is there some sort of cutoff point where scientists decided “everyone in Ireland 100,000 years ago will be considered 100% Irish”?
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Technically you could say we’re all African or just “Homo Sapien” and not bother to subcategorize from there, it’s really down to semantics and how different you decide the DNA has to be (which is arbitrary). Populations around the globe have been separated for enough time that they’ve developed different traits, reflecting slight genetic differences. Being “Irish” vs. “Canadian” is really more of a socio-political and historical argument, based on how populations have moved around and where political borders have been drawn. Based purely on DNA, it is extremely difficult to delineate distinct groups of people, because humans have always been traveling between populations and sharing DNA between them. But you can get a DNA test and it can tell you “your ancestors probably lived in X, Y, Z places within the last 500 years” or something like that. You can imagine human populations and their associated DNA as lots and lot of circles overlapping each other like thousands of venn diagrams.
As a biologist, I caution that we have to be careful when deciding how DNA separates humans into groups because it gets muddled up with a lot of bad historical arguments for racial categorizations.
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