turns out Pastor Rick's Protestant lineage goes all the way back to his 9th great grand father who landed on the New World in 1630, and was a co-founder of the first church in a New England town (but has nothing to do with a May Flower Compact signer who also named Richard Warren). The Korean-Jewish rabbi is the daughter of an American Jewish man and a Korean Buddhist mother, and the Muslim imam is the the son of Pakistani parents whose genetic graph shows certain Jewish markers. And, interesting enough, through their separate Jewish lineage, both the Korean rabbi and the Pakistani imam come to be relatives of Barbara Walters, the famed blonde TV news anchor woman whose ancestors were East European Jews ("Waremwasser") who emigrated to England (and became "Warmwater"), and then to America (hence "Walters").
It shouldn't be too surprising, though. With today's advanced genetic technology and well documented genealogy records, almost everyone can be proven to be related to everyone else, one way or the other. Case in point: President Obama and President Bush are shown to be long lost cousins who share the same great-great....-great-grand father back in colonial New England by way of Obama's white mother from Kansas.
As a matter of fact, through extensive research and genetic samples collected over the past 20+ years, scientists have demonstrated that all modern people today came from one same origin. Briefly, the human genes mutate at a predicable rate that in time created distinctly looking subgroups called races. By comparing the genetic "markers" of different racial groups today, scientist can determine how close or far apart they are related to each other and when did the diversions occur. It is concluded, then, all humans today--black, brown, red, white, whatever--are descendants of one same woman (mitochondrial Eve) around 140,000 yeas ago, and one same man (Y-chromosome Adam) around 60,000 years ago, both from Africa.
Probably due to climate change (the desertification of Sahara), our African ancestors had tried venturing out of Africa a couple of times starting about 100,000 years ago. The last breakout happened around 70,000 years ago, when a group of probably no more than a few hundred men and women went across the Red Sea. In the subsequent tens of thousands of years, some descendants of theirs went northeast to Asia, where a subgroup of them went further to the Americas through the Bering land bridges during the ice age when the sea level was low; some went northwest to Europe via Central Asia, and eventually took over the continent from another earlier Homo Sapiens species called Neanderthals; some went along the Arabian peninsula and Indian subcontinental coasts, all the way to Australia through the southeast Asian straits again during the time when the sea level was much lower than today.
There are books and documentaries explaining how scientists research and collect and put pieces together to come up with such human migration story. For example, the PBS documentary "Journey of Man" details how geneticists collect blood samples of people of a remote village in India and discover them to be the relatives of Australian aborigines and remnants of ancient people who traveled along the Indian subcontinental coast to reach Australia some 50,000 years ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
And if you are like me, or most Chinese of my generation, growing up learning from school textbook that we Chinese are a unique ethnicity that came from a unique Homo Erectus origin (the "Peking man"), you may be amused watching this BBC documentary (http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Besides genetics and archaeological finds, another way of tracking human expansion and migration trails is through linguistic study. Take, for example, the group of people scattered around South East Asian islands (the Philippines, Indonesia), Polynesian Islands (Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand), and the Madagascar Island off southeastern coast of Africa. They all speak one subgroup of Austronesian languages, while the aborigines of Taiwan--the tiny northern-most tip of this Austronesian sphere of habitats--alone speak 9 subgroups of the Austronesian languages. Which means Taiwan is very likely the place where the Austronesian people stay the longest, therefore developing most diverse ways of speaking the Austronesian language. Or, in other words, Taiwan is the most likely place where all the Austronesian people came from.
Take for another example: where did the Indo-Europeans--the so called white people--come from? One way to find this out is through the study of the oldest Indo-European language (called Proto-Indo-European). What Proto-Indo-European scholars find in their study, among other things, are words related to agricultural affairs--such as plant names or tilling tools--do not exist in the language, while a wealth of vocabulary related to wheels, horses, chariots, etc., and the root word for "snow," do. Combining this with other linguistic analyses and archaeological and anthropological finds, it is concluded that the original Indo-Europeans were a group of nomad people living on the southern prairie (of cold weather) of Russia who knew how to maneuver wheeled vehicles and horses and used them to conquer other ancient peoples and forced their language upon them, whose descendants in turn spread the language (or rather, subgroups of the language) along with their colonial expansion during the Great Discovery Age throughout the world, to make it the most dominant language family of the world today.
Conclusions: It is no longer doubt that all humans today come from the same origin, we are all brothers and sisters, literally and biologically. What distinguishes me as an individual, however, has to do with where I was born, the environment I grew up with, the language I use, the culture I immerse in, how I behave, and what I believe, much more than how many different genetic markers I have in the endless DNA strands in billions of cells of my body.
May our species be fruitful and multiply for eons to come.
