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
They go by matches against the profiles of local populations, so the more data they have the better the match. For instance, much of my ancestry came from Ireland, and the test matched not just for Ireland but for the local area most of my lot came from. They have lots of data for Ireland. Matches for other areas of my ancestry were more general – Scandinavia as a whole for one chunk, West Africa for another bit (part-black great-grandmother) and so on.
One issue with this is that the matches are compared to current populations. Most of the movement of the last two centuries has been from a few areas (Europe, China, India). As you go further back you need a different technique, as repeated small very-long-distance movements bleed genetically into local populations, altering the profile.
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