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I did 23andMe and got the >1 African and >1 middle eastern (probably due to Sicilian heritage) but what was the most disappointing is their broad categorization as “broadly northern European” and “broadly southern European” while “identifying” something like 70% of my family oral history of origins... but in my circumstance they tossed in “20% Ashkenazi Jew” at the grandparent level when we can directly account for 100% of our heritage going back to the early 1800s on both sides of the family via all members of the tree.... All married in churches and documented appropriately... Our first reaction was “this sample must have been tainted or confused” but now I’m starting to think these science wizards are just purposely misrepresenting their results to “make people challenge their beliefs”. If there is a class action lawsuit I’ll GLADLY jump on that bandwagon and provide as many spit samples as necessary to the case for a 3rd party audit against the results from 23andMe. Further, following several similar disclosures in the past about contamination and other issues with these companies, I have SEVERE DOUBTS regarding the veracity of their medical information derived via DNA.

I think these are snake-oil salesmen. Maybe they’ll tell us we can each own a segment of a bridge over the San Francisco Bay as a “crowdsourced” effort?

23andMe has a lot of people pegged at 0.1% or 0.2% or some similar low figure of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. 0.2% would mean one ancestor (out of 512) 9 generations ago. For most people 9 generations back would mean ancestors born in the 1700s or 1600s, possibly the 1500s. (On one line 6 generations back my ancestor was born in the late 1600s.)

For white Americans with ancestors in the 13 colonies, to have an ancestor with African origins in the 1600s or 1700s is unlikely since that ancestor would probably have to be one-eighth black or one-sixteenth black to "pass" as white in order to marry a white person...so several generations removed from the person brought to America from Africa. No doubt there are cases like that but not to the extent 23andMe is implying.