Posted on 11/23/2017 6:14:32 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
With a vial of saliva and a little cutting-edge science, AncestryDNA can tell you if you’ve got any Irish heritage in your genes. And with a lot of cutting-edge science, researchers in December 2015 published a study telling the world where that Irish heritage first originated.
By studying the 5,000-year-old remains of a female farmer buried near Belfast, Ireland, and the remains of three men buried 3,000 and 4,000 years ago on Rathlin Island in County Antrim, archaeologists and geneticists now say they now know where the modern Irish people originally came from.
The remains of the Stone Age female farmer show that she resembled modern people from Spain and Sardinia, suggesting she had roots there. But her ancestors ultimately originated from the Fertile Crescent, the once-lush region of the Middle East where humans first practiced agriculture. Those migrants brought cattle, cereals, and ceramics, along with black hair and brown eyes.
The remains of the Bronze Age male farmers show a different group of migrants entering Ireland one to two thousand years later. Those farmers came from the Pontic steppe of southern Russia. They brought metalworking culture, the genetic disposition for blue eyes, and the gene for a blood disorder so often found in Ireland that it’s known as the Celtic disease: haemochromatosis.
Using a technique called whole-genome analysis, scientists at Trinity College Dublin studied the DNA from all four bodies to establish a history of ancestral migration and settlement.
“There was a great wave of genome change that swept into [Bronze Age] Europe from above the Black Sea … we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island,” geneticist and lead researcher Dan Bradley told the BBC.
The research shows that cultural changes in the ancient British Isles, such as the introduction of agriculture and metalworking, likely arrived because of large-scale migrations rather than the adoption of new ways by indigenous people.
DNA research isn’t just for looking back thousands of years. With AncestryDNA, you can discover whether your grandparents or great-grandparents really did hail from Ireland or any one of 26 distinct ethnic populations. AncestryDNA can also be an invaluable tool in genealogical research by matching up your DNA with relatives you might never have known and by identifying common forebears you may never have heard of.
From there, the 16 billion historical records on Ancestry can help you search forwards or backward in time to fill in your family tree — wherever that tree first took root.
Do you have siblings or cousins on that side who have tested and can you tell your maternal and paternal apart? I have several testing on ancestry now ($59 was too good to pass up for a black Friday deal). When their results are in I’ll be putting them on gedmatch, ftdna and myheritage. I have several that I share dna with that were adopted or abandoned and are searching for family. We use the tools on gedmatch for detailed information and to show matched areas that ancestry doesn’t.
It might be helpful to be able to match segments of chromosomes against some of my relatives.
One of my problems is that I have a ton of relatives, and well over half—maybe 80%—are related through my grandmother. She was a Mormon, from a big family, and her grandfather or great-grandfather was a polygamist. He was also bodyguard to Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion.
It is her husband, my grandfather, that is the big roadblock in trying to determine my family tree. The trees of three of my grandparents go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with a few roots in the Connecticut Colony. But that fourth grandparent seems to have sprung from nowhere, at least on his father’s side.
I’ve found relatives who are descendants of my grandfather’s half brother, who had a different father. But so far, no one who seems to be related to my Grandpa’s father.
So, yeah, I see a great benefit to matching chromosome segments. If I could get my uncle’s DNA, the information on the Y chromosome would no doubt be very useful, since it would lead directly to Grandpa’s father.
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