Since receiving my BigY DNA test results from Family Tree DNA, I’ve been on a mission to come up with plausible “routes and reasons” that could explain how/ why my Y DNA genetic ancestors could have travelled through the millennia from the Altai Mountain region in Siberia all the way to Oeftinghausen, the documented home of my paternal Rathkamp Ancestors.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) has exploded over the past 25 years. The initial Human Genome Project completed the first draft of a single human genome. It took 13 years and cost upwards of $3 Billion dollars.
Since then, the figures for WGS look like this:
| Year | Quantity | Estimated cost per |
| 2003 | 1 | $3 Billion |
| 2008 | 10 | $1 Million |
| 2015 | 50,000 | $4-5,000 |
| 2020 | 1.75 Million | $600-$1,000 |
| 2026 | 4 Million | $200-$300 |
It’s projected that by 2030, we’ll be able to sequence 12.5 Million per year at a cost of less than $100 per.
Last night, I was curious to find out how some emerging technologies will be able to move the needle even further. LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a technology that shoots millions of laser pulses from a plane or drone onto a target surface. LIDAR is able to very accurately create a “3D point cloud” which is able to very accurately simulate the topography of Earth.
I then started wondering if archaeologists would be able to use AI to use topographical markers from previous excavations to find more candidates for future excavations. The answer is, of course, YES. It turns out this is already being done.
The issue is that there simply aren’t enough archaeologists to process all of these candidates.
This thought exercise brought me to something I’ve been pondering since writing these posts:
Crunching the Numbers…and the Bones – Rathkamp Family History
From the Steppe to the Forge to the Shop: A 20,000-Year Journey in My DNA – Rathkamp Family History
All of the information I’ve been processing over the past few months has been really interesting to me. But it’s missing something. How did these genetic ancestors and cousins actually live? What cultures were they part of? What were their daily struggles? With whom did they associate? What technologies did they have at their disposal?
We’re not just talking about bones; we’re talking about the lives of people.
I think that without exception, the information for every one of the 30-or-so Ancient Connections FTDNA provided me with was not from the original excavation. They were part of broader studies done. In other words, if a group of geneticists wanted to learn more about the diets of Early Bronze Age people in the Pontic Steppe, they’d collect DNA information from a wide variety of individual excavations and compile that data to prove or disprove their hunches.
I somehow needed to get to the data from the original digs. That data would provide more context about the people found in those excavations.
Enter Claude
Since AI chatbots have come into our daily lives, I’ve done my best to do A/B testing on each of them. But time after time, Claude just seems to do a better job. There are exceptions. For example, ChatGPT does a FAR better job with graphics and such.
Anyway, I approached Claude with this riddle earlier today. Over the past few months, I’ve put a spreadsheet together. This spreadsheet lists each of the 30 Ancient DNA connections provided to me by FTDNA. There are columns for the name of the connection, the link to the published paper, the Y DNA SNP, mtDNA, physical location, along with a Google Maps link, estimated period, and cultural group.
Together with Claude, we worked out a workflow for finding the original excavation-related information, then extrapolating this into something a high school graduate like me can understand, and finally to provide some “color” into this person’s life. I know it’s impossible to provide a biography, but the information it’s able to find could at least provide background information and help me to understand who these people were.
There is NO way I could have done this on my own. First, I’d have no idea where to look. Before I took this project to Claude, I spent quite a while doing Google searches. If I was lucky, I’d find a tidbit of information.
But there are several hurdles I would never be able to overcome:
-Much of this information is published on academic sites that don’t show up in Google searches.
-A lot of the original documentation is written in Cyrillic.
-Much of the metadata showing who did the original excavation/ documentation is held in Github repositories.
Again, there is NO way I could have done this on my own.
Once we had a solid workflow, I asked Claude to compile this information into an easy to understand PDF. I asked it to keep the technical facts on the top of the PDF, and add color on the lower half of the PDF.
We’ve done three out of 30 so far. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and ask it to spit them all out. But for now, I want to digest this slowly. It’s a lot to chew on!
Here’s one of the examples we did today. Enjoy!