I have a question re: Elizabeth Warren and her heritage claim.

[Retrograde]

48. Because DNA testing isn't the magic answer ancestry.com

commercials seem to imply it is. There isn't AFAIK any specific "Native American" (or African or European or whatever) gene: what the tests are saying is that the sample shows patterns that occur most commonly in populations tested in specific areas. And that assumes that those groups are genetically homogenous. When it comes to sampling Native American DNA there are a lot of issues: some groups have intermarried with their neighbors too much, some do not want to provide research samples, etc. The article cited about states that 23&me's Native American reference pool is based on peoples from the Southwest US and Central America: how does that relate to Native American populations from the East Coast, where Warren's ancestors may have come from? Even then, after a few generations of splitting and recombining genes there may not be enough distinctive segments left from the original Native American ancestor to say anything definite.

IIRC, Warren has only claimed a family tradition that one of her ancestors was Native American, a g-g-g-grandparent. It may be true, it may be that her grandmother -like mine - wasn't going to let facts get in the way of a good story.

(I got mine tested. It was mostly what I expected - Northeast European with dabs of German/French [23&Me sticks them together], and Scandinavian - and with a totally unexpected 1% from the British Isles, which as far as I'm concerned is noise)