Have your ever done a DNA test? What were your results?

pinkypinky wrote: »

Unfortunately, ethnicity results are only guaranteed accurate on a continental level at this stage.

They can be quite geographically accurate within that. An average Southern Italian is going show differences to a Swede, or an Irish person. A Japanese subtle differences to a Chinese or Viet. In Africa with her incredibly genetic diversity even more populations can be discerned. Hell they can even track geographical differences in extinct archaic human populations. IE a Spanish Neandertal is going to show subtle local differences when compared to a German one. Though I agree 100% that level of detail is not going to come from the Ancestry type places. They're far more aimed at New World American populations and customers eager to show they're [insert nation here]-American and the results tend to reflect that.

I've never taken a full genetics test and no way in hell would I give what amounts to my instruction manual to a commercial company where it could easily affect things like health insurance etc. And this is only the early days, fast forward twenty years and things could get worrying.

That said I know a geneticist(who held the same attitude to these commercial tests) and he did test me for archaic human stuff and it turned out I have quite high Neandertal admixture, especially for Ireland as we tend to have low levels here(contrary to 19th century English Punch cartoons). The interesting thing about that stuff is you could have ten people in a room with say 2% Neandertal admixture, but they could all have slightly different sequences. Asians and Europeans have very different sequences. And these are genes coding for actual traits, like blood clotting, immune system stuff. It's spread pretty wide throughout the modern human genome. Some populations have some even earlier archaic genes going on, like Homo Erectus stuff. It does show how incredibly complex our human story is and incredibly fascinating with it. The are you French, or Italian, or Irish is but the tip of the iceberg. There's the example of the stone age skeleton dug up in England(Cheddar gorge?) and when they sequenced the genes from the long dead person they found a living genetic connection to a local schoolteacher bloke. I mean, WTF? How cool is that?