To think these DNA ancestry tests make no sense

[CarolineFields]

So you get back a score of 40% Nigerian. Meaning out of the tiny scrap of DNA tested - less than 0.1% -40% of that matches the average population in Nigeria. But if those Nigerians are tested, they won't come back as 100% Nigerian, so 40% of 0.1% matches people who are likely to be told they are 50% not Nigerian?

And if you are in Iceland when you have that test, you are told you are 40% Nigerian, but someone in Australia can be told they are 80% Icelandic due to being compared to you and you cohort?

Yeah - neither of these “facts” are facts

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.

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.

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.

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

Sorry.

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”

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!

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.

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.

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.

Well, he may not have been a real person of course but the mutation is connected to the Uí Néill clan - they just gave the haplotype his name from memory as the mutation happened around the right time. Will have to dig out Dan's paper as it's a while since I read it.

But "where are your ancestors from" is what your profession is about?

Going back to the OP - do you think it's likely that many people in the UK will have some chromosomes that are likely to have been found in at least 1 person who was a Viking - and at least 1 of those chromosomes will have been passed down to most people in the UK - and hence most people will have "some Viking heritage"

Perhaps don’t assume that people on the thread have an 1830s understanding of evolution as a start. Your comment wasn’t a public service to 21st century readers.

😂

I think the issue here @cakeorwine (and apologies if you know this already) is that the chromosomes don't separate in meiosis and recombine in the offspring exactly as they were in the father and mother's chromsome (so the mother has one set of genes in chromosome 1 from her mother and one from her father but when it splits to form gametes it isn't the whole grandmother or grandfather's half that gets passed on but a mix of both). So it isn't so simple tracking them down the generations using autosomal dna as some genes are just not passed on and are 'lost'.

Much simpler for these commercial DNA tests to do mitochondrial or y haplotype because barring random mutations they are passed down unaltered. But it doesn't tell you much about recent ancestry and genealogy. My mitochondrial haplotype is very rare in Britain and Ireland but was first found in the middle east ~10k years ago my maternal ancestor could have arrived here at any point since then and on more than one occasion.

@cake

The other thing about these ancestry tests is that each company uses a different database and the databases are continually being added to Nd the results are just statistical probabilities. So if the company has say, nobody from Iceland in it's database, you will not get a result saying you have Icelandic DNA even if you have.

I had a student several years ago who sent her sample off to a handful of companies and compared the results for her dissertation. They varied quite a bit.

Ancestry keep updating it as the database changes - so I have lost the small percentage of Swedish recently and gained some Welsh 😂 And it is very strongly focussed on the region of Yorkshire where I know my ancestors were living since the 1750s at least.

But it is internally consistent between me and my daughters so it's not total rubbish!

Ancestry keep updating it as the database changes - so I have lost the small percentage of Swedish recently and gained some Welsh 😂 And it is very strongly focussed on the region of Yorkshire where I know my ancestors were living since the 1750s at least.

I guessed that from your user name.

A US TV show took their presenter and her identical twin sister to a few companies.

Just because you may be unfamiliar with the truth, does not make it not a fact, you can easily work it out for yourself, look at the maths

say he was reproducing 700 years ago ( 17 known children- 7 of ) say average generation time is 25 years, so 28 generations between Edward 1 and a modern day English person. So a modern day English person has 268435456 spaces on their family tree for the generation of Edward 1. There was a population of around 5 million English at that time. Every single English person alive at that time appears on the family tree of a modern English person - in that generation- an average of 53 times. Take away the number of people who did not reproduce, or who were of an age to be counted of a different generation, so times that number by at least 3 or 4 - so Edward 1 appears on the family tree of every single English person an average of 200 times.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE THREAD

If you are so damn annoyed with the OP insisting her minority opinion is the one and only TRUE TRUTH, and want to understand why she’s wrong, you’ll need to understand pedigree collapse (she doesn’t). There is a great but lengthy thread that explains why most of us aren’t related to royalty, since “we’re all related to Edward I” is her new claim post-“we’re all Vikings.” It’s here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/s/FldCBVITgb

And then OP’s “Celts weren’t real” which again she insists is the ONE TRUE TRUTH no matter your evidence, either because they didn’t call themselves Celts or because they weren’t organized like the Roman civilization - it’s old, it’s shite, it’s not “the one true truth.” It’s call celtoscepticism and surprise surprise, they already did it to the Picts and now they’re coming for the Celts - you know, eventually any society that didn’t have a written language or wasn’t tall, blonde and lily white like the Vikings OP loves. Here’s a review of a very popular recent celtosceptic book, BY a lecturer in Welsh and Celtic Studies from Aberystwyth University who, surprise surprise, called it “a dreadful book.”
https://nation.cymru/culture/review-the-celts-a-sceptical-history-by-simon-jenkins/

That’s it. We showed OP studies; she said they were wrong and she was right. We showed OP logic; she still insisted she was the only correct one. Dunno what to say.

IF you have real questions about DNA kits, I’d start another thread and ask there. They’re getting lost in this because OP’s comments are so unrelated.

In that thread you linked to - you did notice people disagreeing with the person who started it.

So a question for you - and yes, it is complicated with crossover, what are the chances of one of the chromosomes that Edward I or whoever, has replicated over time during meiosis and ended up inside most people in the UK over time - given he was around 900 years ago?

Given he had 46 chromosomes - and you just need 1 (and not necessarily the same one) to end up in most people in the UK

And yes, you have pedigree collapse etc - but those 46 chromosomes from Edward I will start to spread downwards and outwards. And can all be traced bac to him.

Oh - and the claim is not "we are all Vikings" - but I bet that most people in the UK can (if it was possible) trace an ancestor back to someone who would describe themselves as a Viking.

Mitochondrial DNA is interesting - just following your mum, her mum etc

Crossover does muck things up - and it makes things even more complicated.

I do think the "where are you from?" question is interesting but so subjective.

Do you trace DNA and chromosomes? So compare it

Or do you trace ancestors - and how far back do you go?

My Grandma did our family tree by research - but it just tended to follow a few branches up and didn't separate out much. Really each branch up should then separate into their parents and then their parents etc.

I think there's a statistic about how far back you go in great * great etc grandparents so half the people in the UK can get to a common ancestor.

Further PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Most people who hire the services of a professional genealogist are not trying to find out if they are Celtic/Viking or what their very distant ancestors were doing 2000 years ago.

The last 5 people I have helped were looking at:

1. Why their granny left the UK in 1920 to go to America and never returned.
2. Trying to discover the real parentage of a boy born c. 1860 and raised by an aunt.
3. Establishing where in Ireland someone came from before turning up in the UK in the mid 1850s.
4. Verifying whether a family story about someone killed in WW1 was true or not.
5. tracing the career of a doctor who graduated in about 1870.

DNA testing can help with all of these cases.

Anyway, as I said last night, @cakeorwine don't try to tell me what my profession "is about". I'll leave that up to people in the profession who know what they're talking about, and my clients.

I can't believe you can fucking vote

Both my Great Grand Mothers got pregnant out of wedlock so GGFs unknown, but i have found from My DNA that there is a good chance one of them left on a boat from Cardiff to USA , this is from someone who contacted me. I seem to have a lot of 4th, 5th cousins in Pennsylvania.
My DNA company also identyfied a town very close to where my Grandfather was born as having a genetic groups similar to mine and also the town where my Father was born