Where Your Ancestors Lived—More Than Your Race—May Explain Key Health Disparities

As a shy undergraduate at Harvard University in the late sixties, Constance Hilliard butted heads with the stodgy chairman of the history department. Convinced that there were untold stories buried in her ancestry that could yield far-reaching insights, she told the prominent historian that she wanted to major in African history. “But Africa doesn’t have a history,” she remembers him responding.Hilliard knew that not only does Africa possess a rich and varied history, but it’s also the origin of all human history. Because the first Homo sapiens evolved there and migrated across the globe, our genome can be traced to the continent. The late sixties were a period of social upheaval, and Hilliard believed that a greater understanding of the interplay of African and American…

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