I’m surprised we don’t hear more DNA stories like this, particularly in Scandinavia where the widespread use of patronymics would channel research along these lines. The Bure family in Sweden, a prominent family since medieval times, has a project devoted to using yDNA to investigate the early origins of their patrilineage. They recently found a…
Category: Genetics
Jukes and Kallikaks
Not many people remember it now, but biologists used to like the idea of eugenics, improving humans by controlling who is allowed to reproduce. In that whole muddle the Jukes and Kallikaks were iconic. In 9th grade biology our textbooks had a chapter on genetics. Mendel and all that. I was already a fledgling genealogist….
Warren’s Cherokee Ancestry
I was at coffee with a friend a few days ago when we got mired in a debate about Elizabeth Warren. I was struck by how much misinformation I was hearing. It doesn’t need to be this hard. There is a political narrative that says Warren lied about her Cherokee ancestry. That’s a story for…
DNAPainter
So. I was using Genome Mate. It was a lot of work for not much result. There was an update. Always more work. I never got around to doing it, and never went back. So now I’m looking at DNAPainter. Worth taking a shot, or will it just be extra useless work? Roberta Estes says,…
What Happened to the Old Europeans?
Here’s a video from Masaman about the Old Europeans. He explains, they are “the original people groups of Europe that inhabited the landmass before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, a group which would later evolve into the vast majority of European nations we see today, from the Russians, Italians, Irish, Norwegians and Greeks.“ Not much…