I’m adopted. I did one of those kits and actually ended up finding my birth mother, and it’s 100% her. her side of the family is 50% germanic and 50% english. my test results show me as german, romanian, polish, and ukrainian.
I guess what I’m asking is, how can I not have any english in my dna results? mathematically I can see it possible but it seems pretty crazy.
In: Biology
**ELI5:**
Your DNA is like a book hundreds of pages long with parts written in different languages. “Ancestry” companies pick a number, let’s say 100, words spread throughout the book and look up which language they are in. Then they make statistics about which languages came up at which percentage.
As you may know, there are words that are the same in several languages (e.g. “will die” means something totally different in English and German, but it’s written the same), this also happens with DNA, so unless you picked some pretty unique words you won’t be able to figure it out.
**tl;dr:**
The companies only check a small sample of the DNA, the rest is disregarded. This small sample might be biased.
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