Do DNA tests measure ethnic purity?

[Giordano]

Yes, this is why I would use GedMatch. Your brother should download the raw data from Ancestry, and have a play around on there. Mind you, how much different is German DNA from British? Saxons, Angles and Jutes invaded Britain, Franks invaded France. In many cases these Germanic invasions/ settlements were on top of pre-existing Celtic populations, many of them with long lasting input from the 'Romans'. North western Europe is very similar. Germans, French, Dutch, English. And then the English have been messing about in Scotland, Wales and Ireland for some time. Many of them of Norman descent. You can see where this ends up! A mess.

Thanks- I did not know of this type of site and it seems a lot less simplistic than 23&ME. As I've said, it can be a lot of fun in terms of thinking about the twists and turns in one's ancestry. I think mine is probably mostly boring- dominated by Eastern European Ashkenazi serfs growing potatoes for many generations with a few travelers or other outsiders thrown in every once in a while. Maybe someone interesting among them? I understand the Vikings, surprise, ran large markets in Eastern Europe (actually mostly slave markets)- Maybe they "met" my family back then. I think it would be exciting to "have Viking blood." I would love to pillage and sack the neighboring offices at work.

Who knows- maybe sometime I might try an analysis.

 

[Vixen]

Here is an interesting article that Skeptic Tank might find informative:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/theres-no-such-thing-pure-european-or-anyone-else

I hope this is not behind a paywall- I can't tell from my work.

I'm not Skeptic Tank, but a couple of interesting quotes from the article, bearing in mind it has been necessarily 'dumbed down' for the populist science magazine industry:

After the first Homo sapiens arose in Africa, several bands walked out of the continent about 60,000 years ago and into the arms of Neandertals and other archaic humans. Today, almost all humans outside Africa carry traces of archaic DNA.

This suggests Neanderthals didn't 'come out of Africa'. During the LGM (last glacial maximus) circa 18K YBN they sought refugia in the Iberian and more southerly regions, and then migrated back.

The 'out of Africa' is the establishment view (for example, Chris Stringer). However, not all scientists agree. There is the Devonisian man, another separate species of hominid, ancient remains found in a cave in far east Siberia, which some people have trace of in their DNA (mostly Asians).

So, things are not necessarily what they seem.

The other interesting snippet is about the origin of the Brits, and seems to diverge from Brian Sykes' version (he did a tv series and book called Blood of the Isles claiming Anglo-Saxon descended Brits were mostly along the east coast (East Anglia) with a surprisingly high persistence of the Briton gene (ancient Brits, pre-Roman).

An answer came in 2016 from a study of the ancient DNA of Anglo-Saxons and indigenous Britons, who were buried side by side in the fifth and sixth centuries in a cemetery near Cambridge, U.K. They lived and died together and even interbred, as shown by one person who had a mix of DNA from both Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and a genetic Briton who was buried with a large cruciform Anglo-Saxon brooch. Although the stories stress violence, the groups “were mixing very quickly,” says Duncan Sayer, an archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, U.K., who co-wrote the study.

The team went on to show that 25% to 40% of the ancestry of modern Britons is Anglo-Saxon. Even people in Wales and Scotland—thought to be Celtic strongholds—get about 30% of their DNA from Anglo-Saxons, says co-author Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K.

IMV given that homo sapiens has been around >200,000 years with the earliest hominids breaking off from the chimpanzee line five million years ago, it is striking human civilised societies (art, religion, burying the dead, building metropolis|) only goes back apx 40K years, if excavated artefacts are a clue.

Could this be due to hybridisation between homo sapiens out of Africa and the already present Neanderthals in Eurasia (western Europe)?

It is a thought.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Speaking of ancestors...

Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans by Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson & Joseph T. Chang (originally published 2004 in Nature)

You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents and so on. The number of ancestors you might have doubles every generation you go back. You quickly reach a number that is larger than the human population at the time. This means that some ancestors will appear multiple times in your family tree. It also means that there will be increasing overlap between your family tree and those of others.

The paper models human mating and migration and estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all people alive today lived a few thousand years ago; maybe even less than 3000 years ago.

Go further back and every person alive today will have the same ancestors. Any person alive before that date is either an ancestor to all humans alive today or to none. This date (in the paper called IA for Identical Ancestors) is only a few thousand years further out. Probably this point is much more recent than the oldest written records from Sumeria.

Amazing, right?

Quote the paper:

But to the extent that ancestry is considered in genealogical rather than genetic terms, our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

 

[Vixen]

Yes, this is why I would use GedMatch. Your brother should download the raw data from Ancestry, and have a play around on there. Mind you, how much different is German DNA from British? Saxons, Angles and Jutes invaded Britain, Franks invaded France. In many cases these Germanic invasions/ settlements were on top of pre-existing Celtic populations, many of them with long lasting input from the 'Romans'. North western Europe is very similar. Germans, French, Dutch, English. And then the English have been messing about in Scotland, Wales and Ireland for some time. Many of them of Norman descent. You can see where this ends up! A mess.

The DNA companies have problems identifying 'English' because of all the invasions and difficulty in differentiating them from the French & Germans. The people who score highest as 'British' are the Scots and Irish. Paradoxically, people who are '98%' British are usually Scottish or Irish. True Englishmen can expect to see up to 20% or more 'French and German'.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

The DNA companies have problems identifying 'English' because of all the invasions and difficulty in differentiating them from the French & Germans. The people who score highest as 'British' are the Scots and Irish. Paradoxically, people who are '98%' British are usually Scottish or Irish. True Englishmen can expect to see up to 20% or more 'French and German'.

Do you really believe that there is some 'Briton gene' that was diluted over time?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

To put it delicately, you can always be sure who the mother is; however........

Which has zero to do with my great grandfather being a German immigrant. I didn't say he married a German woman.

I don't know when he got here. He died in 1919 according to the picture of his headstone.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Here's the Nat Geo link: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/

The test.

Geno 2.0 Next Generation Genographic Helix DNA Ancestry Kit, U.S. Delivery

DNA discovery powered by National Geographic and Helix. Our revolutionary Geno 2.0 Next Generation test has been enhanced to offer the most up to date ancestry available.

$149.95 US [plus shipping]

Note, some people are saying their results were too generalized to be useful, just like with 23&me.

 

[Giordano]

I'm not Skeptic Tank, but a couple of interesting quotes from the article, bearing in mind it has been necessarily 'dumbed down' for the populist science magazine industry:



This suggests Neanderthals didn't 'come out of Africa'. During the LGM (last glacial maximus) circa 18K YBN they sought refugia in the Iberian and more southerly regions, and then migrated back.

The 'out of Africa' is the establishment view (for example, Chris Stringer). However, not all scientists agree. There is the Devonisian man, another separate species of hominid, ancient remains found in a cave in far east Siberia, which some people have trace of in their DNA (mostly Asians).

So, things are not necessarily what they seem.

The other interesting snippet is about the origin of the Brits, and seems to diverge from Brian Sykes' version (he did a tv series and book called Blood of the Isles claiming Anglo-Saxon descended Brits were mostly along the east coast (East Anglia) with a surprisingly high persistence of the Briton gene (ancient Brits, pre-Roman).



IMV given that homo sapiens has been around >200,000 years with the earliest hominids breaking off from the chimpanzee line five million years ago, it is striking human civilised societies (art, religion, burying the dead, building metropolis|) only goes back apx 40K years, if excavated artefacts are a clue.

Could this be due to hybridisation between homo sapiens out of Africa and the already present Neanderthals in Eurasia (western Europe)?

It is a thought.

The widely accepted scientific viewpoint is of course that the Neanderthals and Denisovans, all human ancestors in fact, arose in Africa and just some left before others (and often interbred with later groups). I am certain the writer of the article believes this too, and just wrote it a bit confusingly.

 

[jonesdave116]

I'm not Skeptic Tank, but a couple of interesting quotes from the article, bearing in mind it has been necessarily 'dumbed down' for the populist science magazine industry:



This suggests Neanderthals didn't 'come out of Africa'. During the LGM (last glacial maximus) circa 18K YBN they sought refugia in the Iberian and more southerly regions, and then migrated back.

Yikes, by 18 000 yrs BP the Neanderthals were long gone. Possibly 10 000 years previously, maybe a bit later. Gorham's cave in Gibraltar is likely to be one of their last refugia:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16971951

I know of no studies claiming later survival. In the core areas of Europe they were likely gone by 35 000 yrs BP.

 

[casebro]

Ok, in Australia which ones are available and more importantly worth doing?

I think they all will di it by mail, judging by the hits I've received from Latvia, Ukraine, etc.

I was looking forward to doing Genosresearch.com, but they merged and are "temporarily not accepting orders" They were 'sequencing' a full exome, 40 millions snps. Vs Ancestry and 23+me, microarrray, 900,000. $500 vs $100 but lots better for health related genes. .

I did 23&Me. I would use somebody else. 23+ has very poor linkage to health stuff. even Ancestry.com is like 10x better.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Which has zero to do with my great grandfather being a German immigrant. I didn't say he married a German woman.

I don't know when he got here. He died in 1919 according to the picture of his headstone.

You seem to have missed the point, that your great grandfather may not be your great grandfather..

 

[casebro]

You seem to have missed the point, that your great grandfather may not be your great grandfather..

My grandfather was my grand uncle. Married to Gramma's sister, boinking both of them. Broke up both marriages.

I did just find a 23&Me link to a 4th cousin with that granduncle's surname in his family. But he has not replied to my messages yet. Still, nobody ssems to have any genes from the guy married to Gramma.

Gramma's first child came only 6 months after the wedding. Methinks they did not know much about prenatal nutrition back then. But they did know how to wield a shotgun. Wink wink. Later census records all show Gramma had a male 'boarder' in the home. Gramma, you scamp...

About 20% of babies do have questionable paternity. My Dad's situation even shows on charts between sibling and cousin as "half brother/first cousin". It happens, often.

 

[Vixen]

Yikes, by 18 000 yrs BP the Neanderthals were long gone. Possibly 10 000 years previously, maybe a bit later. Gorham's cave in Gibraltar is likely to be one of their last refugia:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16971951

I know of no studies claiming later survival. In the core areas of Europe they were likely gone by 35 000 yrs BP.

Yes, that's right. I was thinking of something else, soz.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

You seem to have missed the point, that your great grandfather may not be your great grandfather..

Oh, OK, I see.

The family history is that my great grandmother was Blackfeet Indian. None of that showed up either. Could be it's an unreliable family history. So that doesn't advance the story any further either.

 

[casebro]

Oh, OK, I see.

The family history is that my great grandmother was Blackfeet Indian. None of that showed up either......

Weeellll, genes is funny.

My two sisters and I did 23+. I'm 50% with the one, who is 50% with the other. But me and sis#2 are only 40%. All legit, that 50% is not always the same 50%.

And just like how 10% is missing from the one pairing, your 4th generation Blackfeet can vaoporize too. It's only 12.5%, if she was pure BF.

Now, I'm 100% Lithuanian, but some sites say i am 2% Native American. It's because I have C5b1 East Asian Mito genes. They got to Lithuania either because the Liths kicked Genghis Khan's ass at the Black sea,* and took some woman slaves home. Or the Laplanders/Aleuts went from China north, then west to Finland, then south the same time the were spreading east into the Americas. So I have Native America Mitochondria.

*If it wasn't for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, we would all be speaking Chinese now.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Using Mitochondrial DNA, it is indeed possible to tell if you are ethnically Jewish, because Judaism is passed through the mother's line.
Some traditional Jews have used to DNA sequencing to determine to which of the original Tribes of Israel their ancestors belonged - this can be done so reliably that for a brief time, Israeli Immigrations allowed DNA sequences as evidence for your heritage for becoming a citizen.

For everyone else and in any other context, ethnicity is something very vague unless.

 

[marting]

I don't find the ethnicity stuff that interesting but I wonder how many people discovered their daddy was, well, not the one expected?

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6107039/23andme-ancestry-dna-testing
The company estimates that so far 7,000 users have discovered that their parents weren't who they thought they were, or that they they had siblings they never knew existed. (The company uses the rather clinical phrase "non-paternity event" to describe these revelations.)

 

[Wolrab]

I had my DNA done. I'm 96% chimpanzee.

 

[Giordano]

I had my DNA done. I'm 96% chimpanzee.

I'm 98%! An earlier split of the evolutionary tree I guess...

 

[Giordano]

I don't find the ethnicity stuff that interesting but I wonder how many people discovered their daddy was, well, not the one expected?

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/9/6107039/23andme-ancestry-dna-testing
The company estimates that so far 7,000 users have discovered that their parents weren't who they thought they were, or that they they had siblings they never knew existed. (The company uses the rather clinical phrase "non-paternity event" to describe these revelations.)

It is not uncommon and genetic councilors are trained how best to handle that information. I gather something like: well Mr. John Doe Jr, the good news is that you do not have to worry about having inherited that bad allele from Mr. John Doe Sr. Now to move on to your mother's genes...