re: #155 prairiefire

I’m sure ancestry.com has plenty of stuff written about their test. My inbox is usually filled with their junk email and I know they are marketing the heck out of their products.

One thing to remember, and I write this as someone with half my ancestry going back to the fjords, is that Scandinavia covers a region with lots of history of trade and migration with the rest of Northern Europe. I would never expect to find a test that would give me exactly 50% Scandinavian.

I’ve come across various websites that get into this type of stuff, but I remain skeptical about the accuracy of ethnicity tests.

I do know that we do not inherit evenly balanced fractions from our ancestors at any given generation (other than our parents.) Last year I wrote some comments to Obdicut about this topic. I was aware that during meiosis that the chromatids resulted from crossovers, but I was unaware at how coarse the divisions were, and that there is a decent possibility of inheriting some of the small chromosomes whole from a parent. This means that we can inherit quite disproportionate amount of DNA from our various great grandparents.