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?

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.

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.

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. ❤️

That question wasn't to me

And you've

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

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

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.

Get well soon @5YearsLeft

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

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.

Ok, so no you can’t address those points then. Thought so.

@Ikeatears have you had any offers? It’s the kind of thing I like being sucked into but I haven’t got the time at the moment. There are several Facebook groups though that seem to be full of people loving the challenge.

That's what I just did.

Maybe you didn't look at the scientific studies and the one I just linked to

Here's some more reading you can do

On genes, ancestry, and why we’re all descended from royalty | The Bubble

Chang also calculated that everyone of European descent has a common ancestor who lived as recently as around 600 years ago, at the time of Richard II. Bearing this in mind, stories of Danny Dyer’s descent from William the Conqueror and Edward III, or Christopher Lee’s direct ancestry to King Charlemagne seem like hollow claims. Yes, they probably are descended from these prolific figures, but so are all other white Europeans. To add to the redundancy of such assertions, Danny Dyer may possess all of William the Conqueror’s genetic material or none of it, as may anyone.

Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think | Scientific American

Go back a bit further, and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common. At this date, called the genetic isopoint, the family trees of any two people on the earth now, no matter how distantly related they seem, trace back to the same set of individuals. “If you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” Rutherford says. Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C.,according to Rohde’s calculations.

In fact, even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry. Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000. So Christopher Lee’s royal lineage is unexceptional: because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him. (And every other European at the time who has ancestors)

And think of this - at some point in the future, every parent here will be the ancestor of every human on the planet. If their offspring etc have children

More on the identical isopoint - the point where everyone who was alive at that point is an ancestor of every human alive now - assuming each of their offspring had children

Identical ancestors point - Wikipedia

The identical ancestors point for Homo sapiens has been the subject of debate. In 2003 Rohde estimated it to be between 5000 and 15,000 years ago.[2] In 2004, Rohde, Olson and Chang showed through simulations that, given the false assumption of random mate choice without geographic barriers, 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

More recently, however, researchers have estimated the European isopoint to be closer to 1000 A.D

However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

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

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.

So it's likely that if many people in the UK did their family tree, then William The Conqueror would appear in that tree

For some people, he might appear many times. For others, only once. But it's very likely that for most Europeans he would appear

@5Yearsleft
”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:”

🙌🙌 hear hear. OP also doesn’t understand too how human society is stratified and that meant marriages tended to be within your own demographic of class, religion, ethnicity and so on much more strictly then than today.

I’m sorry but all the math exercises (no genetic studies) that speculate on a common ancestor for every European or whoever from only thousands of years ago is too much like a new and improved Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and the world is only 4,000 years old story. I am waiting to see the links to the same sorts of conclusions that aliens stranded a common ancestor on Earth to colonise it. Surely there would be at least an Adam and an Eve? Two common ancestors? Unless the idea is that Adam and Eve were brother and sister and the original ancestor was a woman pregnant with nonidentical twins?

I haven't read the full thread sorry but I don't understand why people keep saying Viking when that was an occupation not ethnicity/heritage? Mine shows Scandinavian not Viking.

It's fascinating stuff though. It threw up surprises so I dug deeper. I was surprised to find out lots of Scots in the south/east are of Germanic descent because the Angles settled there and most English people are still Celtic not Anglo Saxon. Go Boudicca lol.

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"

You're ignoring this bit though: "so long as populations have mixed sufficiently"

There have been lots of isolated populations in Europe where there would have been very little mixing. So you cannot assume that there will be common ancestors between say, someone from an island community in the west of Ireland and one from a mountainous village in Transylvania.

Have you seen the bit where it says genetic studies?

Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000

Again:

Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000.

And also:

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

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

So some populations will have the same ancestors multiple time from a particular region - a 5000 BC Norwegian person will appear many times in the family tree of a modern Norwegian person - but would only appear maybe once in a Japanese persons family tree - BUT THEY WILL APPEAR

Imagine in 10,000 years time. Assuming your children have children etc and so on and so on. Could every person on Earth trace a link to you?

Even with pedigree collapse etc, how long would it be before every person alive could trace a direct link to you and to someone else in say Japan alive at this time. Or from you and any other random person alive at the moment.

It's not a "common ancestor" as such - more to do with common ancestors. i.e. at some point each person alive in Europe was the ancestor of each person alive in Europe now. (although obviously there have been patterns of immigration from other parts of the world in that time).

You could pick any person alive at that point and they would be an ancestor of you.

And some more links

Researcher uses DNA to demonstrate just how closely everyone on Earth is related to everyone else (phys.org)

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.
Ralph and Coop calculated that these shared segments showed ancestors stretching back some 3,000 years, or 100 generations. This lends support to Chang's calculation that by expanding his model from living Europeans to everyone alive on Earth, an all-ancestor generation would have occurred some 3,400 years ago

"On top of that it was surprising the extent to which you could also see the effects of history in the patterns we found," Ralph said.

While their research showed that Europeans living closer to one another were also more closely related, it revealed that people in Eastern Europe tended to have more shared ancestors than Western Europeans.

"We could really see the demographic effects of the Slavic expansion in Eastern Europe around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire," Ralph said.

"In a population expansion, people are having more children than in a stable population. So, if that larger, expanded generation traces their family back through time there is an increased opportunity that they will have shared ancestors because the pool of potential ancestors is smaller."

@cakeorwine

I've gone to the actual paper your summaries cite:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555

It include important information missing in your argument. You keep claiming that the research shows that everyone in Europe has Viking ancestry. But there IS variation. The paper says that "Southeastern Europeans, for example, share large numbers of common ancestors that date roughly to the era of the Slavic and Hunnic expansions around 1,500 years ago, while most common ancestors that Italians share with other populations lived longer than 2,500 years ago. " 2,500 years ago. A thousand years before the vikings. What you are saying may be generally true, but it is not universal.

Have you read their comments?

"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.