Caution on the interpretation of MyTrueAncestry results

[Maciamo]

I have noticed that many forum members have uploaded their genome on MyTrueAncestry. It's a very convenient tool to compare oneself to ancient populations. A word a caution is necessary though.

1) Ethnic Mislabelling

MyTrueAncestry do tend to label ethnic groups rather loosely and sometimes in a completely wrong way. For example they give ethnic label pertaining to the Classical or Late Antiquity to Bronze Age, Neolithic and even Mesolithic samples! For example the Cheddar Men who lived 9000 years ago in England is described as a Longobard in Deep Dive, while the Trumpington Meadows individuals from Bronze Age Britain are listed as Latin! It looks like they just look at the closer Iron Age matches for the older samples and think it's ok to lump them under the same label.

At least the new Deep Dive Breakdown has an option to show the Civilisation Closeness. I just wonder why they choose to assign "civilisations" to pre-civilisation eras, and why they even talk of civilisation for Germanic tribes like the Franks, Longobards, Saxons, Vandals, etc.

2) Misleading Ancestry Breakdown

Unfortunately all the mislabelling, even if it is identifiable in Deep Dive, ultimately messes up the Ancestry Breakdown. A large number of samples that are used for the percentages are pre-Iron Age and are nevertheless listed under names such as Gaul, Frank, Saxon, Latin and the like.

Furthermore, I noticed that many people believe that the Ancestry Breakdown represents the percentage of their ancestry, but that is not the case. It only represents the percentage of closest matches among the ancient samples available now. To illustrate how different this is, I have uploaded a modern East Asian genome to see what the Ancestry Breakdown would look like. As there are very few ancient East Asian samples in MyTrueAncestry, the results were quite outlandish, with matches from India or the Andaman Islanders who obviously are very distant ethnically from modern East Asians. To make things worse the Ancestry Breakdown made it look like the few ancient East Asian samples that were the closest matches in Deep Dive only represented a small percentage of the ancestry, while South Asians made up three quarters of the Ancestry Breakdown. The reason is simple. There are much more South Asian samples, so the East Asian ones look dwarfed in comparison as a percentage of the top 100 matches.


So please keep all this in mind when viewing your results.

I hope that MyTrueAncestry is going to fix these issues. It would be easy to relabel pre-Iron Age samples as such, adding categories like Mesolithic Western Europe for the Cheddar Man or giving the name of Neolithic, Chalcolithic or Bronze Age cultures (LBK, Bell Beaker, Unetice, Tumulus, etc.).

[Northener]

You are absolutely right, there are even 'proxy' Franks, based on Szolad samples.

There is one feature that is my favorite though: the Haplogroup Analytics is very insightful because it spits the auDNA up in the sum of your ancestors Y-DNA and Mt DNA.

[Maciamo]

There is one feature that is my favorite though: the Haplogroup Analytics is very insightful because it spits the auDNA up in the sum of your ancestors Y-DNA and Mt DNA.

I am not sure that this is very useful considering the low number of samples. At present the data for modern countries and regions remains more informative in that regard. But anyway autosomal DNA is far more useful in terms of ancestry than Y-DNA or mtDNA. High resolution Y-DNA is great for tracing lineages accurately to a few generations, see when populations split from each others and exactly where they could have come from (if there is enough data to compare it with).

[torzio]

Do you think their problem is that they do not give exact tribal names ....but names most people relate to or know about ................

like ...........do they use Lombard always and leave out Suebi tribe

or use Scythian for Getae or Dacian

or use Roman for Sabine

[Maciamo]

Do you think their problem is that they do not give exact tribal names ....but names most people relate to or know about ................

like ...........do they use Lombard always and leave out Suebi tribe

or use Scythian for Getae or Dacian

or use Roman for Sabine

They do simplify this way. But that's nowhere near as bad as to say that a Mesolithic Briton is a Lombard.

Actually I haven't seen the use of the term Roman on their site. They categorise the Italic samples as Latin. What I don't get is why Bronze Age Britons also get the Latin denomination.

[Northener]

I am not sure that this is very useful considering the low number of samples. At present the data for modern countries and regions remains more informative in that regard. But anyway autosomal DNA is far more useful in terms of ancestry than Y-DNA or mtDNA. High resolution Y-DNA is great for tracing lineages accurately to a few generations, see when populations split from each others and exactly where they could have come from (if there is enough data to compare it with).

Let me illustrate it, this is the Mt-DNA spread of my mother's ancestry:

	Norway	Ancient Norway	Northerer Mom
H	37.5	34.5	39.8
HV	3.6	7.0	5.6
I	1.7	4.6	4.0
J	15	13.9	16.6
K	5.5	9.3	10.0
N	1	0	1
T	8.5	2.3	8.1
U	17.9	20.9	15.1
V	0.5	4.6	0
W	1.8	0	1.5
Other	7.1	2.3	2.5

Source: Maja Krzewińska et al.

Northerner Mom follows the modern Norway pattern, with two exceptions:

I. Northener Mom has an ‘ancient Norway’ kind of percentage I

Explanation:

Wiki:

Haplogroup I displays a strong connection with the Indo-European migrations; especially its I1, I1a1 and I3a subclades, which have been found in Poltavka and Srubnaya cultures in Russia (Mathieson 2015), among ancient Scythians (Der Sarkissian 2011), and in Corded Ware and Unetice Culture burials in Saxony (Brandt 2013).

Melchior et al:

It is notable that the latter I haplotype was also observed in two of the nine individuals of an Early Christian population sample (ca. 1,000 AD) from Konge- marken, 100 km to the north at Roskilde (Rudbeck et al., 2005) (Table 4). In contrast, only one individual of haplogroup I (in England) was observed amongst the 114 subjects analyzed in the recent studies of ancient popula- tions in Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and early central Eu- ropean farmers (Vernesi et al., 2004; Haak et al., 2005; Sampietro et al., 2005; Topf et al., 2006). These findings suggest that haplogroup I might have had a pronounced frequency distribution in Denmark or Northern Europe.

II. Northener mom has an ‘ancient Norway' kind of percentage K
Explanation

Wiki:

The clade was also discovered in skeletons of early farmers in Central Europe dated to around 5500-5300 BC, at percentages that were nearly double the percentage present in modern Europe. Some techniques of farming, together with associated plant and animal breeds, spread into Europe from the Near East. The evidence from ancient DNA suggests that the Neolithic culture spread by human migration.[16]
Analysis of the mtDNA of Ötzi, the frozen mummy from 3300 BC found on the Austrian-Italian border, has shown that Ötzi belongs to the K1 subclade. It cannot be categorized into any of the three modern branches of that subclade (K1a, K1b or K1c). The new subclade has provisionally been named K1ö for Ötzi.[17] Multiplex assay study was able to confirm that the Iceman's mtDNA belongs to a new European mtDNA clade with a very limited distribution amongst modern data sets.[18]

Conclusion
So Northerner Mom had compared to modern Norwegians a higher Indo-European (I) and Funnelbeaker (K) component that is closer to the Norwegians and Danes of the early middle ages.


Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...STB20130384C54
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18046774

[New Englander]

People just need to understand how the distance estimates work, and than modern populations may be very different from ancient ones geographically.

Im still confused about the Royal Matches. So for R1b I get 3 matches. These are just samples that are from Mid Evil Italy, so I would say match 98%, and that person just happens to have the same haplogroup as me, it does not mean I am directly related.

King DNA.jpg

[matty74]

I don’t pay much attention to it. Most of it is rubbish and fanciful thinking.

[Maciamo]

Let me illustrate it, this is the Mt-DNA spread of my mother's ancestry:

	Norway	Ancient Norway	Northerer Mom
H	37.5	34.5	39.8
HV	3.6	7.0	5.6
I	1.7	4.6	4.0
J	15	13.9	16.6
K	5.5	9.3	10.0
N	1	0	1
T	8.5	2.3	8.1
U	17.9	20.9	15.1
V	0.5	4.6	0
W	1.8	0	1.5
Other	7.1	2.3	2.5

Source: Maja Krzewińska et al.

Northerner Mom follows the modern Norway pattern, with two exceptions:

I. Northener Mom has an ‘ancient Norway’ kind of percentage I

Explanation:

Wiki:
Melchior et al:


II. Northener mom has an ‘ancient Norway' kind of percentage K
Explanation

Wiki:


Conclusion
So Northerner Mom had compared to modern Norwegians a higher Indo-European (I) and Funnelbeaker (K) component that is closer to the Norwegians and Danes of the early middle ages.


Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...STB20130384C54
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18046774

It's sad to see that after all this time on the forum you still don't understand what is mitochondrial DNA. You only inherited from a single mtDNA haplogroup. All the others in your ancestry are irrelevant.

Additionally, having an autosomal match (a few segments on one or several chromosomes) with an ancient individual doesn't mean that you inherited their mtDNA. Mitochondrial DNA is not nuclear DNA. It is not part of the 46 chromosomes. It is completely independent.

[Northener]

It's sad to see that after all this time on the forum you still don't understand what is mitochondrial DNA. You only inherited from a single mtDNA haplogroup. All the others in your ancestry are irrelevant.

Additionally, having an autosomal match (a few segments on one or several chromosomes) with an ancient individual doesn't mean that you inherited their mtDNA. Mitochondrial DNA is not nuclear DNA. It is not part of the 46 chromosomes. It is completely independent.

OK I understand. But IMO this tool gives a a picture of the whole ancestry. So the mtDNA of both of the grandmothers and their (grand-)mothers etc etc.

So mother split into the two grandmothers (one has the same MtDNA the other could be different) and so fort.

I hope I have made myself clear. And correct me if I am wrong.

Regarding my mother's result it has potential made a puzzle clear Maciamo!
In most PCA's (G25, most extreme in K36 results) she has got something Baltic. Based on this illustration this makes it clear, she has for modern standards a quite high component mtDNA I. Wiki:

The frequency of haplogroup I may have undergone a reduction in Europe following the Middle Ages. An overall frequency of 13% was found in ancient Danish samples from the Iron Age to the Medieval Age (including Vikings) from Denmark and Scandinavia compared to only 2.5% in modern samples.

And where is this actually high.....indeed the Baltics.

[Northener]

A break up of all my ‘paternal lines’ in my ancestry!





R1B 63,4% (references to R1b1a1a2a1a and R1b L21 seems Bell Beaker)
R1A 13,4% (reference to R-L448 seems Scandic)
I2 12,5% (reference to I2a and I2-M284 occurs in the Isles, Norway, Germany)
I1 8,7% (reference to I1a1b3b seems Scandic)
J 1% (not made specific)
N 1% (something Uralic?)


What is especially clear is that my own Y-DNA namely E-V22 seems to be a very very thin line in my ancestry! It doesn’t even show up…..

[torzio]

so my sister deep dive breakdown shows only


for her H95a .............of which the only modern matches, of which there are 7 ......has 3 x alpine Italians ( Bolzano, Belluno and Fonzaso towns ) , 1 x austrian in Enns town and 3 x swedes all in scandia


while my father deep dive is also a single line with Scythian and nothing else