European Bones

[smokingboot]

According to Ancestry I am:

38% Iberian peninsula
31% Scotland/ Ireland with an emphasis on Ulster
22% Western Europe,which I don't quite understand, but OK.

With less confidence it claims I am 2% Great British, 2% Caucasus and 2% European Jewish, and less than 1% Africa North, Europe South, and Asia South. The small GB component is slightly compromised by the 22% Western European, which can include the South East of England. There's overlap there, and I haven't found anything on Ancestry to make it clearer. This kind of genealogy is still a Weird ScienceTM.

Gedmatch is pretty well regarded when it comes to filtering results. Unfortunately sometimes one needs to know what one is doing, so I'm staying away from any DNA calculators that require understanding from me, but some are very easy to apply. The Eurogenes K36 admixture proportions is very popular. It divvies me up nicely:

Population
Amerindian -
Arabian -
Armenian -
Basque 7.03
Central_African -
Central_Euro 1.53
East_African -
East_Asian -
East_Balkan 4.76
East_Central_Asian -
East_Central_Euro 4.12
East_Med -
Eastern_Euro 4.29
Fennoscandian 4.58
French 6.10
Iberian 26.17
Indo-Chinese -
Italian 7.57
Malayan -
Near_Eastern -
North_African 0.79
North_Atlantic 13.21
North_Caucasian 2.89
North_Sea 10.78
Northeast_African -
Oceanian 0.16
Omotic -
Pygmy -
Siberian -
South_Asian 0.52
South_Central_Asian 0.25
South_Chinese -
Volga-Ural 1.13
West_African -
West_Caucasian 1.38
West_Med 2.75


So there's the Basque. But there's other stuff too that repeats on other tests; the Caucasus and the Balkans, France, central Europe... I find it odd that the Ancestry test finds me with very little south European (in which their map includes the area of Italy) when my mother's surname can denote a strong connection to the country. Gedmatch makes more sense from that point of view. I am interested in a possible Jewish connection and the Eurogenes Jtest gives me an Ashkenazi 'score' of 4.6% - there's no test for Sephardic Jews at all! Bit of a blow! The author warns that the test is not definitive, and recommends others, but they aren't free and it takes more spitting into tubes so I'll think about it.

Me, I'm a European with some interesting bits and pieces from elsewhere, and that's a bloody grand thing to be, apart from the fact that we are a basically a warring collection of tribes who FUBAR'ed everything around us. Theresa May can stick her 'citizen of nowhere' quote right where the sun doesn't shine. I'm a citizen of the world, as are we all. No-one can take that away from us, it's in our blood.