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So LivingDNA has no references? Nothing from the various databases out there? That's odd because they have implied - as like in the Scottish project - they are getting data from somewhere. Or was that some sort of a fib to attract interest? Either way, this makes the initial purpose of OneWorld questionable.
Living DNA already has tens of thousands of reference samples used to differentiate the 80 regions of ancestry worldwide. The aim of the One Family Project is to further refine that to many more regions and subregions in the Old Wolrd. In order to achieve this as many samples from each region are necessary. If you don't want to contribute to this project, nobody forces you. But there is no point in joining and bitching for two weeks that you want to quit. That's very immature.
"Results will be mostly from that region" - so does that mean references [or their relatives] won't get much in relation to secondary populations? And for people who are not related to the references how useful [or useless] is the test going to be?
That is not clear to me yet. I know that 23andMe customers who were selected to be part of the reference population got 100% of their ancestry from that reference region. I proposed to Living DNA to have several views based on the depth of ancestry. For example, what is your ancestry in the last 300 years, or 1000 years ago or 2000 years ago, or 5000 years ago. It is theoretically possible to do this as smaller segments of inherited DNA mean older ancestry. However it is difficult to implement in practice, especially without thousands of ancient samples from each period. If Living DNA eventually implements this, being a participant to a regional project will only affect recent ancestry (under 500 years), so people could still get an idea of the percentage of, say, ancient Germanic, Celtic, Roman, Greek or Slavic ancestry they inherited. I think that is much more interesting than recent ancestry anyway.