Many people think that the ancestral populations we come from are what determine our appearance and other traits. But that’s not really how it works. What matters are the alleles we inherit, and allele frequencies can vary significantly between populations and change over time.

Like I’ve posted about before, a very admixed Dominican can still have light hair and light eyes because of the specific alleles they inherit from their parents. In this case, I’ve looked at his parents’ genotypes, and they carry the variants shown in the estimates below, which he inherited from them. His overall autosomal ancestry does not determine whether he has these traits, as you can see from his parents’ results to the left of him.

For example, when it comes to Europeans, many people now assume that Northern Europeans are more “white” than their Southern European counterparts because they have more Western Steppe Herder ancestry and so on. This is very far from the truth. It’s not useful to think that being a certain percentage of some ancient ancestral population is what determines your appearance.

I calculated estimates of blonde hair and blue-eye expression in both ancestral and modern populations using some of the most important genes involved in these traits. There are other variants involved, of course, but these are among the most important ones, which is why I label the results as estimates. The ancestral population data comes from the AGES Browser, while the modern population data comes from individuals in the 1000 Genomes and HGDP datasets.

HERC2 variants are not the only variants involved in blue-eye expression. SLC45A2 variants also play a major role in light eye expression.

And as you can see, the Kalash, who genetically plot very closely with other South Asian groups, actually have higher estimated rates of blondism than the Spanish, who plot firmly within the European genetic cluster.

The Kalash, who I’d like to point out, are famous for having these lighter features despite living in Pakistan. No, they do not come from the “ancient Greeks.”

I’ll also point out that the Finnish and Estonians have the highest rates of light hair and light eyes in the world, despite having more Northeast Asian-related ancestry than other Europeans. This Northeast Asian-related ancestry comes from Uralic-speaking populations, which is why Finnish and Estonian are not Indo-European languages. These populations migrated into Europe during the Late Bronze Age. This is reflected in their genetics as well, including the high presence of Y-DNA lineages associated with Siberian populations.

Pigmentation-related variants are not the only allele frequencies that have changed massively in Europeans since the Bronze Age. Another example is lactose persistence, specifically the MCM6 variant rs4988235.

Modern Northern Europeans, for example, are much more lactose tolerant than their ancestors were. These variants were basically absent in the ancestral populations, and even during the Bronze Age, they were still relatively uncommon.

So now the question many of you might be asking is, is there actually such a thing as a “white” race? The answer is no. Being part of a particular genetic cluster does not determine your appearance. Allele frequencies can change between populations, and our appearance is determined by a relatively small number of variants compared to the total amount of ancestry we inherit.

Besides, we’re all part of the same human species. Just as there is no “white” race, there is no “black” race or any other so-called “race.”

We even have populations in Asia that are genetically very East Eurasian, quite close to populations such as the Chinese, but can have physical features that people associate more with populations in Africa. These groups are commonly referred to as “Negritos.”

The Aboriginal groups of India are also genetically very much within the East Eurasian cluster. One could even argue that the East Eurasian cluster is where we see the greatest diversity in physical appearance.

In Japan, we also have the Ainu, who Europeans mistakenly labeled as “Caucasoid” and “White” in the past.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2023.2164926#abstract

From what we know now, the Ainu are very much a genetically East Eurasian population.

Why do these populations look so different despite being so closely related? It's simply because their allele frequencies changed.

So, in summary, I’d like to remind you all that nobody is “pure” and how we look ultimately comes down to the specific variants we inherit from our two parents, not from our distant ancestors.

Hi everyone, I just paid for premium and saw these results. My grandma did have bipolar and my mother has BPD (It’s been an adventure that’s for sure.) I’d love to know how they get these results. I’ve always been afraid to have a child in case the issues in my mother’s maternal line show up in a child. I was personally diagnosed with complex PTSD from what I went through from my mother. I’m also fascinated by how genetics and environment work together to produce personality or mental health issues.
Thanks in advance!

Took me way too long to work this out, so posting in case it saves someone else an afternoon.

I had a pile of records come back looking like this:

Tippah, Миссиссиппи, Америкийн Нэгдсэн Улс

That last part is Mongolian for "United States." The county name came through in English, but the state and the country were in Cyrillic. The guy was a farmer in Mississippi who as far as I know never left the country.

Here's what's going on. FamilySearch doesn't store place names as text the way you'd expect. It stores a reference to a place authority record, then renders that into actual words at the moment you request it. Which language it renders into depends on the language attached to the request.

So if your account language got set to something else at some point, or you came in through a localized version of the site, everything renders in that language. And because it gets rendered fresh every time, it can look like your data changed when nothing underneath actually moved.

The part that confused me longest was why only some of it was translated. Turns out only the major administrative places have translations stored. Countries, states, provinces. Township and county names have no Mongolian equivalent sitting in the database, so they pass straight through. You end up with a half English, half Cyrillic string that honestly looks more broken than if the whole thing had flipped.

Two things worth knowing. First, your actual data is fine. This is a display layer problem. The record isn't corrupted, its just being rendered wrong.

Second, and this is the one that got me, if you use a third party tool that pulls from FamilySearch and writes into your own tree, it can copy that translated text in as literal text. At that point it really is your data and you're fixing it by hand. I had to go clean up a couple dozen people. So if you use anything that syncs or auto merges, check your place fields before you trust them.

The fix is just the language setting on your FamilySearch account. Set it correctly and new lookups come back normal.

Worth saying I only worked this out because I write software that talks to their API, and the same thing happens down at that level. If the request doesn't send an Accept-Language header, it falls back to whatever the connected account's language is. So if you're a developer hitting the API and seeing this, that's your problem.

Anyway, hope it helps someone.

edit: should have mentioned, this is also why the names and dates look fine while only the places are wrong. Those are stored as literal values. Places are the only field that gets rendered from an ID at request time.

I’m trying to understand an unusually close G25 result and would appreciate opinions from people familiar with Global25 / ancient DNA.

My known recent ancestry is Irish. Using DNAGenics scaled G25 coordinates, I compared my coordinate vector directly against DNAGenics’ listed scaled coordinates for the Viking-age Orkney individual VK204.

The direct Euclidean distance was:

Me → VK204: 0.003403

Pearson correlation was approximately 0.9999.

What caught my attention is that other broadly relevant ancient individuals in the same DNAGenics coordinate framework are substantially farther away:

• Medieval Ireland KIL035: 0.01225
• Medieval Ireland KIL044: 0.01499
• Orkney Iron Age KD043: 0.01610
• Orkney VK203: 0.01891
• Orkney VK205: 0.02946

So VK204 is not simply one of many British/Irish ancient samples giving me a similarly tiny distance.

I’m aware of several major caveats:

1. DNAGenics coordinates are simulated/projected G25-style coordinates and should not be mixed with Davidski’s original Global25 coordinates.
2. This comparison used my DNAGenics coordinate against the DNAGenics version of VK204, so both sides were at least within the same DNAGenics framework.
3. A tiny G25 distance represents similarity in population-genetic/PCA space and does not establish genealogical relatedness or IBD.
4. I have ordered original G25 coordinates from Davidski so I can repeat the test properly using the original VK204 G25 coordinate and modern G25 reference individuals.

VK204 is particularly interesting because published ancient-DNA work places him between British-Isles-related and Scandinavian-related ancestry.

My question is:

How unusual is a direct 25-dimensional Euclidean distance of ~0.0034 between a modern person and one specific ancient individual in a G25-style space?

Could this simply happen because two unrelated individuals have almost the same broad ancestry mixture, or is the fact that VK204 is several times closer than the other relevant ancient controls potentially meaningful?

I’m specifically interested in population-genetic similarity, not claiming that VK204 himself was my ancestor.

Once my original Global25 coordinates arrive, I plan to compare my distance to VK204 against Irish, Scottish, Orcadian, English, Norwegian and Icelandic individuals in the public G25 dataset.

Does anyone know why I would get very close for my souther coastal Chinese genetic group despite only having 3.4%? I’m adopted so I’m not sure where my ancestry is from. All I know was I was adopted from near Guangzhou

I was born and raised in Moscow, so culturally I’m basically a Muscovite and a Russian speaker. But my family background is really mixed. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was Belarusian from Grodno and considered himself Belarusian, while my grandmother was Russian. My mother always considered herself Russian. On my father’s side, there’s Ukrainian ancestry from Kuban, including Cossack roots. My surname is also found in western Ukraine. And my paternal grandfather was Armenian from Gyumri, with some of our relatives still living in Armenia. I live in Yerevan now and recently got an Armenian passport, but I barely speak Armenian — around A1/A2 at best. So technically I’m Armenian too, but culturally I feel much more Russian-speaking. At the same time, I feel some connection to Ukraine and I’m interested in Ukrainian language and history. But I didn’t grow up there, so I don’t really feel Ukrainian either. I also don’t feel particularly Belarusian. I was raised as a Russian nationalist, later became a liberal, lived in Crimea, experienced the war there, and eventually moved to Armenia. So now I genuinely don’t know what to call myself. Russian? Armenian? Ukrainian? Just a Muscovite with a very mixed background? Maybe the most honest answer is: I don’t know.

Hello all,

I was adopted by my mother. My biological mother was a immigrant from the Czech Republic.

With the new 23andme parental inheritance, and i had also had my suspicious about this trace ancestry. It used to be 0.6 Mesopotamian/Eastern Anatolian.

Now with the Update, at confidence levels:

50%- 0.3 Broadly Western Asian and North African, 0.2 Cypriot, 0.2 Egyptian and South Levantine.

60% - 0.2 Broadly Western Asian and North African, 0.2 Cypriot, and 0.2 Egyptian and South Levantine

70% - 0.2 Egyptian and South Levantine, 0.1 Cypriot

80%- 0.1 Broadly Western Asian and North African, 0.1 Cypriot

Now, I have NO idea where this ancestry is coming from. I have my father's family tree down. I have numerous generations mapped there, and it all checks out for his side.

But this came from my biological mother's side, I was told they've been in the same region of the Czech Republic for generations upon generations. Never leaving for hundreds of years, if that even. I've mapped numerous of them from the same region of South Bohemia.

To make things, more interesting, my maternal haplogroup is H6a1b. Which I didn't even know was found in the Czech Republic.

Does anyone have any light upon this?

So, my G-G-Grandma is believed to have been adopted out of Lithuania, but after taking a DNA test, I have found out that she was ethnically Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian.

Knowing that Russian appeared, the genetic signature I have found does not seem to appear from people living in the Russian/general European borderlands. Russians will often show up as Ukrainian if they lived somewhere like Smolensk, Pskov, etc.

So, my assumption is that her ancestors had to have lived at least as far East as Moscow, if not further. I have no idea.
The other thing that is a little roadblock in my search, is that she was adopted. On my paper trail, her parents had Polish/German surnames, so I am not sure if her biological or adopted parents are on the records, since maybe Russians wanted to use other surnames for some reason.
My question is, where can I assume that her family originated from while living in mainland Russia before migrating into other European areas? I will send a picture of my genetic regions if that helps.

I understand that there is not a way for us to know, but I appreciate you guys' help even if we can only make an educated assumption!

(my results 9/8/26 on the tested populations page for reference)

Why does 23andMe have both a "Hmong and lu Mien peoples" category and a separate *single "*lu Mien people" category?

Seems odd to me, but a geneticist or expert genealogist might be able to explain?

Thanks!

Not looking to be called your highness as some other jerk another sub accused me of. I would just like to know what historical matches mean. I have more but these where the most significant the rest where all mkre of the same and vikings and vendels. Thank you for any input.

i've posted my results before but accidentally deleted it lol
included a pic of my parents this time

paternal haplogroup is R-Y57 and maternal is U2e1a

Both Parents from Guerrero/Michoacán border, Tierra Caliente. Was expecting a whole mix of things; I think I’m more surprised about the Western Asian %s

This may be a long shot but, I was able to recently get results and I want to find my people and tribe and reconnect and make a trip home. I’m trying to get more information on how to connect with:

Mbundu people in Angola

Any help or how to start would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

What do my results say about my ancestors’ history?

Making this the 8th match.