I have family from all over the world, including a white Grandmother born in India from white English parents, she then moved to South Africa where she had my mother, who immigrated to Australia where she had me.
I can’t think of a logical reason a DNA test would actually reveal that-
I’m under the impression that this is just a glorified melanin gene tracker? How would a DNA test be able to determine ancestry at all, considering that we kinda just put lines on a map and said that made them unique? How does the dirt around you effect the dna in a traceable way? And if they can’t, what do they actually do and what’s the point of them?
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A DNA test wouldn’t be able to tell you that your grandmother was born in India, or that your mother lived in South Africa. How it works is that there are certain genes (generally not associated with a certain visible thing like melanin) that is very common in a specific location.
For example, if you have a sequence in your DNA, let’s call this sequence ABC, and you live in Kerala, India. If we sequence a million Kerelans, we find that only 0.05 % of people have ABC. On the other hand, if we sequence a million Greeks and we find that something like 20% of Greeks have ABC, there’s a strong possibility that ABC gene originated in Greece, and that you got it from a Greek ancestor.
Why do Greeks have it and not Keralans? At some point, hundreds or thousands of years ago, a random mutation happened in some Greek dude. It affected absolutely nothing, his hair didn’t change colour, he didn’t get shorter, nothing. It did not prevent him from getting married and having a kid. So he did, some of his kids all had ABC. Then their kids had some ABC. And so on and so on. Slowly, a large amount of the population has ABC.
People back then didn’t have airplanes, travelling far took very very long and was very dangerous. Really the only way to travel for long times was to be an explorer or a soldier. So the Greek dudes descendents generally stayed around Greece.
Maybe one soldier joined Alexander’s campaign and married an Indian woman, creating a small population of people with ABC. Maybe a Greek woman was captured as a slave by slave traders and ended up escaping to Kerala where she got married and had kids with ABC.
So we could say, despite living in India, being born in India, looking “Indian,” you would carry ABC hidden in your genes giving evidence that you have some Greek ancestry.
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