“My father has warned people about the dangers of experimenting with DNA viruses for years. You processed that information through your addled, paranoid infrastructure.” – 12 Monkeys
I come from the land of the ice and snow . . . but this is Denali. My ice and snow is probably closer to Denmark?
So, my mother-in-law gave me a DNA testing kit for Christmas. I’m pretty sure she wanted to verify that I was human. It turns out I am at least 94% human. There’s 2% “Other” (I’m thinking bear) and 4% “Filler” – whatever that is.
The kit that she got for me was from Ancestry.com. It’s a fairly simple kit – there’s a tube that you spit into. It takes about ¼ teaspoon of saliva to fill it up to the line. Since Ancestry sold over 1.5 million of these kits over the Thanksgiving weekend, that’s 375,000 teaspoons of spit headed to Lehi, Utah in a four day period. That’s 488.281092 gallons (150,000 liters) of spit in just 4 days! I guess they need the water in Utah.
How long does it take to test all that spit? In my case, not very long. I put the spit in the mail the first week of January, and it arrived there in five days. They started processing it two weeks later, and about 10 days after that my DNA test results were in. They sure do know how to handle spit in Lehi.
The results are:
- Europe West 40%
- Great Britain 24%
- Ireland/Scotland/Wales 17%
- Scandinavia 17%
Low Confidence Regions
- Finland/Northwest Russia 1%
- Iberian Peninsula < 1%
None of these were a surprise to me. Based on family history and stories, I’d expected just a bit more Danish than 17%, but if you look at the “Europe West” it overlaps Denmark quite a bit. Additionally, the stories that I’ve been told about the McWilder side seem about right. I wasn’t surprised about the Finland or Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese), but those numbers are pretty small.
What is 1%? It’s roughly one direct ancestor back in ~1790 (for me – if you were younger, it would be later, if you were older, it would be sooner, and if your great great great great grandparents had kids young or late, that would skew it as well). But 1790 seems about right.
The DNA data is put into a computer simulator that pulls genetic information into a model and computes how yours matches up against various populations. Are there margins for error? Sure. And are there different models? Absolutely. Once you’ve taken the test, you can upload your data to GEDMATCH.com for free and run it against a huge batch of models. An overwhelming number of models. Really, an overwhelming number of models without guidance. So, I went to look on the Internet, and they suggested I use the Eurogenes K12 model – it models against twelve European populations and produced an output (for me) that looks like:
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Looking at this in a pie chart, it looks like this:
For Southwest Asian, think the area around the Caucuses and the Middle East. A different version of the test suggested that this might be Ashkenazi Jewish, to the tune of 1.9%. Mazel Tov!
This would indicate that around 1765 that the Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother Grandpa McWilder talked about is real. And I saw another chart from a Norwegian dude (online) that look nearly identical to mine as far as proportions go. So, yeah, pretty Scandinavian.
But that takes it back to about 256 ancestors. Seems like as you go back in time, the number of ancestors that you have is manageable. So, let’s go back to, say, 400AD, about the time the Roman Empire fell. What, would we need a school auditorium? An NFL® stadium to hold them all?
No. There are 4.6 quintillion ancestors needed. By comparison, there are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth (an estimate I saw online).
Huh?
Well, we certainly know that that many people weren’t around, so what happened? Well, have you ever been to a village in upstate New York where all of the residents looked . . . similar? All around the world, there are little isolated villages that have villagers that look the same. Or similar enough that you can see they’re all related.
If you haven’t watched Game of Thrones . . . his parents are brother and sister. Spoiler!
Because they are. There weren’t 4.6 quintillion ancestors, because many of them were duplicated. While there have been a lot of marriages between second cousins, (Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers thinks that 80% or more of marriages in history were between second cousins or closer) after about 1860 you saw the practice come under (in the United States) a rather wide degree of disapproval. In Europe it had been discouraged since the days of Rome, but the 24 of the 50 United States have laws against first cousins marrying. To my surprise. I would have expected the number to be 100% since it is so very icky.
Around the world, first cousin marriage is tolerated in lots of places, but actively encouraged in the Middle East (especially Pakistan).
But that gets us out of needing 4.6 quintillion people (each) to produce you and I.
And those villages produce populations where genes are sampled from. The best I can figure is that it gives a good idea of where people came from in the last 500 years – it won’t tell you in great detail that you were related to Julius Caesar (because you aren’t).
Ancestry.com indicated that I have Mormon pioneer ancestors.
Five years ago, this would have surprised me. But at a family funeral, a relative I’d never met filled me in on the family story.
“Sit down, John.”
Turns out that one of my ancestors had been sent down to Mexico by Brigham Young (an early Mormon leader) to set up a polygamist Mormon colony.
Yeah. Back only five or so generations my great-great-great-great grandfather was zooming across international borders so that he could have multiple wives.
I had no idea, as I’m not Mormon, and NO one in my family had ever talked to me about that. But it’s certainly written in the DNA and confirmed through my Mormon Aunt.
Now I have to go see this.
But it makes sense that Ancestry.com has that data, because Ancestry.com is largely a Mormon venture, just like familysearch.org, which is a free genealogical website. The familysearch.org database might just be a bit suspect as you go thousands of years into the past, as you can go back to find Adam and Eve on it. And Julius Caesar (who had no kids). But it did show I was related to Charles Martel (Martel means “The Hammer”) who was so tough that he thought the title of “King” wasn’t enough for him. And I believe that, because men of status had lots and lots and lots of babies.
Genghis Kahn, who died in 1227, is the ancestor of 0.5% of the men alive on Earth today. Which was probably due to this (disputed) quote:
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”
And, as the grandfather of 0.5% of all the men on Earth . . . he apparently held a lot of wives. Maybe he was a Mormon, too?
