Have you had your DNA tested to determine your ancestry?

[alarimer]

99. No, these tests are inaccurate and useless for this purpose

Consider the results with many, many grains of salt. This article was about Elizabeth Warren and native American ancestry, but the same holds true for other ethnicities and maybe more so, because there is no set of "Italian" genes or "Irish" genes or what have. European nationalities (ALL of them) are mixtures of various groups of people. And, of course, even indigenous people are way less uniform genetically than is usually supposed.

Now this says nothing about the ethics of DNA testing by these corporation who are under no obligation to keep your information private.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/06/dna_testing_cannot_determine_ancestry_including_elizabeth_warren_s.html


The problem is that DNA snippets, or markers, are inconsistent. Sometimes they are passed on and sometimes they are not, and whether they are or aren’t is random. Sure, a large percentage of Native Americans may share certain genetic markers. But many Native Americans may lack the same marker, and many non–Native Americans may carry it by coincidence.

So when a DNA test comes back saying you are 28 percent Finnish, all it’s really saying is that of the DNA analyzed (most companies don’t analyze all of your DNA), 28 percent of it was most similar to that of a completely Finnish person. In the end, these comparisons are a fun but ultimately unreliable way to think about the possibilities of whom your ancestors might have been, rather than definitive proof of your ethnic background.

snip

Another issue is limited and inconsistent data. Ancestry.com, for example, divides the world up into 26 genetic regions and uses just 115 samples to create the representative of each region—a very small sample size. And different companies place different weight on these samples, which come from burial grounds, modern isolated communities, and academically published data, like the Human Genome Diversity Project. For the consumer, this means if you don’t like your heritage results, try a different company. You’ll get a completely different breakdown.