To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

Ours was fairly accurate. My paternal Granny was adopted and we managed to trace family back to an area in Ireland. We’ve also managed to find closer family.

The flip side is my maternal Grandfather- his father was unknown & I’ve not managed to work out any family links or areas!

I think anyone that does do these has to step through it cautiously as my DNA being there has caused someone pain as it turns out the person they thought was their father isn’t & it’s someone from my family - they’ve not reached out and I’m not reaching out to my family to cause upset the other way. So I’ve ended up with having to keep a secret.

Actually, I don't know what you mean. To take lemurs as the example that you offered, they are a branch of the primate family, arriving relatively recently in mammalian history. Anyone reading your comment with credulity would be forgiven for thinking all mammals evolved from lemurs, with modern lemurs being one branch that changed little. Not the case.

I'd be inclined to think that your results mean that your ethnicity is SE Scotland, and you and your matches share those common ancestors whose ethnicity was SE Scotland, but theirs left Scotland and ended up in America, Australia and South Africa.

Similar to Welsh people finding out that they have matches in Patagonia.

No real genuine history talks about the Celts, just the children's histories, older Victorian histories, and those based on the tudor fairy tales.

You might want to tell for example, these people
https://www.dias.ie/celt/

or these
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/school-celtic-studies

or any of the many other University departments of Celtic Studies in Ireland, the UK, Europe or North America that they are not studying genuine history!

You know what I meant FFS, I’m not some Victorian who thinks we literally descended from modern day chimps. My original post didn’t even say “modern lemur”

I've watched this thread all day with some amusement, but I can't bear total misinfobollox.

Sorry.

FFS, all names of all ethnicities are social inventions. Celtic is ethno-linguistic grouping that had multiple ethnicities within it. Similar to Jews, they are an ethno-religious grouping with multiple ethnicities within it- ethnicities even from different races.

No. Even if the common ancestor we share with all other mammals was 'lemur-like' that is not the same as us descending from modern lemurs. Lemurs are as descended and different from that concestor as we are.

Before apes evolved, we were lemur-like mammals 47 million years ago. So yeah we sorta are descended from lemurs.

It’s an indicator of where your ancestors were from 6 generations ago. So you are from there too. Just because humans migrated in waves for millenia, it doesn’t mean you aren’t “from” different places and different times.

Where you are from isn’t an origin pin on a map where ancestor zero lived. Ancestry can be as a simple as a person in Chile finding out their Spanish ancestry as civil war refugees from Spain, migrating to France picking up an ancestor there, then becoming WWII refugees to England picking up another ancestor and then emigrating in the 70s to Chile and adding a Native American ancestor to the mix there. It is deeply interesting to be able match up DNA to family written and oral histories, or find out if a family story is fiction.

Yeah - neither of these “facts” are facts

Oh yes! Though it becomes very apparent who is fibbing to those whom do have a higher education in genetics or evolutionary biology. 😂

Saying nowt more because I don't want to spoil it. 🍿🍺

Oh i get it!

Caroline means the Celts are not a genetically identifiable ethnic group, they have a collection of traditions and habits developed over a millennium that give them links to each other (music rifts, kilts, dance, irish bagpipes Scottish bagpipes, language links)

how many fecking times….. I don’t deal with “countless generations”. And I’m not interested in the deep philosophical questions of where dna comes from. You are being very weird.

It's not lemurs we are descended from

But this is the point.

It's not "where are you from". It's just an indicator of where some of your ancestors may have been 6 generations ago.

Great.

So please explain where your DNA comes from?

You have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
They were passed down over countless generations, subject to crossover during meiosis, mutations but ended up in you.

So where does your DNA come from and what does that mean about "where you " come from and your ancestors?

It’s not meaningless if you want to know where your 64 ancestors were 6 generations ago. Many people do want to know.

Is studying modern history also meaningless then? It’s from the same time period.

Not everyone wants to find out which lemur we all descended from millions of years ago.

@cakeorwine amd that’s where you’re wrong. Anyone working as a genealogist will have to know how to interpret autosomal or y dna tests given that so many people do them. But what do I know, it’s only my job.

It's meaningless.

You do agree that your DNA comes from people who were alive 1000s and 1000s of years ago and over time, it's been passed down, mutated,, been crossed over between chromosomes and eventually ended up in you.

So where "does your DNA come from?" and what does it mean?

@GaryLurcher19 i think that’s been very much proven in this thread!! Although of course anyone can claim a degree in anything, can’t they?

I don't have a degree in genetics - and I am also pretty sure that you don't need a deep understanding of genetics to be a genealogist.

Just the ability to trace family trees, research births, deaths etc and look up records.

I don't think that family trees go back to Neanderthal times but I know that using DNA is very useful to see how we have evolved over time and spread over the millenia.

It’s not arbitrary.

It doesn't really mean anything anyway.

Ultimately, we all descend from a tiny group of humans a long long time ago.

It seems arbitrary to talk about "where we come from" when we have so many ancestors.

But we just stop at 200 years.

Having a degree in genetics doesn't involve knowing anything about 'genealogy'.

Not having a go, but it simply doesn't.

Genealogists may need to understand a bit about genetics, but geneticists don't need to know a single thing about genealogy.

I do a lot of genealogy and know to take the ethnicities with a pinch of salt. But I was impressed when my grandmother's DNA test showed a small chunk of French and a decent sized chunk of Germanic Europe, as her mother was illegitimate and I've later realised from DNA matches that the father was one of two brothers (in the very next household) whose grandfather was born in France. I manage several other test results for other family (different lines to my Nana) and none of them have even a tiny bit of French DNA!