Reminder to Eurogenes and Davidski: You ARE NOT Your Y Chromosome, and Your Manhood Isn't Tied to It!

A great study just came out that confirms what many of us have noticed.  Increasingly, instead of dude being proud of their ethnic group (and risk being called racist) or even their soccer team (and risk being called a hooligan), many misguided men, especially in online forums, are tying their identity to their Y chromosome haplogroup!  

Yes, you laugh, I laugh, but any quick read of any of the worst offenders (Maciamo May at Expedia, Davidski at Eurogenes), will reveal this concept, as well as some very fragile male egos, redefined with junk pop-science.

The study is called:

Constructing Masculinity through Genetic Legacies: Family Histories, Y-Chromosomes, and “Viking Identities"

Some highlights:

The practice of searching for a Viking ancestor is, on one level, an exercise in redundancy. At a distance of a millennium, simple mathematics demonstrates that everyone, at least in Western Europe, and most probably further afield, has Viking ancestry (Rutherford 2016).

Rather, this kind of texture was what the participants in our research were interested in: the majority were seeking confirmation of Viking ancestry, for which they already had amassed a certain amount of (usually genealogical) evidence. For such individuals, to be told “yes, you are descended from Vikings, because everybody is”, is seemingly psychologically insufficient.

Critiques from population geneticists likening such claims to “genetic astrology” are widespread (e.g., Balding et al. 2010; Thomas 2013), while the problematic potential of such narratives to essentialise ethnic identities based on biology have also been highlighted (Fortier 2012; Morning 2014; Nash 2004a; Nelson 2008; Nordgren and Juengst 2009). To a lesser extent, how the forms of evidence used to access the remote past create gendered versions of history (usually favouring a patrilineal line of descent) has also been a cause for concern.

The problematic nature of relying on direct-line Y-chromosome tests for insights about “who you really are” is highlighted by the example of African-American users of DTC genetic testing seeking more information about their African ancestry, but regularly receiving results characteristic of European ancestry due to the grim realities of the sexual exploitation of female slaves by European owners (Tyler 2008; Nelson 2016). By way of contrast, discovering that one has a Y-chromosome characteristic or not of Viking ancestry may be seen as less of an existential challenge to one’s sense of self, and more of a form of recreation. However, as Sommer (2012) cautions, recreational genomics cannot necessarily be separated from wider political contestations of identity, culture, and gender.

In a similar vein, Nash (2012, 2015) argues that the cultural focus on “founding fathers”, such as Genghis Khan, to explain patterns of Y-chromosome variation (and genetic variation more broadly) draw on and simultaneously naturalise a patriarchal understanding of kinship. 

She also argues that popular accounts of such research tend towards a nostalgia for an imagined “heroic” past of simpler gender roles: one that represents men as warriors, women as passive, or even as possessions, and can “conjure up images of a harsher and simpler world of unlimited and often violent sex enjoyed by powerful men” (Nash 2015, p. 149).

Such a patriarchal “heroic” past chimes in with what Halewood and Hannam (2001, p. 566) have referred to as the “Anglo-American stereotypical representation of Viking heritage”: that of “sea-faring, sexist, and blood thirsty men raping and pillaging”. 

Even when Vikings are disassociated from violence and rape, they are still represented as somehow essentially masculine, and that this is encoded biologically. For instance, Kroløkke (2009) analysed the success of the Danish sperm bank, Cryos International in marketing its product as “Viking sperm”, and thereby as representing a genetically encoded masculine ideal.

Within this context, for an individual man to seek to establish his “Viking ancestry” is to situate himself, deliberately or otherwise, within a certain historical–cultural discourse of masculinity. 

LOL: Davidski, they've got you down buddy!  Substitute "Viking" in that sentence with "R1b" or "R1a" and half the "Bronze Age Studs" at Eurogenes will be crying in their soup.

AND THE WINNER IS... (Comparing Admixture/Heritage Tests on Gedmatch)

Methodology:

• We ran exhaustive tests of several commercial and free DNA-testing labs and ethnicity calculators.  
• To test the sites, we used only individuals with well-documented, double confirmed, 100% known ancestry.  
• We tested multiple males from multiple lines to assure as much as humanly possible no extra-parental events (bastardy) occurred.  
• We even tested minor nobility with documented ties to geographic locales.  
• We used individuals who do not come from cities or places of cosmopolitanism (influx of foreigners).  
• We tested only people with all four grandparents from the same locale.  
• We tested multiple people from different countries in Europe.

As we've posted before, of the commercial labs, 23andme takes first prize, and Ancestry.com is the worst.  23andme provides the most conservative and accurate ethnic ancestry approximations.

We have also completed our testing of all of the ancestry composition tests available on GEDMATCH.  Below is a summary, the results, and the rankings.

• First of all, the specialty labs, Ethiohelix, Gedrosia DNA, puntDNAL, etc. do not even come close to being accurate, at least for individuals of European heritage.
• None of MDLP's tests passed our accuracy gauntlet and correctly called west European DNA.

1. The overall winner, and the clear winner of all the tools currently available on Gedmatch, is the Eurogenes K13 test.  It was pretty darn good at distinguishing DNA from various western European lands, for people of "purebred" ancestry.

2. Coming in second was Eurogenes EUtest K15 v2, which also had a pretty darn good record of accurate calls.

3. An honorable mention, and a close third, with accurate calls roughly as close to the second-place finisher, was Dodecad's K12b test.

• No other tests besides those three were even close to "often accurate."
• No tests, including those three, were much use for accurately calling the ancestry of European "mutts."  We found that the same tests that were accurate with individuals with 100% heritage from one country, were of limited value for serving as an oracle (predicting accurately) the ancestry of individuals of mixed European heritage.

Will Tim Sullivan and Ancestry.com Continue Its VIRTUAL Ethnic Cleansing of Germans?

23andme discloses right off the bat that it cannot identify German or French ancestry 92% of the time.

Ancestry doesn't seem to be able to discern German ancestry too well either, but it doesn't tell its customers that.

Noted: Yet another reader of this blogger just wrote in and shared her experience.  She is 100% German, born in Germany, from a small town, not a big city.  Her ancestors are documented in the region she's from for the last 400 years.  Several of them were well-known and documented.

Ancestry.com called her ancestry as about 50% Scandinavian, 25% Italian, and 25% generic European.  What an epic fail.

How many "white bread" regular Americans, with German ancestry take one of these tests, and misleadingly, their German ancestry is literally wiped away?

We note Germans are America's LARGEST ethnic group, but their ancestry is also often hidden, because German surnames Americanize so well.  For example, Kohl becomes Cole; Schmidt becomes Smith, etc.

As an experiment, with our reader's permission, we ran her raw data through Gedmatch.  Both MDLP (the Magnus Ducatus Lituaniae Project) and Eurogenes were able to call her likeliest ancestry as German.   Dodecad, which specializes in Mediterraneans, was able to call her as German in about half of its tests.

So the question remains:

1.  If the amateurs can call German DNA with reasonable regularity, why the heck can't Ancestry.com?

2.  If Ancestry.com is so bad at identifying America's biggest ethnic group, why doesn't it do the decent thing and tell people?

Banned from Anthrogenica, Censored by Eurogenes, Laugh at Eupedia

Several posters at Davidski's Eurogenes blog have noted that they've been banned from Anthrogenica for challenging the Kool-Aid drinking orthodoxy that infects that website.

The pattern almost always goes as follows.  A regular Anthrogenica poster says something like, "Isn't the Kool-Aid grand?"  A newcomer says, "I don't want to drink your Kool-Aid."  The Anthrogenica regular says, "I'm right, you idiot."  And then the newcomer says, "You're the idiot" -- and yep, you guessed it, only one of them gets banned.

It's gotten so bad that some of the best citizen-scientist minds, and almost all contrarian voices, are gone from that website.  In the old days, the orthodoxy sought to excommunicate Galileo from the Catholic faith.  Now they excommunicate posters from the major discussion websites.  No dissent allowed.

With Dienekes inactive, Eurogenes is where many go for discussion.  But Davidski has been very heavy with the censorship button there too.  Post something he disagrees with?  He removes your comment.  It's really sad.

I myself have tried to post my most recent thread, about applying simple demographics to his "Conquest and Warfare" fantasies, and he always removes my comments asap.

What does that leave?  Eupedia?  Maciamo is a reductio ad absurdem idiot, who also doesn't hesitate to ban people with any contrarian viewpoint.

So, this is it.  This is your thread.  This thread (and this website) is for anyone Banned From Anthrogenica, or Censored by Eurogenes.

Post away.  You will not be censored here.

When Is A "Conquest" Not A Conquest?

When Is A Conquest Not A Conquest?

You are a scientist living in the year 4017, specializing in the ancient civilizations that existed between 1492 and 2200 A.D.  Various cultures came and went, but alas, most written records were lost in the intervening centuries.  So you study DNA.

Your fellow scientists know that in many different regions, the DNA record shows profound change over time, both in autosomal percentages and uniparental markers (Y-Chromosome, mtDNA).

Unfortunately, arrogant bloggers still exist in 4017, and three of them, one called Davidski Futurski (who blogs at Eurogenes-ski), a fellow named Maciamo-Futuriamo, and another named Rocca Futura, are examples of "a little knowledge can be dangerous."  

They blindly state that all changes in DNA indicate evidence of conquest by some superior culture of badass men.  (Nevermind that they all believe they descend from the people they assert to be superior; that's irrelevant, we're sure).

Your boss at the university, someone who sees nuance better than the bloggers, asks you to model the record and various types of human interactions, and answer the question:

"When Might A 'Conquest' Not Really Be A Conquest?"  

So you come up with the following four models, and re-create as best as you can some historical examples for the clueless:

1.  Refugees from a war-torn area flood into a nearby land (and even some faraway lands), overwhelming the demographics.  The bloggers post that a people called the Syrians conquered the Lebanese, starting in 2011, but you're not so sure.  Your research finds the opposite: that there was a horrendous war in Syria, causing 11 million people to lose all their belongings and flee.  Therefore, you don't think these people were conquerors, but refugees.  Nevertheless, the stubborn bloggers point out how the record shows a massive DNA shift in Lebanon, where the Syrian markers went from 5% to 25% of the population in just three years.  

"It had to be conquest" they write, of powerful, rich, sophisticated men conquering the weak Lebanese.  

Alas, you tell them: it was the opposite: a beaten-down people streaming into a nearby land (and also places like Sweden), altering the gene pool.  In fact, Lebanon started with 5 million people, and absorbed an influx of 2.5 million refugees.  Thus, the autosomal genetics and uniparental frequencies were both significantly changed.  It's really as simple as that.

2. Disease.  In 1598, slaves from Africa were brought to a place called Puerto Rico.  They brought with them Yellow Fever, something the native American inhabitants did not have exposure or antibodies to.  

Although the natives were, under the caste system at the time, a couple of rungs higher than the African slaves, and although the natives had better sources of food and systems for dealing with the native landscape, they were killed off in the thousands simply because they didn't have antibodies to the new disease.  

But all the bloggers see is that Puerto Rico went from showing Native American DNA patterns to showing African (and European) DNA patterns.  And they cry, their must have been a conquest, led by the African newcomers!  You LOL, pointing out that these newcomers were slaves and vectors.

3.  Economic Opportunity.  The bloggers now discuss Los Angeles.  They point out that the DNA record shows that in the 1950s, Los Angeles was 80% inhabited by an ancient culture called, "whites."  By 2020, it was 60% Hispanic.  The record thus showed profound shifts in autosomal frequencies and Y-chromosome patterns.  

"There must have been a conquest!" the bloggers shout from the rooftops!  War!  Destruction!  A supreme powerful tribe of men, with better tools!  

No, you quietly assert.  Your research shows that poor Hispanic immigrants simply migrated to Los Angeles, looking for better economic opportunities than what existed back home.  Alas, the bloggers still don't grasp this example either.

4.  Simple Cultural Differences in Birthrates.  Palestinian women have vastly greater birthrates than their neighbors.  In the 1960s, it was 8 children per every female.  Even now, it's above 4.0 children for every woman.  The Israeli birthrate, while still relatively high at 3.0, is not as high.  By 2045, Palestinians may outnumber Israelis.  

Our future bloggers, looking at this from the perspective of the year 4017, may try to argue that there was a conquest by the Palestinians.  They must have had superior technology, they claim!  Better weapons!  

But again, your research (and history) shows this NOT to be the case.


Taking these four examples, you explain to the bloggers that many changes in DNA frequency, cannot be explained as "conquest" even though it's tempting for the simple-minded to do so.  

There are even examples of multiple of the above factors explaining demographic shifts.  For example, the Catholic Irish replacement of Anglo Saxons in many East Coast cities in the 1800s.  That was due to the Irish being refugees, seeking greater economic opportunity en masse, and having higher birthrates.  

Somewhere in the future, the intellectual heirs of Maciamo, Davidski, and many on Anthrogenica, are arguing that the Irish immigrants of the 1800s were in fact a technologically and militarily superior, overwhelming force of wealthy males who clearly conquered the British Americans of the time.

And you, and anyone with any degree of a nuances understanding of history, is still LOL'ing.  

In Praise of Roberta Estes and DNAeXplained.com

In a world of pseudo-science and echo chambers, a few blogs stick out for being mostly in touch with reality.  In the world of Ancient DNA, Dienekes, although less active than before, has pioneered much in the field of DNA, and still has many serious scientists who comment there.

In the world of DNA for Genealogy, one blog sticks out.  It is Roberta Estes' DNAeXplained.com.  Of all the blogs and websites dedicated to disseminating information about DNA, hers is consistently factual, science-based, and yet easy to understand. 

This scientist came across a few of her posts, and I daresay they are mandatory reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of their DNA.  Below are links and highlights:

"Determining Ethnicity Percentages"

Step 1:  Creation of the underlying population data base.
Don’t we wish this was as simple as it sounds.  It isn’t.  In fact, this step is the underpinnings of the accuracy of the ethnicity predictions.  The old GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) concept applies here. . . .

The third way to obtain this type of information is by inference.  Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe do some of this.  Ancestry released its V2 ethnicity updates this week, and as a part of that update, they included a white paper available to DNA participants.  In that paper, Ancestry discusses their process for utilizing contributed pedigree charts and states that, aside from immigrant locations, such as the United States and Canada, a common location for 4 grandparents is sufficient information to include that individuals DNA as “native” to that location.  Ancestry used 3000 samples in their new ethnicity predictions to cover 26 geographic locations.  That’s only 115 samples, on average, per location to represent all of that population.  That’s pretty slim pickins.  Their most highly represented area is Eastern Europe with 432 samples and the least represented is Mali with 16.  The regions they cover are shown below. . .

No matter which calculations you use relative to acceptable Margin of Error and Confidence Level, Ancestry’s sample size is extremely light. . . .
 

"Are You Native American?"

"having Haplogroup Origins and Ancestral Origins indicating Native American ancestry does not necessarily mean you are Native American or have Native American heritage. This is a very pervasive myth that needs to be dispelled. . . .

The good news is that more and more people are DNA testing.  The bad news is that errors in the system are tending to become more problematic, or said another way, GIGO – Garbage in, Garbage Out.

....

There are a very limited number of major haplogroups that include Native American results.  For mitochondrial DNA, they are A, B, C, D, X and possibly M.  I maintain a research list of the subgroups which are Native.  Each of these base haplogroups also have subgroups which are European and/or Asian.  The same holds true for Native American Y haplogroups Q and C.
In the Haplogroup Origins and Ancestral Origins, there are many examples where Non-Native haplogroups are assigned as Native American, such as haplogroup H1a below.  Haplogroup H is European...

One of the problems we have today is that because there are so many people who carry the oral history of grandmother being “Cherokee,” it has become common to “self-assign” oneself as Native.  That’s all fine and good, until one begins to “self-assign” those haplogroups as Native as well – by virtue of that “Native” assignment in the Family Tree DNA data base.  That’s a horse of a different color.

How Little We Know About Ancient DNA - Part II

Earlier this year, I posted a series of maps graphically depicting the (at that time) exhaustive list of Ancient DNA finds, mapped out for both time and space.

The post, while now a bit dated due to additional finds, is still worth examining.  When reading it, it should becomes very apparent to you, the concept in the title of this post: How Little We Know About Ancient DNA.

As you can see from the maps, it appears that people bearing certain Y Chromosome haplogroups "flew" across time and space.  And that certain parts of Europe had nobody in them until someone flew across the distances.  

Of course, this is impossible.  It simply reflects the fact that we continue to have immense gaps in skeletal finds and in our knowledge.

Most importantly, it shows that today's conventional wisdom, popular at echo chambers like the Anthrogenica boards, will certainly change tomorrow -- revealing the adherents to such theories to be akin to arrogant fraudsters, peddling certainty where none is scientifically warranted.

Recently, a poster at Anthrogenica, with the handle Tomenable, posted an excellent visualization of the same gaps in knowledge that I referenced.

You can view a list of aDNA finds here, in chart form, courtesy of Tomenable.

And even better, here is a chart, in chronological order, showing the same.

What does the chart show?   By applying *scientific* methods of taking things to their logical conclusions, and reducing our knowledge to a set of provable statements, you can easily see how little we know.

For starters, based on these chrono maps, it looks like Haplogroup C1 made it to Europe after I2.  Yet almost everyone, from the scientific community to the "citizen" scientists (their term) on Anthrogenica, agree that C1 is a rare, likely "Cro-Magnon" marker, that represents the very first humans out of Africa and into Europe.  On the other hand, it has been accepted for over a decade that Haplogroup I, notably I2, represents the second (or third) wave of the population of Europe, associated with the Gravettian dispersions.  

But again, this is *not* "what the aDNA shows."

Ask the wiseguys on Anthrogenica, or search their posts.  They express with certainty that C1 came first, followed by I2.  And it probably is true.  But it is NOT born out by the aDNA evidence.  (Yet).

However, the same group of people turn to the aDNA evidence (blindly) to express 100% confidence in other theories, for example, everything from the notion that R1b xV88 couldn't be found west of modern Poland until the Indo-European expansions.  (I find this notion laughable.)  

They also rely on the aDNA evidence to express 100% confidence in wild notions of sex selection that have more in common with dimestore novels than anything scientific.  The proponents of said theories also happen to be mostly males bearing R1b.  Yes folks, in a world where racial identity is taboo, any sense of ingroup-outgroup dynamics for Western Europeans has simply been transferred to tiny markers on one chromosome.

In other words, many of these folks blindly turn to our meager aDNA evidence to justify their pet theory du jour, but choose to ignore what the aDNA evidence shows, when convenient.  

They cite gaps in data (i.e., a lack of samples) as evidence for proving a negative, as if that was possible -- when they want to.

But they ignore the lack of samples when convenient, if it doesn't fit in their narrative for that time or place.  

Doubt them, they revert to the argument "well, the aDNA shows..." but they are more than willing to fill in gaps in aDNA when convenient.

It's already been a rough year for the arrogantly certain in Ancient DNA.  Notably, past theories on the dispersion of Haplogroup J2 have fallen by the wayside.  Theories posted on Anthrogenica just a couple months ago, and accepted by the echo chamber as gospel fact, have been called into serious doubt by recent academic papers.  

I've also posted repeatedly on how difference in culture and hyperlocal topography can affect what aDNA survives into modern times.  The easiest example is one tribe burying their dead, while another tribe cremates it.  Anyone who knows anything about written history understands that the reason why we don't have m(any) ethnic Roman skeletons is because they cremated their dead.  To those who don't grasp this concept, it would be as if the Romans, a powerful, numerous, colonizing, widespread, important society -- didn't exist.  

I can just see Anthrogenica in the year 2515: "but there are no Roman samples in aDNA," they would maintain adamantly.  Yes, you would reply.  But the Romans existed.

The point is simple: approach any theories explaining what happened before written history with caution.  There are major gaps in the record, and it is far, far too early to approach things with the smug certainty one sees on these boards.  

Look at the samples across time and space (geography).  Don't hide behind relative, subjective terms like "Mesolithic" and "Neolithic."  Instead, look at how Europe was populated, the way it was populated --- in gradations, over (real) time.  You, too, will notice "How Little We Know (Still) About aDNA."

What Is the Best and Most Accurate Ancestry Calculator (DNA Testing)?

What Is the Best and Most Accurate Ancestry or Admixture Calculator from DNA Testing?

We Review 23andme, AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), DNA.Land, Dodecad, Eurogenes, etc.

Judging from community discussions in online forums, "Admixture" tests, where a company or entity takes your raw DNA data, puts it into a calculator, and then purports to tell you where your ancestors came from -- these are all the rage.  It is not rare for seemingly educated individuals to post on the Internet sheer and utter nonsense about their results, for example, assuming that a calculator identified their ancestry with something close to 100% accuracy.

In the online world, there is no such thing as perfect privacy.  And in DNA, there is no such thing as 100% accuracy for ancestry calculators. 

This is because all people are admixed, but not all ethnic groups form part of the samples.  Put another way, if your ancestors come from a valley in Switzerland where no one has ever been tested, you might show up in a test as French, German, Italian, Austrian, but not Swiss. 

You might say to yourself that you have documented ancestry back to the dawn of time that you are from Switzerland.  You may match other Swiss people exactly.  But because the Swiss are indeed mixes of the groups above, and because there are no specific, micro-targeted Swiss samples in the hypothetical database that match you more closely than those other nationalities, the test would be woefully inaccurate to YOU.  After all, you don't want a test to tell you you might be Northern Italian, if you are Swiss.  (For that matter, do you NEED a test to tell you that?  See below.)

In the online privacy world, they've named protections that are scientifically the best (and do their job pretty darn well) "Pretty Good Privacy."  In the DNA world, all we can hope for is "Pretty Good Accuracy" -- ancestry calculators that are scientifically grounded, don't make claims beyond what they can really do, and ones that get the broad regions correct in the very least.

The coolest benefit about living in a college town (Berkeley for this blogger) is that there are a ton of people from all over the world, with pretty well-defined ancestry.  For example, that Danish exchange student with 500 years of documented ancestors in Denmark?  That's a good candidate for testing some of these calculators.  Enough friends of mine have taken DNA tests, and we've plugged the results in the calculators across several paysites (testing companies) like 23andme and AncestryDNA, and free calculators, like the ones available on Gedmatch.  Who came out on top?

By far, the best and most accurate ancestry calculator is on 23andme.   Like all good scientists, they are humble instead of full of hubris.  They don't profess to give you one set of results and say, "this is it."  Instead, they give you three different results: standard, conservative, and speculative.  Each is pretty darn accurate for most of the people we know who have tested there and other sites.  Bottom line: 23andme's "Ancestry Composition" feature is outstanding, and the best, most accurate one online we could find.

It is our opinion that the least accurate ancestry calculator is at the new site DNA.land.  And the one on FTDNA is a close second.  Both are terrible.  Almost everyone who used the feature on DNA.land reported that the calculator is way off; just not ready for prime time at time of writing this post.

How do these calculators work?  Well, remember, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that comes in.  It is worth to always remember the concept that computer programmers call "GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out."  What this means is that if the data on which a conclusion is based is faulty, the answer will also be faulty.  With calculators, this manifests itself two ways: with a shifted focus, or faulty or incomplete baseline data.

By a different focus, we mean: Several calculators, for example, the MDLP Ethnicity Calculator, also offered (with Eurogenes and Dodecad and Gedrosia) at Gedmatch, stands for Magnus Ducatiae Lituania Project.  As you might have guessed from its name, it focuses on the people from lands that used to form the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: places in Northeast Europe, including Poland, Estonia, etc. 

MDLP seeks to be very good at calculating ethnic tidbits of interest to those populations.  But is is good for determining the difference between, say, a Catalonian Spaniard and a Northern Italian?  No, it's actually quite bad on that front.  That's simply not its focus. 

Similarly, there are other calculators on Gedmatch that exist to focus on and cater to Asians, Africans, even mixed race folks.  And within European populations, you have other focuses, like Dodecad, which seems Grecocentric, for lack of a better word.  None of these will do that great outside their focus areas.  So take the results from those ones with a grain of salt, unless you happen to hail from their regions of focus.

Don't believe that?  Think I'm being extreme?  If you are European, try putting your data in a calculator that is focused on another population.  Like the East Asian-focused calculators.  It won't tell you that you are NOT East Asian.  It will tell you which East Asian population you resemble the most.  To be clear: if all a calculator has is East Asian samples, a European will be told he or she is Japanese or Chinese.  This same concept applies within European focused calculators at the regional level.

In terms of bad baselines, recall the Swiss example above.  Europe is filled with micropopulations that exhibit a high degree of population homogeneity (a little inbred, to use the pejorative term).  If a calculator does not have a sample from your micropopulation (the narrow region where your ancestor lived for millennia), then you will get a faulty reading. 

Put simply (to use a French example): It's a big country.  Normans are not Basques, Provencals are not Bretagnes, etc.  That is why the best calculators are HONEST.  23andme discloses quite readily that for the huge populations in the middle of Europe (French, Germans, but also Benelux countries, etc.), it cannot spot the DNA with certainty 92% of the time. 

Does the 23andme website have any drawbacks?  Sure it does.  But they are minor compared to the others. 

First, its "Countries of Ancestry" feature is not what it could be.  But it's important to understand three things:  (1) This is NOT their ancestry calculator, but another feature entirely, so perhaps it's unfair perhaps for us to even review it in this space.  (2) It's experimental, and they state that.  (3) They are wisely phasing it out.  What was the problem with that feature?  Well, it gave you the list of countries of people who have the most matches with you.  Let's say for example you are half Italian, half Polish (a common mix in Chicago).  In other parts of Chicago, another common mix is half Polish, half Irish.  For whatever reason, people of Irish heritage have tested themselves at far greater numbers than the others. Your Polish DNA would overlap (match) with the people who reported they were half Polish, half Irish.  And this feature would then tell you that "a high percentage of the people who have DNA similar to yours are from Ireland."  Do you understand?  It's a huge problem, especially for smaller populations, especially because so many Americans are now half this, half that.  It's just not that edifying then.

23andme also suffers from the same sample issues as many of the other ancestry calculators.  For example, 85% of Italian Americans (TRANSLATION: potential customers, since most people who test are from Britain or the US) hail from just 3 regions in the deep south of Italy: Campania (Naples), Calabria, and Sicily.  Yet the population samples that most of these websites use are from Tuscany.  Even though Dante tried to meld them, Tuscans are not Sicilians and vice-versa. 

Often, these calculators when they see Sicilian or rural Southern Italian genes, they, in effect, say: we don't know what you are! you are kind of Italian but you also resemble, a little bit, people from Cyprus or Jews.  So they give an odd result.  And then you have someone tested who says, "I might be Jewish."  No.  The answer is that your people were not included in the data-set by which the baseline was developed.  If they were, the calculator would recognize you as a run of the mill Sicilian.

All online ancestry alculators also suffer from lack of inter-operability and non-standardized terms.  For example, among the calculators on Gedmatch, some use the term "Caucasian" to mean "generalized European" (which is how it used in common parlance, of course).  Others use it to mean, the specific, like, from Soviet Georgia, Armenia, etc.

Here's the bottom line: don't expect any ethnicity or ethnic-origins calculator to be 100% correct.  Don't expect new insights if you have confirmed records.  In other words, if you look just like your dad (you're not a bastard), and you're not adopted, and you have records going back centuries -- why do you need an ethnicity calculator to begin with?

These admixture tests can help if you were adopted, and want to have a sense of where to start.  But keep in mind, the largest plurality of Americans come from German heritage, and yet the best currently cannot identify German DNA 92% of the time.

Avoid the mythology and those who oversimplify.  There are reliable sources out there in genetic genealogy, like Debbie Kennett -- and there are a lot of charlatans.  Be careful whenever someone oversimplifies to the point of exaggeration, falls into stereotypes, or tells you what you want to hear.  With DNA as with everything, the most parsimonious answer is often the best.  The exotic is often wrong.

As the science improves, you can't go wrong using the Standard or Conservative setting on the 23andme Ancestry Composition test.

READ MORE:

DNA Testing Is Often Inaccurate

Summary of Recent Pieces on the Topic

The Percentages Are Off

 

The Top Ten Myths of Genetic Genealogy, Archaeogenetics, and DNA Testing (10 through 7)

Any scientist visiting the websites or online forums of Eupedia, Anthrogenica, or Apricity (to name a few) is mortified.  The amount of shorthand claims, pseudo-science, pop-anthropology, and myths perpetuated there are truly astonishing, and quite sad.  Below we list the Top Ten myths of this world.  We will update the post over time to link to specific offenders, so you can share the laughs we shared.

Don't be an idiot.  Learn these myths, and for the love of all things holy, don't propagate them!

10.  If you are of Scandinavian heritage (Denmark, Norway, Sweden), you are a "Viking."  

Example post: "my gma is half Swedish and I am very adventurous; must be the Viking LOL."  

Vikings were the marauders sailing from Scandinavia who invaded many parts of Europe during the years of approximately 600 AD - 1200 AD.   Those of Scandinavian blood are emphatically NOT "Viking."  The Vikings were the adventurous ones who left.  Scandinavians are descended of the ones who stayed home.  

While Scandinavians may share common origin with the Vikings dating back 1500 years, technically it's not correct to say they are descended from them.  And to the extent there is a gene for adventure-seeking, violence, or the so-called, "warrior" gene, it's more probable that the ones who stayed in Scandinavia (as fishermen and barley farmers) do NOT have that gene.

Many Russians, Ukrainians, English, Scots, Calabrians, Sicilians, and Northern French have a better claim to be "directly descended from Vikings."  Sorry.



9.  You can determine by a test on Eurogenes or Gedmatch the precise percentages of EEF-ANE-WHG that you are.

For the uninitiated, these acronyms stand for "Early European Farmer," "Ancient North Eurasian," and "Western [European] Hunter Gatherer."

Example post: "Username: SteppeOverlord  EEF: 21.345%, ANE: 19.876% WHG 58.779."

It's important to note that these hypothetical populations were reconstructed from...ONE SAMPLE EACH.  Thus, when you take the Eurogenes EEF ANE WHG test, you are comparing yourself to each of three skeletons: the EEF is the LBK sample found in Stuttgart, Germany.  The ANE is the Mal'ta boy found in Siberia.  The WHG is the Loschbour skeleton found in Belgium.  Citation.

These populations were themselves admixed, especially the Stuttgart sample.  It's not accurate to use one exemplar to represent an entire group, especially ones with the huge geographical ranges of the acronym populations.  It's much more accurate to say that you tested whatever percentage in common with Loschbour, Mal'ta, or Stuttgart.  

 Many of the genes inherited so many generations ago will be the result of identical by state, (more or less coincidence, or breeding back, in a way), than Identical By Descent.  Citation.  Europeans are a homogenous lot, and these tests don't therefore reveal much, if anything, and the terminology, turned to shorthand, stinks.


8.  Admixture percentages are due to a historical event.

Example post: "OMG!  I am English, Irish, German, and Polish.  But Dodecad says I have 6% Siberian; this must prove the legend in my family that my great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess!"

Or:

"I am South Italian.  But Eurogenes says I have 12% southwest Asian.  Must be the Greek blood!"

People tend to overestimate historical events (i.e., those we know about due to past events being recorded in writing), but tend to underestimate non-historical events.  This is a recent-ness bias that comes from a little knowledge about history, often expressed in shorthand, (i.e., South Italy was Greek).

It is however, almost always not true.  In the first example above: many Europeans, especially Northern Europeans, test positive for some Siberian/ANE/even Native-American-like ancestry, but this is almost certainly the result of ancient Admixture from the first Indo-Europeans from the steppe, who had substantial Asian-like ancestry.  For the second example: the people who populated Italy in prehistoric times were descended in many cases from the first farmers, who came from the southeast fringes of Europe.  Such signals in modern ancestry are way more likely to indicate ancient admixture from population sources with common ancestry to historical populations.

Sorry, but the boring is almost always more true than the interesting.



7.  People from places with many years of recorded history are more admixed than people with less history.

example post: "If you are of South Italian ancestry, you're probably part Roman, Greek, Scandinavian, Arab, and Jewish."

This one is so obvious it is painful to have to post.  But it's the corollary of number 8 above: a little historical knowledge being dangerous.

Imagine two regions: Region 1 is fairly remote, but has had extensive writing for 2600 years, and every marauder, political shift, kingdom, invasion, battle, language spoken, and petty dukedom is recorded in glorious detail.  Imagine another region, Region 2, that has had extensive writing and civilization for only about 1100 years.  There are large gaps in knowledge of what happened there, because of the lack of historians.

I just described Basilicata, Italy and Hesse, Germany.  Yet so many online "mytholographers" perpetuate the notions that people like Italians, Jews, and Greeks (i.e., those with 25+ centuries of intense recorded history) are more admixed than those without such extensive documentation (i.e., Germans, French, etc.)

You can't escape this, on any online forum, people speculating on exotic sources in Italian ancestry, and almost no one does this for Germans and French.

Just because we don't know who was invading another area during prehistory or the Dark Ages, does it mean it didn't happen?  Just because we don't know the name of the king who pillaged a territory, does it make him any less historical?  Because there is no Trojan War story for Hesse, Germany, does it mean there was no warfare, invasion, or exotic influences?

The French and Germans are so "admixed" (i.e., generic European) that 23andme cannot identify their DNA 92% of the time.  Citation.  Yet the poor Greeks have to tolerate in every discussion, excruciating detail and speculation about every single exotic strain in their blood.

Aside from the remotest, hard-to-get-to, isolated regions of Europe (Finns, Northwest Irish, Basques, and Sardinians), everyone has been invaded, repeatedly, and everyone is very very admixed.  The paradigm, of focusing only on certain peoples for this, has to change, because it's simply not accurate.

Check back soon for the rest of the Top 10 list.