Considering everyone’s related uf we go back far enough ti our african origins, at which point can ancestry tests and the like go “ah you are 20% scandinavian”? Were is the cutoff time period or how does this work?

Question

I may not be asking the rifht questions but i just dont get this at all

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In: 5

Answer 1

You only need to go back 40 generations or so for absolutely everyone in the world to be related to absolutely everyone who ever lived.

The bit about your origin from DNA is largely just horoscoping. You happen to have a section of DNA that’s “present” in most Scandinavian populations, so they say that’s your history. The number of those kinds of sections that you can limit to an area, and which have any kind of correlation to your ancestry (my family name is historically Irish, nobody I know in my family has ever lived in Ireland, even as a baby), is minimal. But if, say, out of the ones they claim to identify, 1/5th of them are “from” Scandinavian countries, they say “hey, you’re 20% Scandinavian!” It’s largely nonsense. They could just as well say “Hey, you’re 90% lettuce!” and be just as accurate (but, of course, you’re not actually 90% lettuce even though you share 90% of some common sections of your DNA with a lettuce).

They’re selling you a product, the main element of which is you going to your friends and saying “Hey, I just discovered that I have Swedish ancestry, who knew?!”. It’s a water-cooler moment they’re selling you, not strict science.