To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

If you go back to a given time and pick any random individual there is a very good chance that if they had children etc, then they are a common ancestor to everyone.

At some point in time, and not too long ago, that chance becomes 100%. In other words, any individual you pick can be traced to any individual currently alive through a path.

I have responded with scientific studies

The scientific studies I have linked to show that basically if you take any human who was alive not too long ago, then we can trace a link through ancestry to anyone alive today.

C:_jtc\papers\TwoParentEve\revisedSingleSpaced.dvi (yale.edu)

Eventually, in a given generation, many (and in fact most) of the individuals will be CA’s. At some point we reach a generation in which some individuals are CA’s (having all present-day individuals as descendants) and some are “extinct” (having no present-day individuals as descendants), but no individual is intermediate (having some but not all present-day individuals as descendants). That is, at this point, everyone who is not extinct is a CA. This condition persists forever as we trace back in time: every individual is a CA or extinct. The next result shows that this condition is reached very rapidly in the model studied here

That was also the conclusion from the study I linked to earlier.

This takes into account pedigree collapse etc

Get well soon @5YearsLeft

Are you going to prove you’re not a bot then? How about responding to some of the posts explaining why what you keep saying is wrong? Instead of regurgitating the same old incorrect interpretation again and again. Address the points on pedigree collapse, movement vs isolation of populations, the separation of the classes, the mistake of making modern assumptions about social mores around having children.

If you’ve investigated your genealogy you’ll usually have a good idea…mine is pretty accurate according to the research I’ve done back to the 1700s

Just responding with some actual science when a poster dismissed what I was saying

People are still saying that they don't have "Viking ancestry" - and yet the study clearly states:

"However, as 1,000 years is about 33 generations, and 233≈1010 is far larger than the size of the European population, so long as populations have mixed sufficiently, by 1,000 years ago everyone (who left descendants) would be an ancestor of every present-day European"

In other words - every European today is a descendant of every European from 1000 years ago who had children

That question wasn't to me

And you've

Thank you 😊 I think it seems to be a really difficult concept for those who aren’t adopted to understand, but in reality it’s the most normal response a person can have. It’s hard for people to imagine potentially not knowing how they were born, not sharing some memories with your (adoptive) family, not knowing who you look like or where you’re from. It’s hard to imagine going to the doctor or midwife and them going to take family history and you saying, “well, actually I don’t know.” Or even the fact that when you find your birth family you can be both desperate for and terrifed to have a relationship because of everything that’s gone before. I think the new research around generational trauma and also generation trauma connected to those who have to move country is also going to add very useful information around adoption. Also, now we know that at different developmental stages, even in adulthood, we reprocess that trauma and understand it differently and I think that makes a lot of sense too. I know when I had children, I suddenly found myself thinking how tough it must have been for my birth mum and in those early newborn days I think about her a lot. At different ages I definitely had different types of questions as I grew up.

It’s so important to do what you can to get that info, however small it seems to others. ❤️

This, I'm.sure, would be my result. Having done my family tree going back several generations, everyone is from a small part of the NW of England. I am the only one who moved any significant distance.

Who knows. She needs the last word and I’m toofucking sick to care anymore, so just let her have it. (I’m not up at 5am because I just love Mumsnet - I’m puking). I’d just let this one go; I am.

Unless you meant me banging on, in which case, I’m really sorry, you’re absolutely right, and I’m done.

@nonumbersinthisname Hey, I was going to leave the thread but I wanted to say, I’m sorry about this. Obviously, it’s ridiculous to say that “every Brit is related to Vikings,” when yes, of course, we have British people who came from Jamaica or Nigeria or India or lots of other places, and celebrate being part of both those cultures, and it doesn’t matter whether they’ve been here so long that they have British great-great-grandchildren or if they only arrived a few years ago and received citizenship - they are British. So yes, to cut out a huge swath of the people who make the UK the UK with these assertions, is pretty shortsighted. I’m sorry if it’s made for painful reading.

It sometimes feels like we’re being practiced on by AI bots who just repeat the same argument without actually engaging in the meat of the discussion.

Still no response to my question about Brits of heritage from other parts of the globe, and what it means for her statement about “all” Brits having these ancestors.

Is she still banging on?

From that study:

"However, as 1,000 years is about 33 generations, and 233≈1010 is far larger than the size of the European population, so long as populations have mixed sufficiently, by 1,000 years ago everyone (who left descendants) would be an ancestor of every present-day European"

In other words - every European today is a descendant of every European from 1000 years ago who had children

And as for genealogists - I suggested that if they really want to find out "who we are and where we come from", then it's evolutionary DNA that holds the key. That's not putting them down - clearly if someone wants to find out about relatives from the last couple of generations, then it's useful. But it's a mere glimpse at what we really are.

So yes, we have ancestors who were Vikings, Celts, etc.

An aside but Mark Thomas is a hugely knowledgeable geneticist who has been a source of reason and sanity for many years in a field that has often misrepresented and overblown the findings from aDNA - I have nothing but respect for him.

Does anybody on here fancy having a go at solving an unknown father case I'm stuck on? I was helping an elderly adopted friend and have got DNA and Ancestry tree. I believe I've traced it to a couple of potential grandfathers but I need a fresh pair of eyes.
I've done quite a few of these, for myself and for other people but, for some reason, I'm having a mental block with this one and I think I might be missing something obvious...

I think it's the last few hundred years that are really interesting anyway. Or at least it is in my family. I've traced several lines back quite a long way and as far as I can tell, pre early 1800s they were all farm labourers and stayed within very small geographical areas. I'm sure it was a very tough life and some of them probably had more interesting personal lives than others, but records are restricted to parish records with minimal detail so I will never know. There was nobody interesting or rich enough that far back in my family for anyone to have recorded more than when they were baptised, married and died.
But from the 19th Century on it gets a lot more interesting, far more records are available and my ancestors start to feel like real people that I can relate to. I don't really care what patch of soil my distant ancestors were tilling in the 15th century to be honest, or whether I have Roman or Viking ancestry but I can see how the lives of my dead but more recent forebears have actually impacted on my life. That's why I traced my family tree and that's why I did a DNA test. In my experience that's what many, probably most people on Ancestry and similar sites are interested in.

Seriously, we’ll be at this forever the way we’re going.

I say you need some back up. You say you don’t need the internet. Then you share pieces from the BLOODY INTERNET. Then I point out two of them are opinion pieces and the other is an overview of several studies, one of which ACTUALLY says,
“We find that a pair of modern Europeans living in neighboring populations share around 2–12 genetic common ancestors from the last 1,500 years, and upwards of 100 genetic ancestors from the previous 1,000 years.”
So 2-12 genetic common ancestors since before the Vikings. And 100 back to the time before Christ. Ok, then. But… obviously Edward I was one of those 2-12? And that’s ONLY neighboring populations. And sticks within Hunnic and Slavic population migrations, according to the study authors, so no Vikings at all, depending on the area. Sad Vikings.

If you will not be moved by anything, that’s fine. You can always agree to disagree. But I do think it’s been INCREDIBLY poor form on your part to continually put down the work that genealogists do. It means a lot to a lot of people and perhaps if you were adopted or abandoned or had no family left, like some of us, you’d feel differently.

Now truly. I’m sick, I see nothing to gain by further attempting to discuss this with you. I’d gently recommend that you also learn when to agree to disagree, which is what I’m doing now, and putting this to bed.

it placed the genetic origin of one paying customer in the depths of the Humber estuary

There's a whole bunch of villages that have been lost due to coastal erosion around the Humber estuary, that sounds perfectly feasible. Ravenser Odd is one of the better known ones but there are others. http://www.hullgeolsoc.co.uk/gordon.htm#:~:text=Those%20villages%20named%20above%20were,%2C%20drawing%20by%20Wendy%20Munday).

But the point is - we have way more ancestors than that so when people get excited about "where they come from", it's a bit meaningless as it just tells you the last couple of generations.

It may be meaningless to you but it's obviously not to the people who are excited about finding out about their ancestors.

I get that many people are just not interested at all at dead people and consider them to have no relevance at all to their life today. I'm married to one of them! Whereas I find it fascinating to be able to name all these people and know that I and the people that I knew in person (my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles) were all born because of the life decisions of those ancestors. When researching them I find myself wondering what kind of person they are, and whether I would have liked them and they like me. What was their life like. And it leads me to then look up the social history of the time and location and research that.

I hated history at school, learning about the Romans and Verulamium just left me completely cold. Now I love it, because I can look at it through the eyes of my ancestors. Whether that is tin miners in Cornwall, or cotton weavers in Lancashire, or soldiers ending up in London Workhouses, or tallow chandlers from Derbyshire. Fascinating.

And

"One company offered a service whereby it would tell you the precise village location of your genetic ancestry 1,000 years ago. It’s a peculiar thing to claim, as you will have thousands of ancestors 1,000 years ago, and I’m pretty sure they won’t have all come from the same village. Their algorithm clearly needed some work: it placed the genetic origin of one paying customer in the depths of the Humber estuary.
The truth is that we all are a bit of everything, and we come from all over. If you’re white, you’re a bit Viking. And a bit Celt. And a bit Anglo-Saxon. And a bit Charlemagne. This is not to disparage genetic genealogy and ancestry. Done right, it is an immensely powerful tool for studying families and human migrations. DNA can disclose unknown cousins or parents"

Which is true:

It can be useful to find cousins, families and recent history.

But it's also true we are a "bit of everything and we come from all over"

I don't need to go on the internet.

There are loads of chances for at least 1 chromosome from Edward I or whoever from 800 years ago to be passed down to people who are alive nowadays.

This is Adam Rutherford on the tests and royalty

DNA ancestry tests may look cheap. But your data is the price | Adam Rutherford | The Guardian

"In short: if you really want to spend your cash to discover that you are descended from Vikings (spoiler: if you have European ancestry, you are) or you have blue eyes (try a mirror), go ahead"

So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European… | Adam Rutherford | The Guardian

And this also makes it more interesting -

"Each subsequent generation, the contribution from an individual from your lineage becomes less. Professor Mark Thomas from University College London describes this dilution as “homeopathic”. After a few rounds of preparation, homeopathic dilutions contain no molecules of whatever the active ingredient is imagined to be. Genetic inheritance works in a similar way. Half of your genome comes from your mother and half from your father, a quarter from each of your grandparents. But because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA."

They are your family. Your blood. But their genes have been diluted.
But you can still trace them as an ancestor as a direct descendant

And some more science

Most Europeans share recent ancestors | Nature

Whether they are a Serb and a Swiss, or a Finn and a Frenchman, any two Europeans are likely to have many common ancestors who lived around 1,000 years ago. A genomic survey of 2,257 people from 40 populations finds that people of European ancestry are more closely related to one another than previously thought, and could help to bring about new insights into European history.

If people want to look at their ancestors from up to 200 years ago, then fine.

But the point is - we have way more ancestors than that so when people get excited about "where they come from", it's a bit meaningless as it just tells you the last couple of generations.

Humans are much more complicated than the last few generations.

I've messaged you as I do.

I’ve read up on how the various companies handle data and I decided I would only use Ancestry or 23andme as they’re more transparent about what they do with it. MyHeritage seemed to be one to avoid and I’m suspicious of its low price.