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?

Edward I was around 800 years ago. How many ancestors do you think he has?

Obviously people didn't move around as much and relations / etc were much closer in closed communities but there are many ancestors and it just takes a bit of movement to start a whole new chain of people. Just takes one to marry a "commoner" or for mistresses etc and a whole new tree starts

Which you can see people saying in the comments

And "all descended from" is the wrong word - as we have many descendents and it's likely that a chromosome we have could have come from Edward I. But with all that DNA crossover, who knows how similar it really is.

As I said, a family tree of EVERYONE in the UK would be interesting. Given the typical Brit, how far up the tree could you go to find a common ancestor for say 95% of British people?

So you are saying that if you did a family tree that traced ALL your ancestors back over 1200 years, not one of them would have been a Viking?

That is terrible

As I said, a family tree of EVERYONE in the UK would be interesting.

It would.

But impossible to create. Because for the bulk of people who were ordinary, working people, once you get into the mid-18th century you start to struggle to document the basics of births/marriage/deaths. You have no census pre-1841. No newspapers. If you can find an ancestor who at that stage was notable or a member of the aristocracy you might be lucky and they have a documented genealogy - but they aren't always accurate.

Autosomal DNA testing is not going to help beyond 5-6 generations. Y-DNA might, but you'd have to test every male, and then you still have to work out the women.

I agree on the two parents but even today there are people who marry their cousin so the numbers don't always grow in a binary way.

Even if they did you would get to the point that the number of great great great... grandparents exceeded the population.

The choice of who you breed with is also limited by the community you live in. An isolated village might have most people related to each other.

I know it's impossible

But it would be interesting.

I know it's not binary.

But it just takes 1 new person in the gene pool to start a spread of new genes and new chromosome 1 etc

And don't forget - we all started out as a few individuals a long time ago.

I'm an adoptee and have done these tests. I found birth relatives. Parts of the ethnicity results could be matched to areas of the globe where I could see from physical records my ancestors came from. Other categories are hugely broad and don't tell you much. It can vary a lot between testing companies.

Now I know this thread isn’t real. People were Celts if they made Celtic art? “‘Celt’ was just a term for leader.” So it wasn’t the languages, religion, geography, or…, like every single history says? Lulz. This thread, the denial of science and general zaniness, must be a huge joke based on the fact that everyone today thinks that they’re related to Vikings and they aren’t and Viking was just a job description.

The more people who register and send in DNA, the more it will change an accurately reflect your background.

Dh's came back 70% Scandinavian, so we went to IKEA, stocked up on meatballs and lignonberry jelly. And had a jolly decent meal there too!

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.

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.

I think the Africa theory is currently being challenged.

Nature Article (behind paywall but can read intro)

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.

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.

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

😂

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?

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)

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"

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.

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?

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 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.

Mine too