Genetic ‘Adam never met Eve’

Testing is being done on indigenous populations for free. However, there have been some difficulties, e.g. in New Zealand. The first I heard about the project was a report in the New Zealand Herald about the Maori being reluctant to take part. See for example here and
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/location/story.cfm?l_id=148&ObjectID=10338311
(that one won’t come up as a link for some reason).

They “know” their roots, and regard this as “scientific imperialism”. I think there may be similar problems with other populations. This article mentions a group called Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, who have similar concerns for native American populations. Hopefully enough people will volunteer to take part to ensure the study has sufficient data.

Still, a century spans about five generational jumps, and the whole back to the 70000 years bottleneck (or whathever) is 2800 gene jumps, and perhaps only about 1000 meme jumps.

1) Is $100 a fair price? Doing PCR certainly won’t cost that much per sample, although I’m sure there are other costs for analysis and running the project.

2) Won’t there be a problem of over- or under-representation of some populations by collecting samples from people who can afford and are willing to pay $100?

3) How useful is it to collect samples from non-native people of America or Australia, whose populations migrated very recently and have been mixing? Are they going to be categorized just as Americans/Austrarians of unspecified ancestry? Or are they going to be categorized as English, Irish, Italian, African etc. to understand migration of these sub-populations? What should people of mixed ancestries do?

4) I guess getting information on ancestry of a population is different from getting information on ancestry of an individual. Suppose I have a genetic marker that is rare among my ethnic group. It’s difficult to know if this particular case means that one of my recent ancestors came from outside of the group or that my ancestors were rare carriers of the marker in the group. I can imagine that you can tell more about the population than an individual using statistics. But I suspect that many people who participate in this project are more interested in their particular ancestry (”my ancestors came from X and Y.”) than, say, how English and Scandinavians are related as populations.

Is this really all about science, or is this also a business?

Even though I doubt this about today’s world, it probably won’t be many more centuries until someone (maybe, in fact, a European from the past few thousand years) dethrones the current MRCA, who I’d guess had had about a 50,000 year reign.

By the way, does anyone know which *living* person is thought to have the most living descendants? Any guesses? There must be a pretty short short-list.