To divide people into groups, Platt told Live Science, researchers make decisions: For example, they'll say, the members of this group of people have all lived in Morocco for at least several generations, so we'll add their DNA to the reference libraries for Moroccans. A person who calls herself an Italian today might have called herself a Gaul a couple thousand years ago and gone to war against the Romans. People move around, get together and separate. But that's not what human history looks like.
Others came from that spot over there, and they were Middle Eastern. Some of your ancestors came from this spot, it says, and they were Central Asian. Log onto a website like Nat Geo's and it chunks the world up into different pieces. "So, you can't really say that somebody is 92.6 percent descended from this group of people when that's not really a thing." "Ancestry itself is a funny thing, in that humans have never been these distinct groups of people," said Alexander Platt, an expert in population genetics at Temple University in Philadelphia. Scientists who specialize in this sort of research told Live Science that none of this is all that surprising, though they noted that the fact that the companies couldn't even produce consistent results from samples taken from the same person was a bit weird. But probably (almost definitely) not.īut, of course, I already knew all that.
And maybe somewhere in my family tree there was a Middle Easterner, or a Native American. The rest of my ancestors in recent memory probably also lived in Europe - though who really knows where. So, nine DNA tests later, I learned this about myself: I'm a whole lot Ashkenazi Jewish.
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