Mongol/East Asian Race Questions

Factual Questions
1

Does anybody know how a Caucasian person can determine whether he has Mongol or East Asian ancestry?

This is an issue I’d like to keep wholly non-controversial. It’s not about multiculturalism or good/bad genes. I’m curious, that’s all.

From some of my reading I’ve come across information (often conflicting) that a sizable percentage of all people of European background, maybe higher than 10% (not sure) have some Mongol/East Asian ancestry. The figures are higher in eastern Europe, as one might guess. They’re probably higher in the Scandanavian countries than in the Mediterranean ones.

The issue is a sticky one, I admit, especially as one who has no Asian ancestors that I know of. Yet I sense, in myself, a distant but unmistakable Asian strain, in an incipient epicanthial fold, strong, though not particularly Asiatic cheekbones and facial definition, skin tone that is neither chalky white nor swarthy, somewhere in-between, similar to the skin tone one sees in Chinese and Korean people. On the other hand I have very blue eyes and wavy dark but not jet black hair.

But this post is general, not specifically about me. If one cruises the web (so to speak) and researches the topic one finds a bewildering mass of information, some of it contradictory. For example, Mongol is not a single ethnicity. Mongol tribes or tribes related to Mongols (or Mongolians, if you insist) abound in western and central Asia, and their ancestors can be found throughout Russia and eastern Europe.

Yet I wonder if these so-called Mogol or Mongol-related tribes are or can be determined to be descendants of the Mongols of the Ghengis Khan (sp?) era of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries A.D.

I have many questions, would like very much to hear some input, especially if there are people on board with backgrounds in anthropology, natural science, population studies, sociology, anything pertinent to the (admittedly) at times vague questions I have posed thus far.
John B.

2

Do you have an odd fondness for fur hats? Does your wife complain about the decorative battle axes you feel compelled to hang in the living room because they just “look good”?

I believe there are companies that will take a sample of your DNA and return Geneological information. Googling reveals this companywhich I don’t know anything about, but appears to be affiliated with the U of Arizona lab, and so is probably legit. You’d have to call them to find out if they might be able to discover the percise info your interested in though (and how much it would cost).

3

There are different kinds of DNA testing, and confusion often arises.

The tests you link to operate on sex-linked DNA used in “Genetic Genealogy.” They won’t tell you “what percentage” of Asian ancestry you have, just whether specifically your father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father (or your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother) had a haplotype/group assiciated with Asia.

In other words, of your million-plus 18-great grandparents, the sex-linked tests can give information only about two of them : the one on the pure-male line and the one on the pure-female line.

What OP may be looking for is an autosomal admixture test, for example this one. At that site I didn’t notice how many STR’s are tested, but the fineness is probably not enough to suit OP. Only four ethnic groups seem to be detected: European, subSaharan African, East Asian, and Native American. The Mongol group of interest to OP may be more “European” than “East Asian.”

4

No fondness for battle axes and fur hats, Simplicio. Nor do I care at all for tartar sauce, perhaps not a good sign, eh?

Septimus: thanks for the link. Yes, that’s a bit closer to what I was looking for. If Mongol group tests as European that rather queers the deal, though. This also rather begs the questions of what’s European and what’s Asian, east or otherwise.

That’s curious about Sub-Saharan African (Negro?) testing. No Semitic? Based on the chart I read it appears that Semitic may be testing as Sub-Saharan, thus anyone with some Arab or even Jewish ancestry would test as having some SSA.

More broadly, this is a difficult topic for a number of reasons. Around where I live this time of year one sees many Canadian ducks mingling with the local mallards, and the Canadians tend to remain a separate sub-group within the larger flock. Yet these two groups do mx occasionally, and what happens is that the mixed offspring generally belong to whatever group they were spawned in, thus the “mixed race” ducklings with a Canadian parent tend to blend in with the mallards, breed with them, thus their descendants become for all intents and purposes wholly mallard in appearance within a very few generations.

The same is or was till recently true for humans as well as to tribe and nationality. Thus if one’s father was French, one’s mother German, and one was born and raised in Paris one became for all intents and purposes French. In America there’s often been a cruel twist, with people assimilating well or badly often based on appearance, thus northern Italians mixed better than those from the south because they looked more “American”. It was the same with most immigrant groups. In order to join a new tribe or nation one has to be accepted by the group, one can’t just gate crash.

The aforementioned is all becoming irrelevant as America is becoming more multi-racial, yet I still for some strange (atavistic?) reason find it a fascinating topic.

5

As regarding the Mongols specifically ( those that entered Europe with Subutai and Batu ), it is most unlikely. The numbers of those that remained behind when the main imperial army retreated back to Mongolia was fairly low - we’re probably talking several thousand at most, mostly the allotted appanage troops of the Jochid princes and a number of officers that chose to stay with their new charges, local Turkic troops like the Kipchaks that had been absorbed into the Mongol polity. Unless you can trace yourself directly back to some of the Turkic Russian peoples like the Crimean Tartars, I wouldn’t imagine many direct ancestors from that route.

Of course the Mongols per se aside, Turkic peoples had inhabited the steppes of southern Russia for millenia and occasionally settled in places like the Balkans, so it is not particularly crazy to think some Europeans may have some Turco-Mongolian forbears. Take for example the Avars in the Danube Basin or the Bulgars, the Turco-Mongolian ruling class who became Slavicized over multiple generations in the southern Balkans. For that matter during the Ottoman period a moderate numbers of Turks from Anatolia ( who themselves may have been a mix of all sorts of people ) probably settled in southern Europe.

The problem is that autosomal tests just aren’t very accurate ( or at least perfectly informative ) yet, so you’d have to take any results with several very large grains of salt. A blond-haired, blue-eyed, half-Jewish friend of mine took one awhile back and if the cops ever had searched for him, they would have been looking for someone of north Indian extraction ;). Now there were in facts some logical reasons why that test spat out those particular results, but they had nothing to do with any ancestors deriving from India. Unless you know what you are doing ( and have a very good idea of your genealogy to begin with ), it can be hard teasing out the results in any meaningful way. In fact I’d say they are more interesting for people who do already know their background pretty thoroughly.

So possible? Sure. Easy to determine? Not usually.

6

My siblings and I were born with this, and it is from my father’s eastern european family. I don’t know how telling it is, or how many generations it takes before it is gone. No one can place the source to one specific person, so it must have happened many generations ago.

I took one of those tests that through National geographic genome project (just for fun), and it seems that my paternal and maternal DNA are both european, so that didn’t explain much.