From the 2021 paper, "Ancient genomes reveal structural shifts after the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the Italian Peninsula", a male skeleton from a Chalcolithic (Copper Age) graveyard in Emilia Romagna has been verified to bear M26 on his Y-Chromosome. The skeleton was likely buried around 2800 B.C.
More proof that M26 was present in the Italian mainland during prehistoric times, and is NOT indicative of a historical Sardinian origin.
I've been very kind to 23andme in the past because of it's easy-to-use interface and it's candor when it comes to disclosing the weaknesses in its algorithm. Nothing was worse than the other testing companies representing to people that their ethnic calculators were accurate, only to discover that the science was really just a guess. Many authors have written entire chapters in books (this one quite funny!) that discuss these concepts.
But as 23andme prepares for its exciting and certainly in-demand upcoming IPO, it needs an update. It needs to offer X chromosome searching, for one example.
And it's DNA ancestry has been lapped now, twice, by Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com, who we've been harsh on before, now features INCREDIBLY accurate DNA ancestry estimates. To tell you how far they've come, so fast, it'd be like going from horse and buggy to the space shuttle. Their new tool is that accurate.
One user wrote me who hired a genealogist to complete a full pedigree. That's 64 ancestors! That user has a complete 64 ancestor pedigree now, well-documented with church and family records. Of her 64 ancestors, 62 come from northeast Bavaria in Germany, 1 comes from Sweden, and 1 from the Czech Republic. In other words, she's 96.8% German, from the Bavarian forest, and she's about 1.56% Swedish and Czech.
She got her ancestry results from Ancestry.com, and would you believe it said she is 96% German, from the Bavarian forest, and 2% Swedish, 2% Eastern European? I mean, WOW. Impressive. Doubly impressive because, as we've posted before and many of you know, German and French ancestry is the hardest to call.
23andme still says this woman is German, Italian, British, Northwest European, etc. In other words, it's pretty far off. It has a ways to go.
Kudos to Ancestry for getting best-in-class and for cracking the German ancestry code. We give major kudos to Tim Sullivan and everyone there for their hard work to become the absolute best.
