On Monday, May 30, 2016 at 6:50:10 PM UTC-7, Stewart Baldwin via wrote: > Based on my autosomal DNA, the "My Origins" page at > FamilyTreeDNA shows my ancestry as 60% British Isles, 31% Western and > Central Europe, 6% Eastern Europe, and 3% Middle East, which isn't that > far from what I would have guessed from my own research, although I have > no idea where the Eastern European or Middle Eastern would come from. These last categories are the same as with my uncle's analysis. About 3/4 or it was reasonable (if you posit that North German shows up in their analysis as Scandinavian), and the final 1/4 (Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, all with huge error bars) is complete nonsense. The problems are highlighted by the Jefferson Y. The best known modern bearers in the US are socially African-American and genetically 'mixed-race', while it came to America in someone who was unambiguously English, yet it belongs to a haplogroup that is commonly referred to as being a marker for Jewish male-line ethnicity, even though it occurs at no higher frequency in Mizrahi Jews than in neighboring non-Jewish populations throughout the Middle East. The problem is that since the last glacial maximum human populations have not been isolated enough that any particular marker is exclusive to a single group, and the attempt to overlay individual SNP sets onto geographic regions that are all mixed at different proportions is statistically dubious. Along these lines, there is a new analysis of Britain that is to be published that shows there is a significant genetic strain missing from the current model. There has been a century-long debate over how much Celt vs how much Old Saxon ancestry contributed to the current Englishman, but the amount of 'steppe' ancestry in southeast Britain is higher than in either Celts or Old Saxons. Somehow another bloodline found its way in there. There is some speculation that it was non-Celt French brought by the Anglo-Normans, but I have to wonder if it isn't a remnant of the legions. As Mr. Tinney points out, though, this is not genealogy. taf

On Monday, May 30, 2016 at 8:09:56 PM UTC-7, taf wrote: > > Along these lines, there is a new analysis of Britain that is to be > published that shows there is a significant genetic strain missing from > the current model. There has been a century-long debate over how much > Celt vs how much Old Saxon ancestry contributed to the current Englishman, > but the amount of 'steppe' ancestry in southeast Britain is higher than in > either Celts or Old Saxons. Sorry - that should have been that the 'steppe' ancestry is lower - that something must have diluted it in England. taf