Comments on: Finding out who your "ancestors" were via DNA

By: a.l.

a.l. — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:48:53 +0000

I paid for the Family Tree DNA mtDNA HV1 and HV2 tests back when they were more expensive.
a) I don’t think Family Tree DNA intentionally promises anything other than what it delivers. The problem is that a lot of people are scientifically illiterate, not that Bennett Greenspan gets up and says all women in the K haplogroup look like Queen Katrina of 50,000 B.C., or anything terrible like that.
b) There is something really, really touching about getting my M* (or whatever) results back and realizing that I got my mtDNA pattern — basically, a genetic bracelet — from some woman who must have lived in Asia 50,000 years ago. And, in turn, that I got the mtDNA itself from some little microbe that was crawling around hundreds of millions of years ago. Of course, I got all of my other DNA from other people, but “M Mom” is, in effect, the one I have the picture of.
c) In some cases, the results may tell an interesting story. Example: my matrilineal ancestors were Jews from Belarus, but my HV1 type seems to be Central Asian. There are a handful of other people with Jewish ancestry who’ve been tested and have the same haplotype. As far as I can tell, the only other people who share our HV1 type and have their results on the Web are Chinese. One explanation I’ve come up with is that maybe I’m descended from a Chinese woman who somehow went west on the Silk Road with a Jewish trader around the time of Genghis Khan. Maybe the real story is more boring, but a girl can dream.
d) The more people get tested and put their results on the Web, the better testing will work.
Of course, the draw back is that someone mean will use all this to breed an army of mutant cannibal clones who will eat all of us, but that’s life.

By: sdanielmorgan

sdanielmorgan — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 17:21:32 +0000

I have another, less scientific hypothesis:
what if Goff’s mom had a brief fling with an infamous Scandanavian named Hjalmar Andersen at Oslo in 1952? Goff is 46, so you just never know…*wink*

By: razib

razib — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:32:35 +0000

jacob, perhaps. it seems that one problem is, to be glib, people conflat phylogeny with morphology. they don’t conceive of the power of selection to reshape phenotype over a few thousand years.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:18:15 +0000

Part of the problem is that most non-scientists don’t understand that the majority of genetic variation has no effect on phenotype. If you find out that you share the same mitochondial haplotype as the founder of some particular female lineage, most people think that must really MEAN something, in terms of their own innate physiological or psychological qualities. Also, people don’t realize how large the human genome is, and many probably assume that a strech of DNA a few kilobases long is a significant portion.