Ancestry Dna Quotes

Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.

Loving who you came from is like looking into the mirror and loving yourself. Your ancestry is your reflection in the mirror.

Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an ancient land who lives within us all.

Why? There was no logical explanation for what I did. It had to come from my DNA. That’s why I needed ancestry.com.

So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.

DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection,handed down from generation to generation,carried,literally,in the bodies of my ancestors.

the single most important source of ancestry across northern Europe today is the Yamnaya or groups closely related to them.

The association between steppe genetic ancestry and people assigned to the Corded Ware archaeological culture through graves and artifacts is not simply a hypothesis. It is now a proven fact.

Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

The Yamnaya—who the genetic data show were closely related to the source of the steppe ancestry in both India and Europe—are obvious candidates for spreading Indo-European languages to both these subcontinents of Eurasia.

in our data around 90 percent of males who carry Yamnaya ancestry have a Y-chromosome type of steppe origin that was absent in Iberia prior to that time. It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the steppe.

But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them.

By computing the proportion of European male and female ancestors that would be necessary to produce the observed difference in European ancestry between chromosome X and the autosomes, Bryc was able to estimate the separate male (38 percent) and female (10 percent) proportion of European ancestors in African Americans.

Figure out way to submit DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry.com.

The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe—Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia—had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry.

So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.25 We now know that at least part of the explanation is dilution. Ancient DNA from Europeans who lived before nine thousand years ago shows that pre-farming Europeans had just as much Neanderthal ancestry as East Asians do today.26 The reduction in Neanderthal ancestry in present-day Europeans is due to the fact that they harbor some of their ancestry from a group of people who separated from all other non-Africans prior to the mixture with Neanderthals (the story of this early-splitting group revealed by ancient DNA is told in part II of this book). The spread of farmers with this inheritance diluted the Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, but not in East Asia.

compiling the information on the number of years of education for over four hundred thousand people of European ancestry whose genomes have been surveyed in the course of various disease studies, Daniel Benjamin and colleagues identified seventy-four genetic variations each of which has overwhelming evidence of being more common in people with more years of education than in people with fewer years even after controlling for such possibly confounding factors as heterogeneity in the study population.25

I learned a valuable lesson that day. And an enduring one, too, because it resonates with me still. Family is not just about who you appear to belong to, or what it says on your birth certificate, or who you look like, or even what they’d find if they studied your DNA. Family is found anywhere you are loved and cared for. That might mean friends or foster parents, a group or even a charity. What matters far more — so much more than chemistry or ancestry — is that precious bond, that reassurance that they won’t let you down.

0.8-standard-deviation increase in the average sprinting ability in West Africans would be expected to lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentile point in Europeans. But an alternative explanation that would predict the same magnitude of effect is that there is simply more variation in sprinting ability in people of West African ancestry—with more people of both very high and very low abilities.

There’s a telling difference between ‘gene trees’ and ‘people trees’. Unlike a person who is descended from two parents, a gene has one parent only. Each one of your genes must have come from either your mother or your father, from one and only one of your four grandparents, from one and only one of your eight great-grandparents, and so on. But when whole people trace their ancestors in the conventional way, they descend equally from two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on. This means that a ‘people genealogy’ is much more mixed up than a ‘gene genealogy’. In a sense, a gene takes a single path chosen from the maze of crisscrossing routes mapped by the (people) family tree. Surnames behave like genes, not like people. Your surname picks out a thin line through your full family tree. It highlights your male to male to male ancestry. DNA, with two notable exceptions which I shall come to later, is not so sexist as a surname: genes trace their ancestry through males and females with equal likelihood.

Today there are hundreds of millions of people in the Americas with African ancestry, the largest numbers in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. The mixing of three highly divergent populations in the Americas—Europeans, indigenous people, and sub-Saharan Africans—that began almost five hundred years ago continues to this day. Even in the United States, where European Americans are still in the majority, African Americans and Latinos comprise around a third of the population. Nearly all individuals from these mixed populations derive large stretches of their genomes from ancestors who lived on different continents fewer than twenty generations ago.

Scrolling through the rest of the 3,500 documents in Michelle’s hard drive, one comes upon a file titled “RecentDNAresults,” which features the EAR’s Y-STR markers (short tandem repeats on the Y chromosome that establish male-line ancestry), including the elusive rare PGM marker. Having the Golden State Killer’s DNA was always the one ace up this investigation’s sleeve. But a killer’s DNA is only as good as the databases we can compare it to. There was no match in CODIS. And there was no match in the California penal system’s Y-STR database. If the killer’s father, brothers, or uncles had been convicted of a felony in the past sixteen years, an alert would have gone to Paul Holes or Erika Hutchcraft (the current lead investigator in Orange County). They would have looked into the man’s family, zeroed in on a member who was in the area of the crimes, and launched an investigation. But they had nothing. There are public databases that the DNA profile could be used to match, filled not with convicted criminals but with genealogical buffs. You can enter the STR markers on the Y chromosome of the killer into these public databases and try to find a match, or at least a surname that could help you with the search.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE LEMBA       One of the most outstanding cases of  Black diaspora Jewry is the case of the Lemba of southern Africa. The Lemba have long claimed that they are Jews or Israelites who migrated to Yemen and from there to Africa as traders. Amazingly, DNA evidence has backed the Lemba claim of Jewish ancestry.   Today, the Lemba can be found in southern Africa countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of their customs are similar to Jews such as the wearing of  yarmulke-like skull cups and observing kosher laws such as the requirement not to eat pork. Interestingly they also avoid eating rabbits, scaleless fish, hares and carrion. In short, the Lemba follow the requirements in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament.     The Lemba claim that about 2500 years ago, their ancestors left Judea for Yemen. Only males are said to have sailed to Africa by boat. The migrants took local wives for themselves. They built a city in Yemen called Sena. From Sena they traveled to Africa where they dispersed. Some remained in East Africa and others traveled to southern Africa. Lemba women do not have 'Semitic' admixture, and this is in line with their oral history.     Professor Tudor Vernon Parfitt, a professor of Jewish Studies then at the University of London, spent several months among the Lemba. He later travelled to Yemen and to his

The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things we cannot change: a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside. The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not the collective will to maintain them. A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be. Once awakened, we then have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity. The goal of this work has not been to resolve all of the problems of a millennia-old phenomenon, but to cast a light onto its history, its consequences, and its presence in our everyday lives and to express hopes for its resolution. A housing inspector does not make the repairs on the building he has examined. It is for the owners, meaning each of us, to correct the ruptures we have inherited. The fact is that the bottom caste, though it bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often been least likely to want to. Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the country’s DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened.

Ancestry has found its home               strung up in guitars               and from gallows.   Contributions               of DNA                             have been accepted                             used, redistributed   Usefulness used up.

published in 2001, concentrates on tracing our ancestry using the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, which also features heavily in The Nature of the Beast. Other books focus on the paternally inherited Y-chromosome and the evolution of sex (Adam’s Curse, 2003), on genealogy and the genetic history of Britain and Ireland (Blood of the Isles, 2006) and America (DNA USA, 2012).

And it also seems likely that many Scots are directly descended from the hunter-gatherer communities of the western refuges. Very recent ancestral DNA research shows that more than 40 per cent carry markers from the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups identified as H, H1 and HVO, all of which originated amongst the people of the painted caves. Each of us carries a great deal of information in our DNA but two small parts of our genomes are especially informative about ancestry. Men carry a Y-chromosome marker inherited from their fathers and their fathers before them, away back in time, and they also inherit mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, from their mothers and their mothers, again away back in deep time. Women carry only mtDNA but they pass it on to their children of both genders. So, men carry mtDNA too but can only pass on their Y-chromosome marker, their fatherline, to their sons. In the act of reproduction, when the 6 billion letters of DNA we carry are passed on, tiny errors of copying are made. These are known as DNA markers and both their origin and the date when they arose can be calculated. Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the

Don’t give in to those who would enforce their racial choices on you. Be wary of DNA ancestry testing. And so on and on.

some of these genetic ancestry tests which proport to find race in your genes but, in fact, have to presume that race already lives in your genes in order to then find it there. If you understand race to be something historically constructed, then it doesn’t live in your genes. (4/10/2020 on Vocal Fries podcast)

The first tenet is, in nature, race is not biological. There are many many modern scientists geneticists who have disproven the existence of race as being something in nature. However, there are just as many geneticists and scientists who say that race is in nature, but what I've come to learn many people associate with the natural aspect of what race is-- is ultimately not true--- it's false, and the things that are associated with ethnicity for example such as DNA, or ancestry, or phenotype, how a person looks; those things are real and exist. They include biology, however those things are best named and identified as ethnicity not race.

your DNA page, click on “Settings” at the top right-hand corner, and scroll down to the Tree Link section. Make sure what you see is what you want. Otherwise, click the “Change” link to assign the correct tree.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic’s Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome.

The idea of common ancestry leads naturally to powerful and testable predictions about evolution. If we see that birds and reptiles group together based on their features and DNA sequences, we can predict that we should find common ancestors of birds and reptiles in the fossil record. Such predictions have been fulfilled, giving some of the strongest evidence for evolution. We’ll meet some of these ancestors in the next chapter.

once spoke about the genetics of ancestry with a Holocaust historian who had hunted some of the last surviving Nazis in the 1990s. When I told him that little letters in our genetic code might testify to the ethnicity of our parents and grandparents, he said, “The Nazis would have loved this.” They would certainly have seized upon the idea, but in the end the full picture would have let them down just as badly as all the other dubious measures of race they tried to develop.

Universally accepted, microevolution has limits for what it can explain. These limits do not reach the center where the controversy lies - the Thesis of Common Ancestry was popularized by Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that the world we see today has come to us through an evolutionary process called natural selection. Through genetic mutation, species adapt and develop because the strongest of a species will survive and pass on their DNA to their successors. Macroevolution is the belief that all development — from the first moments of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, to the eventual emergence of simple bacteria, to the most complex human being is explainable through this naturalistic transformational process.

By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, “most probably from rape or coerced sexuality,” in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.

AncestryDNA is a different beast, an outgrowth of Ancestry.com's vast genealogical resources. Historically, in contrast to 23andMe's customers, many of whom were interested in medical data, AncestryDNA users signed up specifically for the purpose of researching their family lines. The site blends its genealogical resources with test results. When users are a predicted cousin match, AncestryDNA compares their trees to see if it can automatically pinpoint their common ancestors. Unlike 23andMe, AncestryDNA doesn't let users see precisely where their chromosomes overlap with predicted relatives. No actual genetic data is available to subscribers who match. But its "Thrulineis" feature looks at data even in locked trees or trees that aren't linked to users' DNA tests. While I'm selfishly glad to have that information, I worry for those of the site's 18 million users who don't realize how much of their family connections the site reveals.

Ancestry is Garbage (The Sonnet) DNA test may reveal your ancestry, But there is no DNA test for character. IQ may reveal deficit in logical aptitude, There's no IQ test for excellence or genius. If bloodline dictated destiny, We'd still be dangling from trees. Not that we've done much better, But at least there is possibility. In the end we are all monkeys, We all come from the jungle. Question is, have we conquered the jungle that lurks in our heart, have we risen yet above the animal! Ancestry is garbage, IQ is useless, Living humans don't rely on such nonsense. Heart, brain, backbone, these make who we are, Everything else is mythology of the savages.

DNA test may reveal your ancestry, but there is no DNA test for character.

The resulting tree, or phylogram, to use the proper name, again recognised the four main branches (I–IV in the figure on page 17) of modern dog breeds initially published by Wayne and Vilà. The results were fascinating. The fossil dogs on three of the four branches (I, III, IV) of the tree are closely related to modern breeds while the rare fourth, mainly Scandinavian, branch (II) is closest to modern wolves from Sweden and Ukraine. One possible explanation is that dogs on this branch, which include the Norwegian Elkhound and the Jämthund, acquired their mitochondrial DNA from wild wolves in the recent past, after the advent of agriculture.

clearly both related to branch I European dogs, though the ages of the fossils (1,000 and 8,500 years BP respectively) mean that they must have arrived well before the first European settlement in the fifteenth century. These dogs accompanied the indigenous Native Americans who had arrived earlier from Asia. None, however, had mitochondrial DNA remotely like that from American wolves. This has to mean that Native American dogs were ultimately descended from European and not American wolves.

What is it that you learned?" I smile. I've thought a lot about this. How my question this year was to understand how ancestry shapes me. I think ancestry only shapes you if you want it to. How you can go your whole life never knowing what you were meant to be and never knowing what you could have been and still be you. How family is the thing that shapes you. The nurturing from the people closest to you and the experiences you share are the things that make you whole. I learned, through this project, that the man who contributed to my DNA isn't the one who made me who I am. That was the man who raised me, who watched my first steps, and encouraged me every step after- even when it took me away from him. I shrug, a shrug that almost hurts, diminishing the last few months to an essay question. "Nothing I didn't already know, deep down.

today the commercial ancestry market is worth billions and relies on a weak supposition that the composition of your DNA will reveal the identities of your forebears in time and space. At best it’s a fudge, a spell to bewitch your romantic and sentimental urges—to belong to a tribe of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or other noble warriors. But really it’s just gassy bullshit. What modern genetics has shown unequivocally is that while there are differences among people around the world, which manifest broadly as

Two months passed, and I gave little thought to my DNA test. I was deep into revisions of my new book. Our son had just begun looking at colleges. Michael was working on a film project. I had all but forgotten it until one day an email containing my results appeared. We were puzzled by some of the findings. I say puzzled - a gentle word - because this is how it felt to me. According to Ancestry, my DNA was 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi. The rest was a smattering of French, Irish, English, and German. Odd, but I had nothing to compare it with. I wasn't disturbed. I wasn't confused, even though that percentage seemed very low considering that all my ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe. I put the results aside and figured there must be a reasonable explanation tied up in migrations and conflicts many generations before me. Such was my certainty that I knew exactly where I came from.

Happiness is having your first novel chosen by Kirkus Review for inclusion in the Best Books of 2019!

The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague. There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50–100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England. So English supervened.

Although Winkler had always known that his family had Native American and white ancestry, this new affiliation was a complete surprise. “I had always assumed that my dad’s family was mostly Indian, because that’s what they looked like and that’s what they always said,” Winkler recalled. When he eventually asked his father why he had always described himself as being an Indian, his father replied, “Everybody knows what an Indian is. It takes all day to explain what a Melungeon is.