To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

Since you have given this some thought OP, do you have any suggestions as to what we should be calling Celtic languages? You say the term Celt / Celtic should be used only to describe a type of art. The term Celtic has been used to describe a group of related languages (Welsh, Breton, Irish Gaelic, etc.) since the early 1700s so it's well established. According to you however it is incorrect. What would the correct term be?

TIA

Geneologists should go back to the early humans if they really want to look at ancestors and where we "come from"

Ultimately, we all come from bacteria really.

Mine dna kit shows Ashkenazi Jewish split into 24 ethnic groupd. think they all do.
My test was quite accurate considering im a bit of a mix with half my heritage from a tiny country which was invaded a few times . But i dont have any viking in me😀

easily done by professionals

Professional scientists? Or professional genealogists?

Still sounds like scientists resent having "their" kit muscled in on by other professions. OP clearly doesn't understand what genealogy is about.

My understanding is that Jewish is both a religion and a distinct genealogical race due to geographical constraints of historical populations and the effect of hundreds of years of marrying into the faith.

So you may not regard yourself as Jewish from a faith perspective, but you can have significant Jewish genetic heritage.

I thought you could only be Jewish if your Mother was Jewish, so would be measureable by DNA .

Mine too

But it also made me wonder about something I wasn’t sure about - that being Jewish isn’t just a religion if it is measurable on a DNA test.

I’m completely ignorant about the science here but I was bought an ancestory.co.uk DNA test. I know my parents and 4 grandparents are Orthodox Jews from Lithuania and Belarus and my results came back as 100% European Jewish. I was sceptical that someone can be 100% of anything but can’t say I understand what is or isn’t genetically likely /possible.

But then again, you could go back even further and tag chromosomes in our earlier ancestors. Then they copy themselves during meiosis and get passed down. With a bit of change during meiosis.

Then they get passed down. More reproduction etc. More change.

It would be fascinating to go back in time and see what was "the original Chromosome 1 etc" or how many versions there were....

And which makes the "Viking ancestry" pretty redundant - as you can go back further and further in time.

And what will future people say in say 2000 years time. When we should have more detailed birth records. What will their ancestry mean?

Mine came back correct. My family are from Hungary and my DNA results came back with this result. There were tiny percentages of Germanic. So accurate if you look on at the AustoHungarian empire.

What I mean is - imagine all the people we call Vikings.
Imagine all their chromosomes - they all have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each chromosome 1 is slightly different to another chromosome 1. So lots of variations of each chromosome.

Now imagine tracking all those chromosomes as they trickle down through reproduction. Imagine they are tagged.

How likely is it that most people in the UK will have at least one of those chromosomes in their cells? A nice tag on saying " I was in a Viking"

Do you think it's likely that 1 of your chromosomes could also be found in at least 1 of the chromosomes from at least 1 of the people we call Vikings?

If so - then you have Viking ancestry.

(of course the chromosome might not be 100% identical due to crossover)

It's irrelevant about whether they crossed or not.

You just need 1 person who had Viking ancestry to go into Wales and then the ancestors spread.

Are you saying that not 1 person who had Viking ancestry ever went to Wales ?

When do you think the first person who was not Welsh went into Wales and started reproducing with the local population?

😂

Don't do one of these tests! I got send down for 10 years for armed robbery after doing one of those "How viking are you" tests.
They never would've caught me if it wasn't for one of those pesky tests

Rounding all numbers to an average. 1000 years ago. Aprox 40 generations, given a generation time of 25 years. So you have 22 hundred billion ancestors at that point. But there is only 50 million people here. And 1 million of them are Vikings. So the average Viking is related to you 22 hundred million times.

You are assuming that because a family tree implies 22 hundred billion ancestors, that they will be as unique as possible and will include all the available population.

It doesnt have to. All our family trees will have increasing duplication of ancestors as you go further back, especially if you live somewhere less diverse with a stable local population.

Just because there were 1m vikings, does guarantee that they made it into every single population pool, everywhere.

Yes, not that strange really when Vikings didn’t reach my part of wales and all my family lived in the same area for ever.

I think the Africa theory is currently being challenged.

Nature Article (behind paywall but can read intro)

I'm just here to ask everyone to stop using "descendents" when what is meant is "ancestors" please. It's very confusing. I know all my descendents as I gave birth to both of them.

That’s a xenophobic statement. There are a lot of British and European people who are descended from more recent immigrants from places outside Europe. Some Brits weren’t born in the UK. Brace yourself - some of them might not even be white!

So to say “all” Brits are descended from Vikings, apart from being wrong as shown by other posters, is wrong just on common sense if you open your eyes and look at your neighbours.

i enjoy rooting around in my family tree, and my parents both did the DNA testing at Ancestry. The DNA results happily match my paper trail for several generations so everyone up to my 2xgreat grandparents are who they says they are. In the instances where my paper trail stops, I have some tantalising clues that one day I will sit down and work on, but it involves triangulating dozens of trees from other matches and I don’t have the headspace at the moment.

The ethnicity part is mostly for fun, but does correlate quite well with the paper trail. The matching of people who are related is very accurate, and I managed to reunite my mum with a long lost cousin who she hadn’t seen since childhood when her aunt died and her uncle remarried and moved away. That alone made it all worthwhile.