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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This is a semantic issue, if you define nationality/ethnicity in terms of ancestry from 100,000 years ago then sure. In practice people don’t trace their ancestry back so far, and it’s usually more on the order of a few hundred years at most. On those time scales describing everyone as African would be misleading and unhelpful.
I’d also like to point out that the difference in genetic material between a totally isolated population like the Sentinelese, and you… is almost 0. We’re a single species, we all can interbreed, we’re all painfully similar. The fact that where we’re born and some very surface-level morphological differences carry enormous social weight, doesn’t make them genetically significant.
Edit: A lot of people are talking about mutations, and I just want to emphasize that the sum total of genetic differences between a genetically isolated group like aboriginal Australians (isolated for up to 50k years) and the queen of England is virtually nil. We’re talking percentages of percentages. To illustrate this keep in mind that all breeds of dogs, from toy poodles to cane corso, are more closely related to each other than any of them are to wolves. The differences between domesticated dogs account for less than .2% of their DNA.
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