More Ethnicity for the Stevens

Today I will cover our ethnicity as calculated by the Eurogenes K9b admix utility found at gedmatch.com. This calculator is designed to mimic the ethnicity results of the National Genographic Project’s Geno 2.0 test. These results are based on an entirely different set of data and criteria from the results I showed previously, but they are still nothing more then scientific guesses.

Here is a table of our results by generation.

 

The first thing I notice is the results do not vary a great deal between the siblings, whereas the FamilyTreeDNA results I posted previously showed wide differences between the siblings. The second thing I notice is the 2nd generation is much more inline with the results of the first generation. The Geno 2.0 test was designed to provide information about our more ancient ancestors and the FamilyTreeDNA test is more about our current ancestry. This difference in focus may explain the difference in results.

For me, the most interesting item in this table is the “Native American” category. We all have segments of DNA that match with Native Americans more closely than Europeans. In addition to the Native American category, the “Northeast Asian” category is of interest and I will explain why in a minute. Oh yes, and the sub-Saharan African and Oceania (Australia etc.) is seriously unexpected and pretty far out there. Does this mean we have African, Native American and Australian ancestry. Not really, but you never know for sure.

The African is easy to explain. Since all modern humans originated in Africa the results are merely showing that we still retain some DNA signatures that are more than 70,000 years old. Pretty cool! The other unusual results are not so easy to explain in a  group of people that should be all British Isles or at least all European. To understand why, I need to provide a little history lesson.

Modern humans originated in Africa. About 70,000 years ago the climate and geography allowed humans to begin migrating out of Africa. Once they left the continent they began moving in all directions. The groups that would eventually become “European” moved in different directions than the groups that eventually found there way to Australia, the far east, and the Americas. It is common for Europeans to show Mediterranean and south or west Asian because these groups were never completely isolated from each other and would have some gene flow between the populations. The Oceania results are low enough percentages to be random coincidence. However, theoretically, as Europeans we should not have any significant DNA in common with Northeast Asians and Native Americans except for our most ancient common ancestry in Africa.

Native Americans came from Northeast Asia before crossing over into America. So if I combine the Native American and NE Asian results, they become a rather significant amount (over 2% average and at least 1.5% for each of the siblings). So the question becomes, how come we show these results? And the answer is, no one knows for certain, but it might be because we actually do have a Native American ancestor somewhere in the last 500 years. My job as group administrator for the family DNA project is to figure out if this is modern Native DNA or really ancient African DNA disguised as Native American.

One thing I found surprising in these results is that the 2nd generation has significantly more Native then the 1st generation. The results suggest the 2nd generation received additional Native segments from these non-Stevens parents. The non-Stevens parent for each member of the 2nd generation appear to be European on paper. I really doubt we have a bunch of Indians on both sides of our trees. So, this may be a indication that all this Native stuff is really not Native at all just Native impostors.

So who gets the booby prize today? No one in the first generation really stands out in any specific category. For the 2nd generation, the prize goes to NL with over 4% combined Native and NE Asian results.

Stay tuned for more