It's all over the news. Prince William, the heir to the British throne, has some Indian blood, inherited through his his great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Eliza Newark. She was the housekeeper of Theodore Forbes (1788-1820), a Scot who worked for the East India Company in the port city of Surat in the early 19th century. They had three children together, one of whom became the matrilineal ancestor of Princess Diana.
William's Indian genetic heritage was revealed after he took a test with BritainDNA, a new DNA testing company offering products similar to FTDNA and 23andMe. Only William's mtDNA was found to be South Asian. Hardly any trace of autosomal Indian ancestry remained after seven generations since Eliza Newark. Theoretically he should have inherited approximately 1% of each of his ancestor at the 7th generation. This is a good illustration of how the DNA of some of our ancestors is lost, while the DNA from other ancestors is overrepresented.
William's mtDNA is a extremely rare haplogroup known as R30b. Among some 65,000 individuals tested for mtDNA around the world, only 14 people of them were found to belong in this haplogroup, all in India except one in Nepal.
R30a and R30, sister branches of R30b, are also entirely South Asian in origin. However that is mostly because South Asia is undersampled compared to Western countries. In a region with 1.5 billion inhabitants even 1% of all lineages within South Asia would still translate in tens of millions of people.
William's Indian genetic heritage was revealed after he took a test with BritainDNA, a new DNA testing company offering products similar to FTDNA and 23andMe. Only William's mtDNA was found to be South Asian. Hardly any trace of autosomal Indian ancestry remained after seven generations since Eliza Newark. Theoretically he should have inherited approximately 1% of each of his ancestor at the 7th generation. This is a good illustration of how the DNA of some of our ancestors is lost, while the DNA from other ancestors is overrepresented.
William's mtDNA is a extremely rare haplogroup known as R30b. Among some 65,000 individuals tested for mtDNA around the world, only 14 people of them were found to belong in this haplogroup, all in India except one in Nepal.
R30a and R30, sister branches of R30b, are also entirely South Asian in origin. However that is mostly because South Asia is undersampled compared to Western countries. In a region with 1.5 billion inhabitants even 1% of all lineages within South Asia would still translate in tens of millions of people.