Not completely surprised by most of the results. I was born in Germany, so unsurprisingly, I’m 70% Western European (as they classify ethnicities). I also knew that I had Greek ancestors, so when I saw that I was 15% Greek, it wasn’t a shock.
What was a shock was that I’m 12% Middle Eastern. That’s something I’ve never known. When I told my mom about it, she was shocked as well. The things you learn from these tests! This is something I really want to learn more about; I’ll probably look for a genealogist. I’d really like to know which country I have ancestors from in the Mideast.
Have you ever taken an Ancestry DNA test or something similar? How was it?
Mine said that I have @2.1% Denisovan DNA (along with @2.5% Neanderthal), despite being mostly European and no east Asian. I thought that was strange.
Although one thing to remember on these is the results they gave you are pretty much based on their existing database. They’ll grow more accurate over time, but there are a LOT of populations with almost zero testing done on them. Mine was 2+ years ago and I don’t doubt they’d give me a bit different breakdown today.
I’m half Ashkenazi Jewish and most of the rest is British Isles, which was no surprise, but what was a surprise (I did 23andMe) was that I’m 3.1% sub-Saharan African. My father’s father (from north Florida) was particularly dark skinned for a white man, and the family story to explain this was that his mother was part Native American. But discovering this ancestry (which was confirmed when my father’s brother also did a test and found he was ~6% African) leads us to believe that my grandfather was 1/8th black (and thus his mother was probably 1/4th black), and the Native American ancestry story was cooked up because this was considered so socially undesirable, especially in the deep South.
Unless there are error bars, the numbers aren’t very meaningful. They’re not necessarily wrong, but if you don’t know the how far off they might be, you can’t put too much stock in them.
Do the companies ever send updates, as they improve their databases?
laurieb, I think there is a lot of interplay between populations in the Mediterranean and Middle East. My first guess would be that the Greek and Middle Eastern are coming from the same place.
For me, it’s almost as much fun to read history into the results as to see the results themselves. I have a big chunk of British Isles blood which I know is largely from Scotland…and about 4% Scandinavian blood, which I read as also coming via Scotland.
Biggest surprise in my results was absolutely no Ashkenazi ancestry. It had been accepted fact in my family that my g-g-grandfather was Jewish, but never mentioned it after he emigrated to America. I guess that’s statistically unlikely, now. His genetic legacy could have been wiped out in the intervening generations, but it’s not probable.
My Paternal grandfather told me his family was Irish, and told my Uncle they were Scottish. The test show Irish, but no Scots.
Glad to finally get that settled.
I wonder about the quality of the underlying databases that enable them to arrive at these percentages and geographical distributions. I did one (not Ancestry) that told me I was 100% European, but the documentary evidence I have is that one line of my ancestors is descended from a mixed-race relationship in eighteenth-century Jamaica, so there must be a some small trace of West Africa in the DNA. The haplogroup analysis was much more interesting - that one group came out of Africa up along the Mediterranean coast into what is now Turkey and the southern Caucasus, the other moving further east apparently across Arabia and east of the Caspian Sea, before both seemingly suddenly turned west through Europe.
I took the 23andMe test, but felt that it was too vague so I plugged the raw DNA data into GEDMatch, which cross-checks your genome with various extensive databases to find population matches and pinpoints which specific combinations of genomes overlap with your most closely. Mine is a combination of Northern European (Baltic), Southern European (Italian and Greek), Ashkenazi Jewish, and “West Asian”/“East Med” (the Levant region and nearby areas) which could overlap either with the Southern European part or the Jewish part (if you go back far enough.) The Italian genes were clustered around Tuscany and Sardinia. It also gives you interesting comparisons with other people of mixed ancestry whose overall genome is similar to your own. Hence, I might have a similar combination of genes to someone who’s half-Swiss and half-Palestinian, or someone who’s 1/4 Norwegian and 3/4 Greek, or something. It’s interesting.
We did 23 and Me some time ago. Mine came back as mostly western European, particularly Germany and England. One outlier was a <.01% Native American. My wife’s was predominately Polish/Slavic with an outlier of <1.2% Ashkenazi Jew. We recently sent off the Ancestry packets to see how they match up.
Uh, nope, not just you. My family didn’t emigrate till the early 1900s and they all settled in the Polish neighborhoods in Baltimore. I haven’t had any tests done, but I’m pretty sure the chances of anything other than eastern European are pretty teensy-tiny. Unless, of course, Native Americans traveled to Poland before 1900 and married into my family back then…
Correct. If you have Southern Italian, Southern Greek, Syrian, or Levantine ancestry, or are what’s called a Sephardic Jew (as opposed to Ashkenazic, the ones who come from Eastern Europe, Poland, and parts North), there is a lot of overlap in those genetics.
This is the same reason why you routinely see Syrians, including among the refugees in the current crisis, with “European” phenotypes including blonde or red hair and light skin.
Phenotypes for all of the above groups can vary wildly, but tend to be classified in the “Med/East Med/Pontid” range. Basically imagine someone who looks like Scott Baio, Al Pacino, or Ralph Macchio.
But occasionally you see real outliers. This is why I always raise an eyebrow when people talked about what Jesus supposedly looked like. In the Levant, which is the true crossroads of the Old World, he could have looked like a very wide variety of things.
(He probably didn’t look like this. But every nationality models their vision of Jesus after themselves. Northern Europeans aren’t the only ones. Every nationality does it.)
This is something I really want to learn more about; I’ll probably look for a genealogist. I’d really like to know which country I have ancestors from in the Mideast.
