Autosomal Test

[curiousity]

I took an autosomal test from this company a number of years ago, I think it was called the Fingerprint Test. I've taken some other tests from a competitor in the past couple of years, and that raises some questions.

I've found out that there's different kinds of autosomal testing than CODIS markers. My CODIS marker results give varying colored dots across a world map, and other companies just use colored blobs or splats to give the customer an idea where his relatives wandered to. That seems rather vague compared to this company, but one thing they give is a chromosome map of sorts that show where a potential match may be on their specific chromosomes. Now, that's really novel.

Those tests are much cheaper than the Fingerprint, but I'm wondering if they give as much information. I used the ENFSi calculator a couple of times, but now that I've taken my haplogroup tests I've found out it's not that easy. My y-DNA haplogroup is R-Z2573, my mtDNA haplogroup is H11a; both of these have European origins.

R-Z2573 could explain all South American Native American hits I got as that haplogroup is supposed to have a lot of Iberian hits even if that's not where it originated at. I had a lot of Australian matches along with a green dot in South Africa. The latter was acknowledged as European, but not listed as such in Australia. All the green dots in South America were said to be NA. I only had a couple of green NA dots in North America, which I think is curious as if I had that many in South America, I should have had the same in the north. But, Iberians were more active in South America than they were in the northern continent, or at least they were after all the squabble in North America between the English, French, and Spaniards (all three have a lot of DF27, which Z2573 is downstream from).

Now I find that companies are able to discern if NA hits are from natives or colonist intermarriage. If a y-DNA test comes back as C or Q, then that person is probably indigenous in his beginnings. But any R subclade would show that his origins were in Europe and his ancestors had some ethnic intermarriage. That is not genetically Native American.

These companies advertise their autosomal tests as merely covering the customer's genetic history for the past few hundred of years, and that this heritage is descriptive of who that person is, genetically speaking. But there's thousands of years between the customer's haplogroup beginnings and his autosomal results, thousands of years of genetic history that's omitted by the autosomal tests. These tests simply show who the person's ancestors were in recent history, and that's not really genetically descriptive of who that customer is.

This DNA testing is a new science, and like all things it needs improvement. We read that new discoveries are made every day, and we know that the science is in its infancy. Personally, I don't mind a mistake or two as I know this is new, it's a revolutionary scientific discovery that could basically be described as rocket science in a genetic, microscopic level. Really fun, I'm having a great time with all of this, but I wish they'd improve autosomal tests to reach a little farther back in our chromosome's history. CODIS marker or the other ones companies use, there simply has to be a way to reach into our chromosome's depths.

Like the Neanderthal Index. I took mine, I got a high match. See how many hundreds of thousands of years ago that is? Good example there.