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?
In: 5
The way it works is that these companies only look at a handful of genes that tend to vary with different groups of people, and then they compare your results to their own reference database of people from some region to see if it matches. This works because discrete populations tend to have similar genetic mutations because for most of human history until very recently, people never traveled very far and mostly reproduced with other people nearby. In other words, People from the Arabian peninsula for example never really traveled to Ireland or southeast Asia or whatever to reproduce, so all of those mutations remained in the roughly the same populations of people.
It’s also important to remember that these tests aren’t telling the nationality of your ancestors – there’s no way to conclusively prove that, it’s simply telling you what area of the world your ancestors were *most* *likely* from. So for your facts, an ancestry test won’t know that your grandmother was born in India, it will just say she has DNA mutations consistent with people born in Britain. And your ancestry test may or may not include results from South Africa or Australia depending on whether or not your grandfather and father were from there. If your family is all of English descent, your test will say they regardless of where people lived.
These tests also aren’t particularly accurate for a number of reasons, but that’s a different issue.
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