To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

@HootyMcBooby I know MyHeritage and 23&Me claim to be running different data.

Apparently, MyHeritage tests autosomal DNA (which you get equally from both parents) and 23&Me also tests mitochondrial DNA (your mother and her mother and her mother, etc.) and y-chromosomal DNA (same thing in your father’s side - his father from his father from his father EXCEPT only males can have this so your father or brother would have to get tested too). MyHeritage says it only breaks ethnicity into 42 areas while 23&Me breaks it into 1,500.

But as @Misthios has pointed out, you can link MyHeritage with existing Ancestry records. MyHeritage is also a dual service; they only have 2 million DNA records but 10 million data records. Whereas 23&Me is strictly DNA records. Their results may be true, but you’d have to go farther back than any existing family tree could to find the Coptic Egyptian, maybe? I don’t know.

I wish you the best of luck with finding whatever info you took the test for!

My results are weird with MyHeritage too.

One thing to note for those thinking of testing - at present Ancestry does not let you upload your DNA data from other sites, but you can download your DNA data from Ancestry and share it on My Heritage or other sites. Your DNA data is just a long list of numbers.

According to Ancestry I am:

81% Scotland
10% England/NW Europe
9% Ireland

Ancestry also identifies the Scottish borders as the area I have strongest links, which is very accurate.

MyHeritage is based in Israel and has a smaller customer database with different demographics. Most people who have tested with Ancestry haven't taken their information and put it into MyHeritage. According to them I am :

87.1% Irish/Scottish/Welsh
6% English
4.6% Scandivanian
2.3% West Asian

This is much less accurate. For a start, they lump all Scotland/Ireland/Wales in together which is not helpful if you are trying to identify where to start to look for your great granny. It also can't give pointers to specific communities within any area. The Scandinavian/West Asian thing is a mystery, their database appears to be picking up very small quantities of shared DNA with people in N America who have Scandinavian ancestry as well as British, but the West Asian (Turkey/Iran/Iraq) is totally wrong, I have no ancestors from there which I have found, and no matches with people from that part of the world. MyHeritage has been useful for matching with relatives, I found a second cousin on there (our grandparents were siblings) but as I've said all along the ethnicity results are not the main point of ever doing one of these tests - or shouldn't be.

HootyMcBooby. Crikey those results are so different. At some stage I’m going to use a different company. I still can’t believe I’m 100% of anything!

I've had results from two separate DNA companies and the results were very different. For what it's worth my family is mainly Scottish, with some Welsh and Irish. The rest was a total surprise, but you can see both companies have totally different estimates for the Scandinavian element, and one company even mentions Native America and Coptic Egyptian.
Complete mystery.

My Heritage

Irish/Scottish/Welsh 46.8%
Scandinavian 24.9%
English 16%
East European 7.9%
Iberian 4.4%

23and Me

British & Irish 94.7%
Scandinavian 3.4%
Northwestern European 0.2%
Southern European 1.3%
Italian 1.3%
Indigenous American 0.2%
Coptic Egyptian 0.2%

So I'm unsure which one is more accurate, but it's really just for fun.
I'm not hugely invested in it but thought it was worth mentioning as I literally have two different sets of results!

Hello Jackie. You look nice.

Oh, good grief. They were right. I know this must be a bot. Because only a bot would do this without noticing the recursiveness.

Sure, I read the Wikipedia page that wasn’t shared by the account @cakeorwine until the final page of this discussion. It first says, “the Identical Ancestors Point for all humans would be surprisingly recent, on the order of 5,000-15,000 years ago. Ralph and Coop (2013), considering the European population and working from genetics, came to similar conclusions for the recent common ancestry of Europeans.”

But then it says MORE recently researchers determined the point is about 1000AD. Who are these mystery researchers?!? Where did that info come from? Well, let’s look! The Wiki source takes us to an article by Hershberger in Scientific American that the @cakeorwine account quoted earlier. Now let’s see what they say, “Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000.”

Huh, looks like “using genomic data” links us to a study! But what will it be!!?

… it’s the Ralph and Coop study quoted right before that sentence on Wikipedia as disagreeing with the very next sentence.

Lolol. It’s like that part in Scooby Doo where they pull the mask off.

Look, this has been a good bot. It kept me going for quite a while, until I was like “who the fuck cares this much about arguing on Mumsnet.” I mean, I do it because I’m bed bound, but even I’d be better off reading a book. Problems I saw:

• it focused specifically on only about three of us despite arguments from several others in the thread
• it used outdated research
• it repeated itself
• it had trouble with terminology (ancestors, descendants)
• it changed tact (what I’ll call “the final four comments” as if it suddenly discovered genetic genealogy existed despite previously being unable to spell genealogy)
• as a learning model, it’s not bad. If you want an ENDLESS argument though with citations, unleash it on Reddit

What the fuck did you think this was that I talked about?

Identical ancestors point - Wikipedia

Did you even understand what that is?

Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions.

A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern-day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than they will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.[6]

Note that a person in the population today does not necessarily inherit any genetic material from a given ancestor at the Identical Ancestors Point. For example, a Japanese person may not inherit any genetic material from his Norwegian ancestors. In that case, they are genealogical ancestors but not genetic ancestors. The same goes even for the most recent common ancestor

Clearly you didn't read it or you didn't understand it

And I am done with people who clearly can't be bothered to read

However - this is all useful information for the next time this topic comes up

"How funny that you’ve now discovered that they are! So now you suddenly don’t give a shit about DNA at all and it’s genealogy (specifically, genetic genealogy) that you meant, though the definition you give of it is almost like a dictionary definition of genealogy itself (“following a traceable line down parent to child”). Oh, how silly we all are for misunderstanding! Much like the SEVERAL times you said descendants but meant ancestors."

FFS - that's exactly what I have been saying. It;'s not about the genes but about the fact that people can trace a line back.

Maybe you didn't understand that and can't read?

Is. This. A. Joke.

You have blatantly ignored any science you’ve disagreed with during this debate (when @ChaosAndCrumbs pointed out the Africa hypothesis is now believed to be outdated) and NOW you want to say that it’s because you were such a huge proponent of genetic genealogy? You didn’t even know it existed, based on your past comments!

Let us all remember the moment when you not only shit on @Misthios but all genealogists as if they weren’t doing their jobs when you made this comment:
Geneologists should go back to the early humans if they really want to look at ancestors and where we "come from"

How funny that you’ve now discovered that they are! So now you suddenly don’t give a shit about DNA at all and it’s genealogy (specifically, genetic genealogy) that you meant, though the definition you give of it is almost like a dictionary definition of genealogy itself (“following a traceable line down parent to child”). Oh, how silly we all are for misunderstanding! Much like the SEVERAL times you said descendants but meant ancestors.

So this whole thread has been absolutely pointless, starting with the OP who didn’t understand how DNA works and going down to you supporting her, who didn’t understand what genealogy meant, and now wants to claim you were talking about it.

@nonumbersinthisname was absolutely right - you can’t keep arguing with someone being wrong on the internet period, but especially if they keep changing the goalposts like you’ve done, changing this entire thread, rendering every previous argument moot.

I think this was probably enough “arguing on the internet” for me for all of 2024 😂

I’ve said I was leaving before, but then returned again and again because I couldn’t bear if people got the wrong point of view from you, but honestly, how ridiculous is that, because who the fuck cares about an argument on Mumsnet? No one. I’ve been beyond ridiculous to care myself.

And the (last) thing on looking at ancestors

Genetic ancestry groups and genetic similarity | gcbias

Genetic similarity and genetic ancestry groups Graham Coop Center for Population Biology and Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis July 2022

For example, ∼450 years ago you may have more than 32,000 living genealogical ancestors, but only ∼1000 of them contributed genetic material that ended up in your genome, and the proportion of ancestors who contribute genetic material drops farther back in time

The subset of your genealogical ancestors from whom you inherited genetic material are your “genetic ancestors”, a small fraction of your total ancestry.

Several thousand years back, all modern humans share all of their genealogical ancestors.

Farther back than that, anyone who left any descendants in the present day (and many did) is an ancestor to all humans living today (Manrubia et al., 2003; Rohde et al., 2004; Coop, 2017b).

What does that mean for our genetic relatedness? Well, that’s complicated. You and I share a genealogical common ancestors at least as recently as the time when all modern humans share all their ancestors.

However, only a limited subset of these people are our genetic ancestors, and we only inherit small fractions of our genome from any one of these common ancestors. Therefore, at a typical locus, your and my most recent genetic common ancestor lived much farther back in the past.

And if anyone still is interested in genetic genealogy, there are a whole load of links here on the genetic genealogy Wiki page from the International Society of Genetic Genealogy.

(Including several that I have linked to. And to Mark Thomas)

Genetic ancestry - ISOGG Wiki

Is your article about DNA inheritance?

"I shared an actual scientific study that used the DNA of several individuals known to be Vikings. Results: only 6% of British people have Vikings in their ancestry. What would you like me to do about it? You may have Celt, or Norman, or Saxon, or Moor, or maybe even Nordic - and 6% have Vikings."

The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present: Cell

That's different to having ancestors though - as has been explained, *you can have ancestors but you might well not have DNA from them. But you do have a link through a "bloodline"

Correct - not many people in the UK will have Viking DNA. That's what your paper shows.

However - all people in the UK with European ancestry are related to every European who was alive 1000 years ago and whose line has survived. That's different to the DNA study though - as DNA gets mixed up etc.

This is the link to the current work from UCL by Mark Thomas on this.

Have you read it?

I would watch the video as well.

Molecular and Cultural Evolution Lab - UCL – University College London

I think you have been thinking about actual DNA and genetic inheritance - which the study looks at.

I have been talking about following a traceable line down parent to child etc. Which most people in the UK can do from the Vikings. Or the Normans.

@cakeorwine

HINT: You’re allowed to change your mind in science.

MY PROOF: 2023.

YOUR PROOF: 7 years old, 9 years old, 11 and 12 years old, and the block for it is 25 years old (Chang).

I think it was the OP who claimed to be a genetics expert, not you. But people who are really interested in genetics would not be so resistant to changing their minds. They’d be interested and intrigued. Learning more is not illegal.

I’m sorry that you seem to feel (or at least you’re acting like) it is.

And since you’ve told me to feel free to leave, I’m gone, nonumbers is gone, Misthios is gone, and it’s my sincere hope that no one else will give you the argument you want, for no reason.

It’s just new research. Why is it such a personal threat to you?

A screenshot

Maybe this geneticist should be told he's wrong as well

Feel free to leave

Someone quoted Mark Thomas - this is him giving a lecture on genetic genealogy and he quotes EXACTLY the same evidence. To genealogists

It's at 15 minutes in

If you don't like to have actual scientific evidence given to you that contradicts your views given by geneticists in scientific papers and at conferences to genealogists, then fine

You can also read this

DNA, Genealogy And The Search For Who We Are : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

And you can read UCL on genetic testing.

Understanding genetic ancestry testing | UCL Division of Biosciences - UCL – University College London

The lecture looks interesting.

@nonumbersinthisname Oh, god. Sometimes XKCD gets it exactly right. I’m saving that one, ha. But yes, it can be really hard to disengage. Even now, there are so many points still to be argued SO easily, I know, but it will never stop, so sometimes the healthiest thing to do is just leave. Hats off to you.

I am quoting from the research.

If you disagree, then fair enough.

It is the paper that is quoted and the research that is quoted and has been peer reviewed.

It's in Scientific American and other respected journals.

You can disagree but it's not been argued against in any science journal I can find.

So it's the working hypothesis. Maybe you should edit the Wikipedia page for it if you think it's wrong.

Identical ancestors point - Wikipedia

Our family looks fairly white, but we have an Indian grandmother (although she was never forthcoming if she was mixed race (she was very light skinned) and my father was Welsh - born in Wales to two Welsh parents - but in an area which had a lot of migration from SAm.

My brothers and I did one one Christmas and they weren't similar enough to each other to be potentially true. I was more similar in genotype to my half brother than my full and there isn't an issue with paternity.

I suspect they googled our names and then worked out the genotype from that.

Ok, I’m out. @cakeorwine you can’t even be consistent within your own posts. It’s like trying to debate with a cat. I am reminding myself of the futility of online debate.

"e’s wrong. Not everyone who had children 1000 years ago had grandchildren for example. Plenty of lines died out. It’s really basic stuff like that that calls into question their credibility on extrapolating their research at a population level to individuals"

You did read this bit?

"Our research confirmed what Chang suspected—that everybody who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago and who had children, is an ancestor of everyone alive today who has some European ancestry," Ralph said"

You did read the bit where it says "and who had children" - he could have said "had a line that continues to the modern day" - it's reckoned that about 80% of people alive back then have modern descendants.

"I also call into question your credibility in not appearing to know the difference between ancestors and descendants"

Really? And what are you basing that on?

" I don’t know why you’re so obsessed by this one paper from over 11 years ago"

Because it's the one that is quoted when you do research on the genetics of this.

1000 years ago is a very long time - and it doesn't take much to build up a large family tree. Even with everything mentioned on this thread.

Do you read what you post? This is what you said.

”"Our research confirmed what Chang suspected—that everybody who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago and who had children, is an ancestor of everyone alive today who has some European ancestry," Ralph said”.

And my response is

He’s wrong. Not everyone who had children 1000 years ago had grandchildren for example. Plenty of lines died out. It’s really basic stuff like that that calls into question their credibility on extrapolating their research at a population level to individuals

I also call into question your credibility in not appearing to know the difference between ancestors and descendants. I don’t know why you’re so obsessed by this one paper from over 11 years ago. Their analysis of genetic interconnectedness of populations is interesting from at a population level but as far as I can make out they are massively overstretching to apply it to individuals because they are not taking into account all the factors described already in this thread. Such as stratification of societies, the lack of mobility. Theres also huge areas of bias, for example they only sampled people in two locations!

There is of course genetic evidence that you can tell people on FB groups who go on about being "proper English" that they are in fact related to everyone else in the world by people in the not too distant past and also evidence that they are all related to every European who lived about 1000 years ago.

So I would have thought that if you wanted to "silence" them, then that evidence would be very powerful.

And if you think that's wrong, then it would be great to hear your reasons why.

That's not a very helpful response.

Do you accept the hypothesis about every European who lived about 1000 years ago and who have an unbroken line is also the ancestor of every person living today with European ancestry?

The whole 'ethnically British' thing is so bloody weird. There's been wave after wave after wave of immigration to Britain, nearly everyone has added a bit to the culture and a bit to the language (or a lot). I suppose at some point there was a group that arrived and could be called 'the first' who became indigenous (?) but we're talking ten thousand years ago.

I can trace my family back to a small area, all of them, both sides, we were there for generation after generation. I kind of found this funny because almost my entire family still lives in the area (some left and returned) and I used to joke it had some sort of atavistic pull on us. But I don't say it any more because it sounds like I class myself as an indigenous Brit and those people are just vile and ignorant.