On May 22, 2014, at 6:17 PM, kincaid-request@rootsweb.com wrote: > 3. Re: SNP testing update (Peter Kincaid) > Message: 3 > Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 15:44:00 -0300 > From: "Peter Kincaid" <7kincaid@nb.sympatico.ca> > Subject: Re: [KINCAID] SNP testing update > To: <kincaid@rootsweb.com> > Message-ID: <FCF3CC918C8D48F4986C6906137551D3@BonniePC> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; > reply-type=original > > My choice of AAVs comes from looking at the AAVs of the previous > groups we spawned from. We would be mutating away from them, > not towards them from a vacuum. This is where you and I differ. You > are looking at the Kincaid project as a self-contained or isolated group. > I am taking into consideration where we came from. AAVs are useful, but the first A stands for "Apparent" (Ancestral Values), and we shouldn't forget that they are more apparent than real. They are based on the (STR) values of modern people -- mostly colonials -- who have tested. As we learn nearly every time ancient Y-DNA is sequenced (with difficulty and at great expense, which is why most of the ancient DNA in the record so far is mitochondrial), modern populations have been squeezed through bottlenecks, winnowed, sometimes mutated almost beyond recognition; old lines have daughtered out, succumbed to plagues, wars, etc. The modal values today of a plurality of Kincaids are derived from tested survivor lines. We suspect the they represent the values -- or are, at most loci, kind of near the values -- of the ancient Kincaid founder. But we haven't dug up a really old Kincaid and tested his DNA. And if we did, we might be as likely to find DYS391=12 as 11, or some other nearby number. Because a plurality of modern, t! ested survivors descend from some person or persons with 11 there, we call that the "AAV" for DYS391. We have reason to hope that's right, but we don't know it. It's just "apparent," to some. > SNP testing is changing the game and could make str testing obsolete. > It will come down to which can be packaged more cheaply. For example, a > 67 marker test for $100 could out do snp testing at $25 a snp. I agree that SNP testing is changing the game -- but not that STR testing will become obsolete, very soon. Especially for people who believe in AAVs (since those are based on tested STRs). Doing away with such testing programs would pull the rug out from under AAVs, among other useful fictions. My personal favorites are signatures of "off-modal" STR values; those are useful for targeting which SNP to test, thereby saving buckets of money. We can only target SNPs we know about, so somebody has to take those expensive Big Y and similar "discovery" tests. But once several have been taken and compared (the subject of Peter's original post, and this thread), the likely bearers of such newly identified SNPs are most readily found by comparing STR patterns in big surname projects, haplogroup projects, and databases like YSEARCH. And btw autosomal testing (notably including FTDNA's Family Finder -- since this family's eggs are largely in the FTDNA basket) is also changing the game. An example of this was reported here by Don W. Kincaid about ten days ago. One might venture to guess that one game likely to be changed by autosomal testing could be "vetting." Dick Hulan

Your point is relevant to ancient dna. However, for Kincaid purposes we are talking about a 600-700 timeframe. After 13 years of testing we got things pretty well covered now. There is very little wiggle room left. For Group A Kincaids the patriarch's values will is either represented in our project or within a mutation of one of the participants. New values will simply populate some of the gaps in our existing tree. Some of those gaps will not be filled because, as you note, any line that could have represented them went extinct. The main thing left to do is to get more old world overseas participants tested so we can eliminate some paths between two points, and, more importantly, get people with deeper paper trails. The latter is needed to fix which points represents the old Kincaid houses (Auchenreoch, Carlowrie, Grange, etc.). The snp testing will then provide one mutation that represents each house so a future participant can do a cheap test to see if they were part of it. The time has come to look at the data and accept what it is telling you. If two people match at 67 markers, then their earliest known ancestors were very closely related. For example, testing has revealed that sample 1256 (descended from William Kincade of Adelaide, ON) is within a mutation of 44108 (descended from George Kincade of Johnston, NB). The patriarchs were born in the same part of Northern Ireland and were about 10 years apart in age. The dna evidence is telling us they were brothers or 1st cousins. There is really no wiggle room for any other interpretation. The same goes for two people with the same values as say 5806 but with different patriarchs in the mid to late 1700s. There is no real wiggle room for their respective patriarchs being anything other than siblings or 1st cousins. The most important thing to remember is that one is moving from more ancestral values to more recent values. There are layers is our tree now which we have to work from. Peter -----Original Message----- From: Richard Hulan Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 10:08 AM To: kincaid@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [KINCAID] KINCAID Digest, Vol 9, Issue 99 AAVs are useful, but the first A stands for "Apparent" (Ancestral Values), and we shouldn't forget that they are more apparent than real. They are based on the (STR) values of modern people -- mostly colonials -- who have tested. As we learn nearly every time ancient Y-DNA is sequenced (with difficulty and at great expense, which is why most of the ancient DNA in the record so far is mitochondrial), modern populations have been squeezed through bottlenecks, winnowed, sometimes mutated almost beyond recognition; old lines have daughtered out, succumbed to plagues, wars, etc. The modal values today of a plurality of Kincaids are derived from tested survivor lines. We suspect the they represent the values -- or are, at most loci, kind of near the values -- of the ancient Kincaid founder. But we haven't dug up a really old Kincaid and tested his DNA. And if we did, we might be as likely to find DYS391=12 as 11, or some other nearby number. Because a plurality of modern, t! ested survivors descend from some person or persons with 11 there, we call that the "AAV" for DYS391. We have reason to hope that's right, but we don't know it. It's just "apparent," to some.

Oops. Peter's set is 2c not 3. Sue Liedtke