Share your 23andMe Ancestry Composition

Practically the same. The best representative for German is the South West, Germans which are very North Western get higher English, those very Northern Norwegian and Swedish, the ones to the East get Eastern European and those to the East and South East more often Balkan. The German sample is however wider, so the percentages for EE and Balkan decrease in my opinion rather on Ancestry DNA, while with less smoothing the transition to the North and North West involves higher British and Scandinavian percentages.
I understand, but how much English, for example? I was willing to see the proportions, because AncestryDNA did a really good job with N. Italians in this new version. I was wondering if it's that good for others as well. When I find the time I'll search for more results outside Italy.

I have very little information about Italians on AncestryDNA, but I guess it should be similar, but probably better differentiated because of the larger samples AncestryDNA seems to have?
As I said, it seems to work just fine for most of North Italians. I''d like to see what Central Europeans and Central Italians are getting.

I still think it's a possibility that L2 was spread beyond Italy by the soldiers of Gallia Cisalpina, although it is possible, yes, that it arrived late with Gauls? Although if that's the case we have to deal with the low percentages in Genova and Savona.
R-L2 in Italy must have different stories, indeed, then some of it could have arrived later. But not all.

What I don't get is why there are two hotspots like Treviso and La Spezia/Massa and so much lower numbers elsewhere. With La Spezia/Massa many of the current inhabitants have come down from the mountains of places like the Garfagnana where R1b as a whole reaches levels of 70-80% in some places, and there's a "lot" of L2, which could be founder effect typical of mountain refuges. I don't know enough about Treviso to venture an opinion.

So maybe we're getting a slightly distorted view because Boattini didn't have a lot of samples, and there's that mountain founder effect to take into account.

Anyone know if there's a good amount of L2 in Provence?
In La Spezia, perhaps a founder effect, as you said, also because they would be all R-L20. Regarding Treviso, there would be this sampling bias you referred to, in Boattini et al, but if we think the real number must be well above average anyway (even if lower than Boattini's), it could be that it was a relatively frequent clade among Adriatic Veneti? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the Celt influence in that area was not heavy. If I'm not missing something, the bulk of R-L2 in Treviso could be of "Italic" origin perhaps.
 
^^Good luck to those who try to disentangle what is Dane, Viking, Angle or Saxon in the English of the eastern and southern areas. They're all variations on a theme to me.

As for whether R-L2 is of "Italic" origin or not I have no idea. There's a lot of "empty" territory between Treviso and the Garfagnana even if we consider pronounced founder effect in the latter. That's why I was interested as to where the most L2 is found outside Italy.

There are a lot of Italian samples which haven't been resolved beyond U-152, including that in my own family.

Btw, is there a source you can recommend for up to date high resolution of U152 subclades in northwestern Italy including Emilia?
 
I understand, but how much English, for example? I was willing to see the proportions, because AncestryDNA did a really good job with N. Italians in this new version. I was wondering if it's that good for others as well. When I find the time I'll search for more results outside Italy.

You can find German results here, I made a thread about it on Anthrogenica:
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?21950-Any-German-Results-from-AncestryDNA-for-Comparison

Some admixture being swallowed, both by smoothing out and better references. Because the Balkan-like admixture I have is for the most part very old among German speakers, dating to early and high Medieval times, and not recent.

The more Northern-Germanic they are, the more Scandinavian they get. But the good thing about AncestryDNA is they don't balance it out by artefactual extremes. Like on other platforms where one brother gets 30 percent Scandinavian, but to balance that out 10 percent Balkan and 5 percent West Asian, whereas the sister gets just straight 70 percent German and the like. Because that's also a very important sign of quality, that is consistency. So even if you create such abstruse numbers, it should be the same for the same ancestral make up. But that's something MyHeritage and FTDNA are not as good at, just like Oracles.

On AncestryDNA it also matters whether you get provinces and what the range is. Like I get Scandinavian too, but its 0 - X. If its more likely to be real, it gives you 5-20 percent and especially for the well-tested Scandinavian sphere a concrete region. Otherwise you can say its just "general Germanic".
 
^^Good luck to those who try to disentangle what is Dane, Viking, Angle or Saxon in the English of the eastern and southern areas. They're all variations on a theme to me.

As for whether R-L2 is of "Italic" origin or not I have no idea. There's a lot of "empty" territory between Treviso and the Garfagnana even if we consider pronounced founder effect in the latter. That's why I was interested as to where the most L2 is found outside Italy.
R-L2 is old, virtually as old as R-U152. It appeared in Switzerland very early, and I believe it could have entered Italy in different times, carried by different groups.

By the way, I was just mentioning that the R-L2 in La Spezia, among the samples tested by Boattini, would be all R-L20. Probably most of the R-L2 men in La Spezia belong to R-L20, however, I just saw in YFull a basal R-L2 from there. There're also three R-L20 (two of them are very closely related, with TMRCA of 50 ybp), and one is under R-Z49.
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-L2*/ (for the basal check the R-L2* IDs, who are confirmed negative for the subclades in YFull, while the R-L2 IDs are not)

There are a lot of Italian samples which haven't been resolved beyond U-152, including that in my own family.

Btw, is there a source you can recommend for up to date high resolution of U152 subclades in northwestern Italy including Emilia?
Unfortunately, I don't know about a good source. I'd be also interested to knowing it.

You can find German results here, I made a thread about it on Anthrogenica:
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?21950-Any-German-Results-from-AncestryDNA-for-Comparison

Some admixture being swallowed, both by smoothing out and better references. Because the Balkan-like admixture I have is for the most part very old among German speakers, dating to early and high Medieval times, and not recent.
Thanks. I'll take a look.

The more Northern-Germanic they are, the more Scandinavian they get. But the good thing about AncestryDNA is they don't balance it out by artefactual extremes. Like on other platforms where one brother gets 30 percent Scandinavian, but to balance that out 10 percent Balkan and 5 percent West Asian, whereas the sister gets just straight 70 percent German and the like. Because that's also a very important sign of quality, that is consistency. So even if you create such abstruse numbers, it should be the same for the same ancestral make up. But that's something MyHeritage and FTDNA are not as good at, just like Oracles.

On AncestryDNA it also matters whether you get provinces and what the range is. Like I get Scandinavian too, but its 0 - X. If its more likely to be real, it gives you 5-20 percent and especially for the well-tested Scandinavian sphere a concrete region. Otherwise you can say its just "general Germanic".
Agreed. That's what I think too.
 
Which part of my post you're addressing to?

I believe you'd not disagree that there was South-North flow too, before the Germanic. We also descend from Romans.
One of my points was that NE Italians seem to fit pretty well in N. Italian cluster, which is a real one, and part of the Italian cline. The fact that there are internal differences in North Italy, or that North Italians could score a bit differently in certain calculators (for "exotic" pops), doesn't change it, the same way a French scoring for North Italy would not mean the non-existence of a cluster related to France.

F&G are modern, not ancient. I don't think these people perfectly correspond, i.e., moderns don't equal ancient. At the end, the Germanic influence, whatever they are, is already part of N. Italian gene pool since much time ago. I believe we would not disagree on this. Now, I naturally understand that Germanics came, if it is what you're saying. More directly, what I meant is that those relatively high F&G in part of North Italians apparently is not explained mostly by this ancient Germanic influence, i.e., the F&G% wouldn't equal that Germanic input. "Germanic Europe" in AncestryDNA seems to correlate better to the Germanic influence we're discussing, if we assume Germanics did come in somewhat low numbers, as Y-DNA would suggest.


True that F an G are "modern" ( AD times ) ...all germanics entered Italy in AD times

your ethnicity would not have any Roman , it is rare finding a real Roman , especially since they where held under the etruscan rule for over 200 years, enough time to breed any purity of roman out ..............you would fall into either Venetic, Gallic, Celtic, Histrian or Umbri ............maybe even a chance of an etruscan or Liguri

The 2 biggest ethnic races in italy in BC times would have been Umbri ( Sabine, Sabellic, Samnium, picene and many others are all Umbri origin ) then the Etruscan ......liguri and then Venetic .......that is basically it
 
True that F an G are "modern" ( AD times ) ...all germanics entered Italy in AD times


your ethnicity would not have any Roman , it is rare finding a real Roman , especially since they where held under the etruscan rule for over 200 years, enough time to breed any purity of roman out ..............you would fall into either Venetic, Gallic, Celtic, Histrian or Umbri ............maybe even a chance of an etruscan or Liguri

The 2 biggest ethnic races in italy in BC times would have been Umbri ( Sabine, Sabellic, Samnium, picene and many others are all Umbri origin ) then the Etruscan ......liguri and then Venetic .......that is basically it
Ok. I understand what you're saying.
At the end N. Italians became "Romans" themselves. We also descend from Romans under this point of view then. :)
Details apart, I was naturally referring to the Romans from before the influence over North; they came as such after all. In other words, to South-North flows related to Roman expansion and influence, even if the main source was not Rome proper. At certain point these Romans reached North, which became part of the Roman Republic, and I believe some relevant gene flow occurred from that point on, with areas to the South being important sources in the process.
 
Ok. I understand what you're saying.
At the end N. Italians became "Romans" themselves. We also descend from Romans under this point of view then. :)
Details apart, I was naturally referring to the Romans from before the influence over North; they came as such after all. In other words, to South-North flows related to Roman expansion and influence, even if the main source was not Rome proper. At certain point these Romans reached North, which became part of the Roman Republic, and I believe some relevant gene flow occurred from that point on, with areas to the South being important sources in the process.


I do not understand what you mean by becoming Roman .....you mean culturally, like England , france etc did

In regards to your North-east italy ................the Venetics allied with Rome prior to the Hannibal wars, they where never conquered .............the Alpine people of modern Italy only came under Roman rule circa 10BC under Imperial Rome and not republican Rome
The gene flow of Roman ethnicity would be less relevant than the Lombard ............I do not see any great numbers of pure Roman from BC times.....if there was a lot, there would be many ancient samples , which there is not

But getting back to this 23andme ethnicity ..............I was told by many people that it goes back only 250 years ........so any french, german, spanish, greek , italian etc you either already had prior to 1750 ish or gained later
 
I do not understand what you mean by becoming Roman .....you mean culturally, like England , france etc did
Yes. That's just the perspective of culture, or citizenship. As I said, a "point of view". Not my focus though.

In regards to your North-east italy ................the Venetics allied with Rome prior to the Hannibal wars, they where never conquered .............the Alpine people of modern Italy only came under Roman rule circa 10BC under Imperial Rome and not republican Rome
The gene flow of Roman ethnicity would be less relevant than the Lombard ............I do not see any great numbers of pure Roman from BC times.....if there was a lot, there would be many ancient samples , which there is not

But getting back to this 23andme ethnicity ..............I was told by many people that it goes back only 250 years ........so any french, german, spanish, greek , italian etc you either already had prior to 1750 ish or gained later
I wrote "details apart" for a reason. :)
I know that different genetic elements could have been taken along the expansion in space and time, and at different degrees.
Regarding being allies, well, I mentioned expansion and influence.
You used the term "under Rome" for the Alpines, which would actually imply the existence of Romans. I don't know exactly in which ways you'd define Romans, or a "pure Roman", but that would be another discussion. I believe I made my point clear in my last post, be it (the point) right or wrong.

So, details apart, if I understand you right, you don't believe in such possible gene flow from South in the context of the expansion and influence of Romans (or Rome, if you prefer), bringing more Southern elements to the North. Is that right? Well, ok then. Let's see if ancient DNAs provide clues on how people looked like in the North just before the Roman influence (or whatever we could call it).

@Angela
Likely addressed to me too. :) Thanks. I'll certainly take a look at the thread, with great interest.
 
Thank you all for the thoughts, now the picture is a bit clearer to me.


There remain some ambiguities about the actual purposes of an oracle like the current 23andMe one. Theoretically, it should be more functional for those who have actual and recent mixed origins (such as many inhabitants of the USA or Latin America), as well as organic with the proposed timeline (notwithstanding that the timeline has anyway a very limited value for those who are native of a given territory and descend from ethnic mixtures stabilized for centuries or millennia).
On the contrary, in other countries not affected by recent migratory phenomena, the usefulness of information on one's ancestry becomes practically nil, bordering on tautology, on the petition of principle (it seems almost as if they ask you where you are from, then 23andMe confirms it, tells you it is so and so on).


The perplexities are not only mine: 23andMe's blog on the subject is a hoot, starting from the gobbledygook with which the company's staff celebrates the new calculation method, up to the florilegium of complaints more than justified and heated by users. Here it is clearly said that the "smoothing" of the new algorithm, according to its creators, should increase the accuracy of the oracle, eliminating the ballast of the "Broadly" quotas and even "personalizing" the analysis (!). But in reality it goes in the opposite direction, annihilating even the recent genetic signals, those that in theory should be more marked and evident even to the most rudimentary calculators. The "Broadly" only changes name and crypts itself under other ethnic groupings, overestimating them to the unbelievable (among the most disappointed users of the blog a half-German and half-Swedish individual who has now become completely Scandinavian, much to the detriment of accuracy...). More than a "smoothing" operation, it works like leveling machine, an industrial press

https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry-reports/algorithm-gets-an-upgrade/

Now it escapes me or I can't understand from 23andme if behind this revision of the algorithm there was also a revision of the selection criteria or the representativeness of the samples, but at this point I doubt it, since still in its reference dataset there are the usual 596 Northern Italians, Tuscans, and Italians (it is several years that I see that number), and I think they have not changed much even for the other Southern Europeans. It is desirable to look for new and more accurate references as long as we want, but if the oracle already fails to detect the genetic signal at an earlier generation, it's legitimate to ask some questions about its reliability, and paradoxically I suspect that the Broadly components rather than eliminated should be maintained, because they seem to balance better the rest.

XqpxxyIQGAQhAAAKvE0C4vc6IERCAAAQgAAEIQGAUBBBuo0gDTkAAAhCAAAQgAIHXCfwfRn6WjAtaA4YAAAAASUVORK5CYII=



I make these criticisms with some regret, as I have been a satisfied user for several years, but the current value of 23andMe for now is only in providing you with haplogroup indications, possible kinship with people scattered around the rest of the world, and the raw-data file at a relatively modest price. Now for the autosomal oracle there is surely better on the Web.
 
Yes. That's just the perspective of culture, or citizenship. As I said, a "point of view". Not my focus though.
I wrote "details apart" for a reason. :)
I know that different genetic elements could have been taken along the expansion in space and time, and at different degrees.
Regarding being allies, well, I mentioned expansion and influence.
You used the term "under Rome" for the Alpines, which would actually imply the existence of Romans. I don't know exactly in which ways you'd define Romans, or a "pure Roman", but that would be another discussion. I believe I made my point clear in my last post, be it (the point) right or wrong.
So, details apart, if I understand you right, you don't believe in such possible gene flow from South in the context of the expansion and influence of Romans (or Rome, if you prefer), bringing more Southern elements to the North. Is that right? Well, ok then. Let's see if ancient DNAs provide clues on how people looked like in the North just before the Roman influence (or whatever we could call it).
@Angela
Likely addressed to me too. :) Thanks. I'll certainly take a look at the thread, with great interest.

I would never place you in certain categories; I respect your approach and input even when I disagree with you. So, I know you will read the thread and are capable of understanding it. I would, however, recommend reading the whole book. The footnotes lead to further very enlightening reading.
 
Just for comparison's sake: my latest ancestry results. Roughly the same. 23andme is probably more correct about the French being more similar to Provence, and perhaps Ancestry is more correct about the small amount of Spanish versus Sardinian, although perhaps 23andme has more samples not only from Provence but from Sardegna.

Nds03sX.png


I'm sad that La Spezia/Sarzana don't show up, areas with which I identify much more than Emilia(looks like provincia di Parma and part of Reggio Emilia, I think), but if they had more samples from there I'm sure it would. Sure nails the Emilian and northern Lunigianese, though, even going a bit into the neighboring Garfagnana, which we always thought of as the back of beyond. Everything is relative, though. Nothing is as much the back of beyond as the isolated villages in the Apennines and the Alps as well. God spare me and I give thanks I wasn't born in the 1800s or whatever.




EHZ0Hbb.png


A geneticist once said that given enough samples they could pinpoint someone to within a few miles. I believe it, at least if all four grandparents come from approximately the same place, but then why would you need the test, unless you were an adoptee or something.

Once again, what ancestry does is not anthropology, although they purport to go back to the mid 1700s. ( I already posted my map). On that, my ancestors were all over northern Italy, going no further south than around Pisa if I recall. Still, doesn't answer some of the questions that are important to certain people.
 
Last edited:
Just for comparison's sake: my latest ancestry results. Roughly the same. 23andme is probably more correct about the French being more similar to Provence, and perhaps Ancestry is more correct about the small amount of Spanish versus Sardinian, although perhaps 23andme has more samples not only from Provence but from Sardegna.

Nds03sX.png


I'm sad that La Spezia/Sarzana don't show up, areas with which I identify much more than Emilia(looks like provincia di Parma and part of Reggio Emilia, I think), but if they had more samples from there I'm sure it would. Sure nails the Emilian and northern Lunigianese, though, even going a bit into the neighboring Garfagnana, which we always thought of as the back of beyond. Everything is relative, though. Nothing is as much the back of beyond as the isolated villages in the Apennines and the Alps as well. God spare me and I give thanks I wasn't born in the 1800s or whatever.




EHZ0Hbb.png


A geneticist once said that given enough samples they could pinpoint someone to within a few miles. I believe it, at least if all four grandparents come from approximately the same place, but then why would you need the test, unless you were an adoptee or something.

Once again, what ancestry does is not anthropology, although they purport to go back to the mid 1700s. ( I already posted my map). On that, my ancestors were all over northern Italy, going no further south than around Pisa if I recall. Still, doesn't answer some of the questions that are important to certain people.
Curiously, France shows up as a Likely Match for me in 23andMe. It suggests that in the last 200 years my ancestors may have lived in Brittany (supposedly strong evidence of recent ancestry), Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and/or Occitanie. Which is not possible.
While my parents get more French & G than myself, they don't get France as a Likely Match.

rwa7KlI.jpg



Naturally Italy shows up as a Highly Likely Match for us.

Mine
jGT92U9.jpg



Father's - It's a decent result, but his paternal grandmother was from Mantova province. Lombardy could be the second, in dark tone.
G7o18Pt.jpg



Mother's
0hZyBan.jpg
 
Curiously, France shows up as a Likely Match for me in 23andMe. It suggests that in the last 200 years my ancestors may have lived in Brittany (supposedly strong evidence of recent ancestry), Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and/or Occitanie. Which is not possible.
While my parents get more French & G than myself, they don't get France as a Likely Match.

rwa7KlI.jpg



Naturally Italy shows up as a Highly Likely Match for us.

Mine
jGT92U9.jpg



Father's - It's a decent result, but his paternal grandmother was from Mantova province. Lombardy could be the second, in dark tone.
G7o18Pt.jpg



Mother's
0hZyBan.jpg

23andme does just weighting your matches with its algorithm for people which gave the location of their grandparents. This means if there are no matches for your in a region which gave away the location of their grandparents, you don't get it, even if you are 100 percent from that location. On the other hand, if relatives of yours moved to another place and are, let's say half Italian-half French, living in Brittany, you get that region. For me its e.g. Berlin. I have no known ancestry from the city, highly unlikely any of my German ancestors came from Berlin in the last 300 years, yet I do get it, simply because distant relatives of mine moved to the capital.

I didn't knew that myself, but a user on Anthrogenica showed it to me, you just have to look into the source code.

This is an example:
"subregion_id": "de:hesse:1", "num_relatives": 3, "state": "Hesse"}, {"num_gp": 5

So I have 3 genetic relatives from Hessen, with 5 Hessian grandparents in total. So not that much, but something.

For your case, let's just assume a relative from Italy moved to France, had many children, so you get even more than one match from the department, et voil?!

Doesn't mean you can't have real ancestry from the region, but it could be very well gone in the other direction. Like I know from surname data that between various people and Germans there was so much reciprocal gene flow, that its hard to say which segment was brought by whom, by the Germans or the other side.

You can check for surnames on this site for example:
https://forebears.io/

I found two surnames, one rather rare, the other extremely rare, in other populations and regions from which I have no recent ancestry, obviously because one of the relatives of my ancestors was a trader or whatnot and moved into this country. In one case the surname is now more common in the foreign region in which not too many Germans were living at any time, than in all of Germany. So if I would get from 23andme a similarity for that region, I know why.

A fairly common Italian surname is Rizzo, if you look at the forebears map:
https://forebears.io/surnames/rizzo

There could be some clusters due to Italian migrants which moved there generations ago. Just in case you don't have any ancestry from the region, proven by your record and matches, this could be the explanation. Undertested regions won't appear in 23andme, because no testers = no matches = no ancestral region.
 
Curiously, France shows up as a Likely Match for me in 23andMe. It suggests that in the last 200 years my ancestors may have lived in Brittany (supposedly strong evidence of recent ancestry), Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and/or Occitanie. Which is not possible.
While my parents get more French & G than myself, they don't get France as a Likely Match.

rwa7KlI.jpg



Naturally Italy shows up as a Highly Likely Match for us.

Mine
jGT92U9.jpg



Father's - It's a decent result, but his paternal grandmother was from Mantova province. Lombardy could be the second, in dark tone.
G7o18Pt.jpg



Mother's
0hZyBan.jpg

There are people with both my mother's and father's surnames living in both Sardegna and France. I really don't think that explains all of it however. Those people would have also had to test, and I think the odds of that might be pretty small.

Plus, people in France don't test on the whole; it's not like the U.S., Britain, or even northern European countries. There are actually even legal impediments, or at least lots of red tape in France before you can do a dna test of any kind, and the Sardinians I know are just like the other Italians I know, and couldn't be less interested.

In my case there are perfectly plausible explanations for why my genome might share alleles with people from Provence and Sardegna.

In your case I'm not sure, but the Bretons are a bit different from other French people, more heavily "Celtic", and you might have happened to inherit some of those alleles. Lyon is a Gallic, Roman, Burgundian mix. wouldn't be hard to find some matches with a far northern Italian.

I just ignore how they phrase it, i.e. "some of your ancestors might have lived there during the last 250 years". All they know is that the matching "chunks" aren't very small so they're assuming they're within the last 250-300 years. However, I'm not sure that's always the case. Up until the late 19th and even early 20th century in many areas of Europe people hadn't moved more than 20 miles for hundreds of years. They're cousins to everybody in their villages, and these chunks may be quite old.

I knew their attempts to date this admixture didn't make sense from the time that they used to give some far southern Italians big percentages of northern Near Eastern, i.e. the Caucasus, Asia Minor. It made absolutely no sense to claim that, and at the same time say they couldn't go back more than 300 years. There was NO, repeat, NO, migration from "Anatolia" to Italy from 1700-2000 A.D. It was absurd then, and what they're saying now about smaller percentages is still absurd.

The people in the town where I was born still gossip about the fact that in the town just south of it toward La Spezia some "Moorish" pirates settled there. That happened in the Middle Ages. You think the old nonne wouldn't pass down the story that somebody coming from France and married into one of the families in the last 200 years? They'd probably still be calling the family "i francesi". :) My father's family got its wealth (which had disappeared by the time he was born) from a privateer from Rimini who fled to the mountains hundreds of years ago. No one forgot.

If I were you and there was no family or village history of Bretons settling there, I'd ignore it and just treat it as a bit more Gallic ancestry.
 
Plus, people in France don't test on the whole; it's not like the U.S., Britain, or even northern European countries. There are actually even legal impediments, or at least lots of red tape in France before you can do a dna test of any kind, and the Sardinians I know are just like the other Italians I know, and couldn't be less interested.

Contrary to MyHeritage, 23andme has almost no European residents in its data base for me. Most matches are Americans which claimed grandparents in the regions. Look for me, none of the matches in Hessen is a full one, with 4 gp, all have just 1-2. The same will apply to France, with most of the matches might be from the Northern USA and Canada actually, but with grandparents from the respective departments. Also some French do and did test, in many ways, but then again, most don't do it on 23andme, which is much more American focussed.
 
Thank you both for the inputs.

23andme does just weighting your matches with its algorithm for people which gave the location of their grandparents. This means if there are no matches for your in a region which gave away the location of their grandparents, you don't get it, even if you are 100 percent from that location. On the other hand, if relatives of yours moved to another place and are, let's say half Italian-half French, living in Brittany, you get that region. For me its e.g. Berlin. I have no known ancestry from the city, highly unlikely any of my German ancestors came from Berlin in the last 300 years, yet I do get it, simply because distant relatives of mine moved to the capital.

I didn't knew that myself, but a user on Anthrogenica showed it to me, you just have to look into the source code.

This is an example:


So I have 3 genetic relatives from Hessen, with 5 Hessian grandparents in total. So not that much, but something.

For your case, let's just assume a relative from Italy moved to France, had many children, so you get even more than one match from the department, et voil�!

Doesn't mean you can't have real ancestry from the region, but it could be very well gone in the other direction. Like I know from surname data that between various people and Germans there was so much reciprocal gene flow, that its hard to say which segment was brought by whom, by the Germans or the other side.

You can check for surnames on this site for example:
https://forebears.io/

I found two surnames, one rather rare, the other extremely rare, in other populations and regions from which I have no recent ancestry, obviously because one of the relatives of my ancestors was a trader or whatnot and moved into this country. In one case the surname is now more common in the foreign region in which not too many Germans were living at any time, than in all of Germany. So if I would get from 23andme a similarity for that region, I know why.

A fairly common Italian surname is Rizzo, if you look at the forebears map:
https://forebears.io/surnames/rizzo

There could be some clusters due to Italian migrants which moved there generations ago. Just in case you don't have any ancestry from the region, proven by your record and matches, this could be the explanation. Undertested regions won't appear in 23andme, because no testers = no matches = no ancestral region.
23andMe explains the tool. The related algorithm naturally uses matching segments. This doesn't equal basic statistic over one's own matches with ancestry informed (which is not necessarily what you meant). Seems more complex than that. See:
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003184973

They would work with a whole database - a dynamic one -, not (only) with one's listed matches; a database with 400 thousands (!) reference samples of customers from all over the world (out of ~10 millions customers, IIRC). Perhaps the ancestry locations don't come from profiles, but from those 23andMe surveys, in which one also informs the ancestry location(s) of the grandparents.
Btw, time ago LivingDNA was looking for individuals whose grandparents were born not more than 80 milles from each other. My parents don't fit. My father's and mother's maternal grandparents would. :)

From the article above:
"To determine these results, we look for identical pieces of DNA that you have in common with individuals of known ancestry from around the world. Reference populations for recent ancestor locations consist of over 400,000 customers, and this number will continue to grow as our customer database expands."

So they search for relevant identical segments among reference samples, suggestive of recent connections, and then they perform a calibration:
"These initial steps determine the percent genome shared between you and the reference individuals for each location.
Next, we do a calibration step to set more meaningful thresholds that accounts for the special demographic histories of each location. This calibration step helps determine whether you share a similar genetic makeup to people who have recent ancestry from a specific location. We then use this comparison to set unique confidence thresholds for each location."

About Match Strenght:
"The strength of the match for each recent ancestor location is determined by how much of your DNA you share with people from that country, calibrated by how many people are in the reference population. For a given recent ancestor location, we indicate our confidence in the result. "Possible" means we are between 30% - 49.9% confident in the assignment, "likely" means we are between 50% – 79.9% confident, while "highly likely" means we are at least 80% confident in the assignment. "Not detected" means we are less than 30% confident in assigning that recent ancestor location to you."

Angela is correct. My parents probably falled under 30%*, but I must have inherited from them peaces of the DNA that made me got more segments related to that area than themselves. I falled between 50-80% of confidence then (probably something around 55%, since they would have scored less than 30 each).

*
"If you don’t share the minimum number of identical DNA segments with our reference individuals and/or the percent of your genome shared with our reference individuals does not pass our confidence thresholds, then you will not see any additional regions added to your Ancestry Composition Report."

And of course there're limitations (as you suggested), which may explain why Lombardy is not the second for my father. For example:
"To assign your recent ancestor locations, we look for identical pieces of DNA that you have in common with a large group of individuals with known ancestry from many regions worldwide.
The more DNA you share with reference individuals from specific locations, the higher the likelihood is that those locations will be assigned to you. However, you may not have enough genetic relatives with self-reported ancestry from a particular country or region for us to assign that location to you with confidence."

It's worth reading it all.
 
There are people with both my mother's and father's surnames living in both Sardegna and France. I really don't think that explains all of it however. Those people would have also had to test, and I think the odds of that might be pretty small.

Plus, people in France don't test on the whole; it's not like the U.S., Britain, or even northern European countries. There are actually even legal impediments, or at least lots of red tape in France before you can do a dna test of any kind, and the Sardinians I know are just like the other Italians I know, and couldn't be less interested.

In my case there are perfectly plausible explanations for why my genome might share alleles with people from Provence and Sardegna.

In your case I'm not sure, but the Bretons are a bit different from other French people, more heavily "Celtic", and you might have happened to inherit some of those alleles. Lyon is a Gallic, Roman, Burgundian mix. wouldn't be hard to find some matches with a far northern Italian.

I just ignore how they phrase it, i.e. "some of your ancestors might have lived there during the last 250 years". All they know is that the matching "chunks" aren't very small so they're assuming they're within the last 250-300 years. However, I'm not sure that's always the case. Up until the late 19th and even early 20th century in many areas of Europe people hadn't moved more than 20 miles for hundreds of years. They're cousins to everybody in their villages, and these chunks may be quite old.

I knew their attempts to date this admixture didn't make sense from the time that they used to give some far southern Italians big percentages of northern Near Eastern, i.e. the Caucasus, Asia Minor. It made absolutely no sense to claim that, and at the same time say they couldn't go back more than 300 years. There was NO, repeat, NO, migration from "Anatolia" to Italy from 1700-2000 A.D. It was absurd then, and what they're saying now about smaller percentages is still absurd.

The people in the town where I was born still gossip about the fact that in the town just south of it toward La Spezia some "Moorish" pirates settled there. That happened in the Middle Ages. You think the old nonne wouldn't pass down the story that somebody coming from France and married into one of the families in the last 200 years? They'd probably still be calling the family "i francesi". :) My father's family got its wealth (which had disappeared by the time he was born) from a privateer from Rimini who fled to the mountains hundreds of years ago. No one forgot.

If I were you and there was no family or village history of Bretons settling there, I'd ignore it and just treat it as a bit more Gallic ancestry.
Good post!

I'm the living evidence that Gallic Veneti and Adriaric Veneti are somehow related to one another. Kidding! :)

Yes, it looks like it could be something related to the Gallics.

I don't have any known ancestors from outside Italy (apart grandparents' generation down). All my lines are documented from the end of XVIII at least, and I've gone further in many of them. Always Italians.
 
Good post!
I'm the living evidence that Gallic Veneti and Adriaric Veneti are somehow related to one another. Kidding! :)
Yes, it looks like it could be something related to the Gallics.
I don't have any known ancestors from outside Italy (apart grandparents' generation down). All my lines are documented from the end of XVIII at least, and I've gone further in many of them. Always Italians.

We're in the same situation. Half of my ancestry can be traced back to the Council of Trent when it was first mandated that the churches keep records. All of them came from the same Apennine ridge except for the Rimini privateer and a Florentine merchant who probably was also one step ahead of the law as we say in the U.S. Mountain refuges are always attractive to the less "compliant" shall we say. :)

My mother's maternal side likewise seems to have been in the Lunigiana since that time, both the northern and middle Lunigiana, the areas with more "Emilian" influence both in language and genetics.

I'm less sure of my maternal grandfather's side because "his" paternal side's records would have been in La Spezia and were destroyed in the war. The surname, however, can be found in the Ticino, Lombardia (Como), Piemonte, all over Liguria and Provence. However, on his maternal side he was distantly related to my maternal grandmother.

In these situations, chunks of genes are passed around and around and around. It's a roll of the genetic dice. On top of that, phenotype isn't necessarily "linked" to "ancestry". My very Emilian looking brother comes out less Emilian than I do, and less French as well.

As well as reading the white papers these companies publish, you have to know the European context in which your ancestors lived, and you have to have some common sense and logic.
 
Last edited:
Yes. That's just the perspective of culture, or citizenship. As I said, a "point of view". Not my focus though.
I wrote "details apart" for a reason. :)
I know that different genetic elements could have been taken along the expansion in space and time, and at different degrees.
Regarding being allies, well, I mentioned expansion and influence.
You used the term "under Rome" for the Alpines, which would actually imply the existence of Romans. I don't know exactly in which ways you'd define Romans, or a "pure Roman", but that would be another discussion. I believe I made my point clear in my last post, be it (the point) right or wrong.
So, details apart, if I understand you right, you don't believe in such possible gene flow from South in the context of the expansion and influence of Romans (or Rome, if you prefer), bringing more Southern elements to the North. Is that right? Well, ok then. Let's see if ancient DNAs provide clues on how people looked like in the North just before the Roman influence (or whatever we could call it).
@Angela
Likely addressed to me too. :) Thanks. I'll certainly take a look at the thread, with great interest.

I don't believe in calling anyone under the Roman empire as Romans

Gene flow ..........there are differences between South and North Italy.......but looking at iron age and earlier for italy, the bulk of the people would be central Italians or coming from central italian ethnicity .......there are basically only 2 ethnic peoples of Italy at that time .......the 12 cities of the etruscans and the many more numerous Umbri and all their side branches ............I do not see southern italians except Sicilians ( basically moden Campania, Benevenuto, Apulia, Abruzzo are all Central italian people ( mostly Umbri ) in the ancient times ) ...............If I was to guess on the true origin of Italians , I would say the Umbri group

You are North-East Italian......you have Celtic, Gallic, Germanic, Venetic, Euganei, north balkan Illyrian ( not necessary slav ) mix .............with some Umbri as well
 

This thread has been viewed 235348 times.

Back
Top