dear maciamo,
kudos for your work
do ftdna ancient origins goes inline with k12b calculator{ meseolithic+neolithic european} ?
here are my results for example :
ftdna ancient origins
i score 60% farmer/ 24% metal age invader / 12% meseolithic hunter and /0% non-european {african , native americans , east asian allells}
View attachment 8383
in k12b: i score 23% atlantic med{neolithic}+ 14.8 north european {meseolithic}
14.8 is very close to 12% meseolithic ftdna gave me
hope to hear your thoughts as you are expert
with kind regards
adam
p.s
could it be the metal age invader in ftdna is { caucasus +gedrosia in k12b }?
I have explained in
this thread that FTDNA ancientOrigins is completely unreliable. What they call Metal-age invader corresponds only to one specific part of West Asian ancestry (mostly Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan), and not to Proto-Indo-European Steppe ancestry. That's extremely misleading and I don't see the point of it.
FTDNA is a company whose tests is geared primarily to people of European descent, and their ancientOrigins section describes the Mesolithic Hunter ancestry as being native
European (not native African or Siberian or Indian or Japanese or Amerindian or whatever else). Their Farmer component means Neolithic farmers from the Near East who colonised
Europe, not Neolithic farmers from the southern Levant who colonised East and North Africa, nor Iranian farmers who colonised Russia, nor Chinese farmers who colonised most of East Asia. But they don't explain at all that there were different kinds of Neolithic farmers. Yet their Metal-age invaders only correspond to Copper Age Caucasian/Iranian ancestry that spread toward India and around the Middle East. Proto-Indo-European in southern Russia also carried about 30% of that ancestry, but the 70% remaining was Mesolithic East European. However those 30% came mostly during the Neolithic period, when J2b and T1a farmers from Iran colonised southern Russia and the Volga-Ural region, then Siberia. In Europeans, the main component brought by Bronze Age invaders was that Mesolithic East European admixture found in Yamna people, and which replaced most of the Mesolithic West European admixture in northern Europe. Why would a test made for people of European descent not distinguish between Mesolithic West Europeans and Mesolithic East European?
That kind of gross oversimplifications and misleading data is one of the reasons why I wouldn't recommend to test with FTDNA. Their My Origins calculator is also completely off and attribute modern geographic denominations to ancient ancestry as I explained
here. Testing companies provide these interpretations of ancestry to paying customers. I think they should have the decency to either provide serious and well-researched information or not to interpret the data at all. I am surprised that so many people complained in the media and even sued 23andMe for providing what I think was a reasonably good interpretation of medical risks linked to one's genetic data, but that nobody sued FamilyTreeDNA for their terrible interpretation of ancestry (even though FTDNA is specialised in ancestry testing and should know better). This problem with FTDNA isn't new. It doesn't date from the 2016 when they introduced ancientOrigins. FTDNA has been misleading and abusing the trust of naive customers for many years through their European subsidiary iGenea, which claimed among others that they could determine if someone was related to Marie-Antoinette of Genghis Khan simply through a mtDNA or Y-DNA test. This was an outright lie, since mtDNA cannot ascertain any relationship apart from a shared matrilineal ancestor who lived many millennia ago. Most of the mtDNA deep clades that exist today already existed during the Neolithic period, over 6000 years ago. As for Genghis Khan his DNA has never been tested, so we don't even know which haplogroup he belonged to. There are many other examples (Tutankhamen...), but I won't list them all here. The bottom line is that FTDNA is the kind of company that has no scruples telling complete lies to prospective customers just to make money.
