DNA mystery.

[Ruskie]

Good explanation Albufera 32.

To add to the “unexactness” of the ethnicity estmates I remember a while ago reading a document which gave numbers of the people in some sample populations. For some of the rarer populations the bumbers were really very low - a hundred or so, or fewer. That has propably increased over the years.

Participants also needed to know that their lineage as far back as their great grandparents (someone will correct me if I am wrong) came from a specific area. Unsure if they needed a paper trail to prove it, or how it worked if they came from an area without a paper trail.

So it seems like they largely took people’s word for it, which I imagjne must be open to guesswork and error.

[John Scott 1959]

The first thing to understand is............

I am unable to thank you enough for making this such a simple and easy to understand explanation of what has been a difficult to understand subject for me personally.   

[Albufera32]

The numbers in each reference panel are listed on Ancestry in the section on DNA.

In all there are 107 reference panels, with a total of 116 830 DNA samples making up those panels, so the average size of the panels is about 1000. Almost all the European panels are 2000, whilst the lowest I could see was Burusho with just 17, followed by Indigenous Arctic at just 24.

Perhaps partially explaining the sudden appearance of Iceland in many people's ancestral regions, Iceland, one of the new panels is just 295, whilst Cornwall, which I think is also new, is 1090.

I should also mention that my explanation is a little simplified, I think Ancestry's clever algorithm is a little bit more complex than I described, but in principle, it works rather like the way I described, I believe.