I don’t have the results handy, but if I recall correctly he has 2% Neanderthal and 1% Denisovan. It was enough Denisovan to make him look into the possibility of a recent ancestor of Melanisian descent, but his paternal history only goes back to the beginning of the 20th century with an orphan and his maternal history is Acadian/French/Gallic going way back, so he’s not sure where it came from. There’s possible Semitic ancestry according to his results, but from what culture or religious tradition is unknowable.
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I could explain why and how genetic makeup is not the same as ethnicity, but not very eloquently.
Someone might be American, for example, but 1/8 this, 1/8 that, etc. It is highly likely that they don’t observe any of these cultures in their homes, not even cryptically through grandparents, and that they don’t speak any language except English, but when asked they’ll say they’re Italian American or whatever instead of American mutt. They also would tend to think of Italy as the country it is today, even though a unified Italy hasn’t even existed for a hundred years, and then totally neglect that Italy traded with everybody and Italian is as practically as variegated a category as American. These lines on the map have been crossed and uncrossed so many times over the millennia, so the present day country your great great grandparents came from isn’t necessarily the same thing as their ethnicity, which is also almost certainly not where their genetic material originated.
It makes as little sense to assume all Italians are 100% Italian genetically and culturally as it does to assume someone who doesn’t speak Italian and has no knowledge of Italian culture is Italian. Everyone is some kind of mutt, because even if their family lived in the same remote central European village for 1000 years, the people who settled that village had to have come from somewhere. Lines on the map are misleading and meaningless, especially to people dumb enough to think all Germans wear lederhosen.*
*a word which I’ve heard pronounced Liederhosen (song pants) and leiderhosen (unfortunate pants)
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I could see where that might be even less specific: do they mean from around Bamako, or from the north?
I don’t mean to get too off-topic, but what did people call Italy before unification? Did they refer to it as its separate components, e.g. Lombardy, Papal States etc.?
Not to mention that Europe only started to look like Europe physically about 8,000 years ago:
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I’ve got to correct you on some of your assumptions.
Not sure what you mean by “major” haplogroups, but there are only two: Y-DNA haplogroups, which are passed down from father to sons only, and mitochondrial haplogroups which are passed down by mothers to all of their children…thus, women have only one haplogroup, and men have two. But that’s it. That’s all there are. And they’re thousands to tens of thousands of years old (although, to be fair, Y-DNA mutates more often, so it is possible to trace surnames in some cases).
None of the three main consumer testing companies has a lock on ancestry composition. If you test at all of them, you’ll see that their computer algorithms make different assumptions based on the SNPs they test (they don’t all test exactly the same SNPs, which is one of the reasons you don’t get the same results from one company to the next). This is not about nationality, it’s about genetic heritage. Some groups are well-defined by their DNA due to isolated location or endogamy (inbreeding). Some groups are not, because there are too many generations of migration and mixed marriages to be able to, for example, nail down exactly how much of someone’s heritage is Celt versus Saxon versus northern French or German.
Finally, it is an extreme and unwarranted claim to say that Ancestry is about white supremacy. If anything, it’s exposing the idea of “pure white heritage” for the nonsense that it is.
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23andMe sells its data from testers to researchers. That’s their real business, not providing ancestral heritage info to consumer testers. Because of this, they have in the past and will probably in the future offer free tests whenever they can find a group of ethnically isolated groups, because it helps their business model. The problem they have is that because they market the tests as giving consumers “health” information (in fact, doctors won’t take 23andMe test results as proof of anything because they aren’t), various governments around the world will not allow their citizens to take these tests. In fact, there are a couple of states which will not allow these tests to be shipped, so people have to cross state lines if they want to send their test in.
It’s also ridiculously expensive to ship internationally (because it’s considered bio-material).
It would be wonderful if testing became normalized around the world and we got a much better understanding of the genetic heritage in all countries. But blaming the companies for “choosing not to” doesn’t make sense. It’s the consumers themselves, and their governments, making the choice.
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Btw. that’s an issue that plagues German genealogy to this day. The classic nazis required proof of ancestry for lots of things. That caused a lot of really shitty research by people who either didn’t really care or had good reason to fudge the results a bit.
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I’m not an expert in genetics (pretty obvs) so I apologize for using incorrect terms - I think I should have written haplotypes instead of haplogroups? Is that more likely? I am going by memory of the report which I don’t have - there were multiple haplo “things” listed - perhaps the term was “significant” instead of “major.” My imprecision is not meant to present some kind expertise or alternate theory of genetics.
As for your descriptions of geographic areas related to genetic similarities, I don’t disagree, or have other ideas. I think my other post in this thread clears up some of my meaning when talking about nationality versus ethnicity versus culture versus genetics.
Where I do disagree is in my interpretation of how Ancestry.com markets their services - I do think that it tacitly (not explicitly or intentionally) endorses a white supremacist perspective of culture, ethnicity, and nationality. I do not think that the corporate overlords at Ancestry.com (or other companies) are colluding in a conspiracy of white supremacy - they don’t have to, it already exists. I am also not indicting the science of any commercial genetics testing nor the varience in their results and it was not my intention to do so. It is far outside my area of expertise to do so. I am commenting on how that science is presented and interpreted by lay people, like myself. And, frankly, white Americans are some of the people who are most invested in ideas of purity and composition of heritage. I am sensitive to this for many personal reasons and so I know a dog whistle when I hear it - but what I find most disturbing is that it’s probably not intentional, but has just become the way we understand and talk about culture, ethnicity, and nationality.
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I’m aware, and I think I noted in my comment that their real profit is making drugs and selling consumer data. I will note that access to their full databases is well outside what most academic (basic researchers) can afford on a lot of grants. Full database access rights have been granted to pharam firms at $10 mil, plus backend money. Academic users apply for access, which is determined by the company, and grants have to fit the company’s profit motives.
I’ve been offered “free” tests for my students, but still at cost to the university. If you have a free test offer, I’d love to have it!
But it’s quite cheap to partner with a lab in-country and send the results. I do this all the time.
Maybe it’s unfair. But they offer a different specificty to one user base than another, based on ethnicity. I personally have not had issues exporting sequence data, but my experiences might be biased by employer clearances, study organisms (human in some places, not in others), etc. No one said all 23AndMe data has to come from random people. If they sent a detachment of a couple people to a university somewhere with poor sampling, they couple probably get reliably amplified DNA from a bunch of people, maybe teach a sequencing workshop so they could write the whole thing off, and send it to a regional or local sequencing core and avoid most export charges.
Even if they can’t avoid some export costs, I think it’s worth it, in terms of trying to provide customers equally good output. There will always be gaps, but I don’t think companies are wholly blameless in their coverage.
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Well in my case, Ancestry.com said my ancestry was 54% “Great Britain”, which, considering the grab bag of peoples that invaded those islands, might as well be “Europe and points beyond”.
I suspect the prime market for these services is North America and Australia/NZ - countries with large mixed immigrant populations, many of whom have lost touch with their ancestry. Since Ancestry build up their database from submissions from people with the money and leisure time to pursue their curiosity, I don’t think it’s necessary to call on racism to explain the imbalance. (I don’t have any experience with 23AndMe).
It’s weird for me to be defending 23andMe at all, because it’s a failure in so many ways (business, education, consumer use, etc.) but I had to speak up because there are enough conspiracy theories in the country right now.
I think the last free kits stopped something like 2012, maybe? I totally agree with you that on every level – again: business, education, consumers – it would be the smart choice to get more diversity in the raw data that informs the algorithms.
Basically, they’re not a well run company, and they are particularly bad at how they treat testers (consumers), so word got around and they went from being the #1 company in this field to a distant #2 out of 3 (with #3 being the most highly regarded by geneticists, but the tests are more thorough and consequently more expensive, so fewer people test there).
There are groups which refuse to test (most Native American tribes, for example) and tendencies among individuals in some groups (like many of those with Italian heritage, believe it or not) to not want to test because “we already have a complete accounting of our relatives back 500 years so why pay for a test to tell us what we already know”. And then look at the continent with the most genetic diversity: Africa. How to test each of the thousands of tribes? It’s a lovely idea to say we should test every population, but that’s not going to happen quickly and it’s not going to be funded out of the goodness of a for-profit company’s heart.
And remember: currently, some states and many countries simply won’t allow DNA testing outside of a medical lab, and especially not through the mail.
It’s frustrating for me on a personal level, too. I have 0% British of any kind. That area of specificity doesn’t help me at all. But honestly, it’s mostly confusing for those who know they’re 100% British or at least northern European, because the truth is in almost every case we can’t really point to a segment and say “this is from a specific area of a specific country”. So they get small percentages of things that can’t possibly be right because “we’re Scottish, not Irish” or whatever. That could be because the computer has to infer based on the totality of the data where to assign the segment, or could be because their great-grandfather wasn’t actually who they thought, or at least didn’t come from where they thought.
Bottom line: at this point, human genetic mapping is still more art than science.
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I am dubious about paying money for these tests, I keep meaning to but don’t.
However, I will make one observation. My wife is Celtic - very much so in terms of skin colour and type. I am a mixture. One of our children has managed to inherit a hair type which lends itself very easily to an Afro, as a result of these influences.
Some years ago she went to teach at a school in a deprived part of London. In her form were several girls of Afro-Caribbean origin. At lunch time they approached her nervously and asked "Miss, are you a bit black?"
She thought about it, realised what the real question was and said “I expect so.” Because the message that the new Head of Maths might be a bit Caribbean was what they really wanted to hear, not “Well, a combination of Celtic, French, Ashkenazi and Dutch, actually, and I’ve just been on holiday in the South of France”.
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Oh, OK, I’m a conspiracy theorist and my science is garbage. Anything else?
Is this true of many countries? My sample was sent in the box provided by Ancestry to a lab in Ireland.
My results showed roughly half Welsh, which is correct, but interestingly it was narrowed down to North Walian, confirming my mother’s oft-stated belief that “those South Welsh aren’t like us”.
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I haven’t kept notes on which countries seem to complain the most about either ridiculous shipping fees or not being able to ship to their country at all. I know some people get around it by having a friend or family member mail the kit to them from the States and then turn around and follow the same procedure back. But it’s definitely true that the laws are most similar between the U.S./Canada/U.K./Ireland/Australia/New Zealand. And so that’s where the vast majority of testers are coming from at this point, and so those are the population groups that get more clearly defined with more and more data points.
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There were two posts right near each other that, put together, could give people a misunderstanding about this industry, what it’s doing and what it isn’t doing. I should have said that this is how conspiracy theories get started: when no one counters not-fully-informed opinions on new science and so the theories start to build.
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I think you may be conflating critiques of businesses’ practices and products with a critique of the science that they have built their products on - I have zero ability to critique the science, but I can talk about my consumer experiences of the products, how they market them, and why I think these things are problematic at best. I think you may have created a bit of a straw man here. It also seems that you believe that if, for example, I had a better understanding of genetics that I would not be criticizing the businesses, which I don’t think is an accurate read of my perspective.
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I really don’t know what to tell you. In my post, I gave examples of how I, personally, have gotten around the issues doing this kind of research you present in your post. It’s not my favorite topic in the world, but I do some amount of genomic population delimitation. It’s really fundable. I’ve participated in a number of collaborations that got me outside the ivory tower because there’s fundability in partnerships for this work. I’m mostly on the software side, but being a PI with a lab of my own, I’m currently writing a budget to do the exact tissue transport and processing that these ancestry services do. I’d really rather not know this info, but I need institutional review board approval for everything, and that must be in my name - not a subawardee or research staff.
I stand by my point: 23 and me won’t improve sampling because it’s not where they make their money. But they could, if they wanted to. If that assertion, based on my own personal experiences of doing research in this realm, is the makings of a conspiracy theory then I think “conspiracy theory” might be meaningless.
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You said previously:
And my point is: No, that’s not right in this circumstance. It’s the opposite, in fact. And in making this claim you’ve maligned the character of people like me who are part of the process. We’re not all part of the “we” in your assumption.
Once again, I find myself taking the side of a for-profit company that I know has engaged in some bad business practices. Ancestry has taken advantage of both the genetic and genealogical research done by others; basically, it has created a pay-for-play platform using materials compiled by others (often volunteers, or even people who paid to do the early work). Plus, I totally agree that the stupidity of their commercials is staggering: I can’t eat pasta anymore, I have to wear lederhosen? Please.
But their commercials very clearly show that when you take a DNA test, you’re going to find out that your ancestral heritage isn’t exactly what you thought it was. That there will be percentages from various areas you weren’t expecting. This is a path toward obliterating the claims of white separatists, not supporting them.
And the discussion forums set up by the various companies solidify that stance, as well. Ancestry doesn’t actually have one for the DNA side of things at this point, but for example at 23andMe, if a Stormfront denizen starts discussions about how to interpret their data to be 100% German, the thread will stand for a while if there is good feedback from everyone pointing out that this is a racial-purity bigot and how they’re wrong from both a scientific and socio-political viewpoint, but if the bigotry is repeated, the entire thread disappears. Not just the offending post, but the entire thread. This stuff will not stand in genetic genealogy circles, unlike say at that OTHER place.
That’s why they have to bring their whining back to their own websites, among people who will support their prejudice instead of call them out on it every single time.
Consumer DNA testing is how we silence white supremacists.
Besides, a significant number of the people testing – and the ones I work with, specifically – are doing so because they’re trying to embrace their mixed heritage instead of covering it up the way their ancestors did.
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This is weird, to me, to be defending individual corporations I normally have strong complaints against.
The reason we have as much knowledge as we do is because of government research funding. A few for-profit companies have piggybacked on that research to make a business plan for themselves. That’s it. If we want more population groups tested, no private company has the funding or the access that governments do.
It’s the exact opposite: 23andMe would LOVE to have more samples, because that’s where they make their money. But they can’t do the kind of large-scale testing needed.
Our government has been shutting down research in recent years, so no one is getting what they want, now or in the foreseeable future. Not 23andMe, not you or me, and definitely not geneticists.
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