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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Answer 1

To some extent it’s arbitrary, and I can’t really speak to what the “cutoff time” is..

But maybe this will help: if you go back far enough, all dogs are related. They all belong to the same species, yet they’re wildly different in terms of both phenotype and genotype. We acknowledge that at some point certain breeds of dogs became genetically isolated (through breeding.) With humans, this genetic drift can often correlate pretty strongly with geographic isolation. People tend to reproduce most commonly with the people around them, so it tends to be the case that we can identify genetic commonalities between people whose ancestors inhabited a certain area.

But if it all seems just *ridiculously* arbitrary.. well, historically speaking, hominids found themselves so isolated in the past that we literally consider them a different species (Neanderthals.) Yet some people alive today have Neanderthal DNA. The very fact that the two “species” were able to interbreed conflicts (to my understanding) with the concept of speciation itself, but nonetheless, there exist sufficient enough differences that we can identify them.

At the end of the day it’s not something we need to obsess over. Really, what does it mean to be “Swedish?” My ancestors immigrated to the US primarily from Ireland and Sweden, but that’s just where they lived. Really my “Irish” ancestors seem to have come from Scotland, and my “Swedish” ancestors seem to have come from Finland.

I will say that tracing it all back to Africa seems to be an oversimplification though.