Genetics, History, DNA, and Genealogy Information

Readers of this blog know that we like science.  That we hate popular-culture fairy tales and stereotypes.  And that we love to correct awfu...

Thought of the day: So many men (who coincidentally bear R1b) love to think that R1b is the lineage of kings and conquerors.  In reality, th...

Long-time readers of this blog know that we have reminded our readers that ethnic calculators or heritage estimates based on DNA tests are n...

Europeans are not that diverse genetically.  There is less genetic diversity from Sweden to Spain than there is within any given African vil...

Kristen V. Brown is back with an excellent piece for Bloomberg, on home DNA testing , that is remarkably astute for a piece in the popular m...

Here's a great graphic that I was made aware of.  It shows Italy's ancient borders, during the Classical Era, basically the dawn of ...

MyHeritage ethnicity estimates seem to be THE WORST of all the major testing companies. We've received dozens of emails from people of...

Judy G. Russell, the Legal Genealogist, is out with a fantastic new post on AncestryDNA's new ethnicity estimate percentages. As she w...

A great study just came out that confirms what many of us have noticed.  Increasingly, instead of dude being proud of their ethnic group (an...

You go to take a cholesterol test, and your doctor, very thorough, sends you to four different labs.  One reports your cholesterol is 200, o...

The media has blasted headlines this week that show an incredible ignorance of DNA testing for ethnic percentages.  One, which could have be...

Methodology: We ran exhaustive tests of several commercial and free DNA-testing labs and ethnicity calculators.   To test the sites, we...

23andme discloses right off the bat that it cannot identify German or French ancestry 92% of the time. Ancestry doesn't seem to be abl...

As we've noted before, there are a bunch of charlatans in the world of Ancient DNA.  The worst offender, perhaps, is a pseudonymous Belg...

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

When Is A Conquest Not A Conquest? You are a scientist living in the year 4017, specializing in the ancient civilizations that existed be...

Ah, if they were all as good as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  The pioneer of interdisciplinary studies, and a Renaissance man, he would thorou...

Many of you already know the following concepts.  Humans intuit a sense of community and family with those with whom they are related.  This...

When a commercial DNA testing site like Ancestry.com or 23andme or FTDNA tests your DNA, they do not know which snippet came from which of y...

From a piece by Faye Flam in none other than Bloomberg, comes this wonderfully succinct nugget that expresses something that readers of this...

Just a couple months ago, in the context of the peopling of Ireland, I emphasized on Eupeida (and here) how important it is to put all the ...

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...

I have discovered that very very very few people know this, so it is worth posting. The different testing companies, 23andme, Ancestry, FT...

Lara Cassidy et al. just put out a paper that injects a bit of welcome science into the world of R1b fantasy theories.  Those theories, of m...