why the fascination with DNA and what it supposedly proves about our origins?

My view is that this fascination is a part of white elitism.

A family member did this DNA test, with a predictable result.

3/4 Northern European, 1/4 First Peoples. But all that shows is that thousands of years ago, people migrated.

My view is that Senator Warren should not have debated Trump on this spurious DNA issue.

The reason is the SBVT were also spurious. Kerry never gave "his version", he had the NAVY version of his service on his Senate site and his campaign site. I have seen a few times on his recent book tour where he responds to questions on that and it is clearly still difficult for him.

However, even though many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, adviced him NOT to speak about Vietnam, the current conventional wisdom is that he should have fought those stories more than he did. (In fact, it is a tricky question. Polls showed that few people who might have voted for him believed the liars. However, imagine he had blown them out of the water and then used his crew and the man he saved as character witneses of his character and his intelligence which probably saved the lives of his men as ONE element of his closing argument.)

Back to Warren. The accusation is stupid. At worst, she repeated an inaccurate story her family had told her starting when she was little. People asked her to just take the DNA test ... which she did. Whether she has any NA heritage or not, makes no difference in the person she is and her accomplishments. The super negative response is likely partisan politics by people preferring other candidates.

My view is that, for many, the fascination with heritage is based on a desire for a "racially pure" bloodline that has nothing to do with the reality that all humans are the product of thousands of years of intermarriage and migration.

was finding some cousins my family had lost touch with over the years.

I was actually expecting and hoping to find some surprises about my genome, but found nothing except what I already knew, based on family genealogy other relatives had done. All my DNA apparently came from the same general region -- boring!

With one, identified by the DNA analysis, he knew of her father but did not have inforamtion about her. He made her day sending photos of her parents at our wedding and at his bar mitzvah.

On my side, my brother who took the test and then got many of his 8 siblings and our parents to take it used it to fill in a family tree that he has also done a huge amount of work on using documents (birth, death, weddings). Years ago, on one branch of the family we were contacted by someone researching his (related family) - so we were able to use a lot of his research. (it helps to have a semi unusual name.)

because she had known the parents of these cousins, and she would have enjoyed finding them again. Back in the day, it was much easier to lose all contact with relatives who had moved across the country.

My kids, now in their late 20s and early 30s, never really lost touch with high school or college friends. Email and social media made it easy to keep in touch or get back in touch. I am 68 and did not keep in touch with many people from High School. Finding them or college friends is complicated by the fact that at that time many women changed their names so they are very hard to find.

I like it. I'm back in touch with lots of old high school friends -- and newly discovered relatives.

I was able to get in touch with the woman who was my closest friend through most of middle school and high school. We no longer have much in common, but it was nice for both of us to touch base.

Eventually she reached out to thank me for posting political stuff, saying the posts had given her a lot to think about and that though her job prevented her from being as open as I was, she had started talking to her friends about more issues -- and they are all having problems with Trump.

Later, during the Kavanaugh hearings, she confided that she and her daughter had shared their own sexual assault stories for the first time. She knew I would understand, too.

In Seattle more people actually voted for Jill Stein than for DT. I'd hate to live in a heavily red state. Anyway, I keep speaking out in FB and I've had more than one redstater thank me for it.

Recently found out that we had more cousins/relatives living in our city then realized or closely connected. In fact, three doors down from us the grandson of the couple married a cousin 1x removed from me. She lived about 3 counties north of us. And the family that lived down the street attended the same small church as us. And a 3rd cousin of mine married another member of the same church. My parents didn't know of the connections before they passed.

10k years ago there were already mutations for blue eyes, but not for white skin. Not sure about blond hair yet.

These "Western Eurasians" would have been darker than most Middle Easterners. Blue eyed, to considerably extent, but as white as your typical Pakistani.

But, yeah, it's because white racists like being secure in the fact that their ancestors were as brown as the typical Mayan. It's a point of honor, in fact. Just ask any Klansman.

Things are different with that kind of time depth.

Mostly people are curious. Sometimes it's just curiosity. It really doesn't matter where, exactly, eikhorn was first isolated, or if the traditional pig population in Europe was independently domesticated or hybridized with pigs brought in from Asia Minor. But we want to know. Does it matter that beans were independently domesticated three times, or that lactose tolerance arose in three different locations? And good luck tying that in with white elitism.

In the case of the "west and east" Eurasians, nobody, I think, is even saying much about whether they were actually in Europe at the time. Europe was populated by at least two streams, one through the Balkans and another across Asia. Cladistic genetic analysis puts Europeans fairly close to East Asians, but with an overlap with Middle-Easterners. Was the East Asian genetic stock separated by the time the early Americans migrated? Or were they still all clustered there, and it's not so much "people moving east and across to the Americas" but "the people, some of which migrated to the Americans were already developing enough genetic diversity that they're no longer identical to the east Asian genetic stock." We're curious about our past. The West Eurasians are going to be the "indigenous" peoples of the Urals, so Uralic speakers, Finnic speakers, Khanti, Evenki, maybe the Turkic peoples.

Cavalli-Sforza produced a huge tome on alleles and their distribution back in the '90s; I had a copy when I cared about such things. It was nice to see Hungary as an island in so many ways--echoing what tradition and records tell us about the Magyar incursion and settlement of Pannonia. Finns and Estonians are outliers, too. You could see the immigration that spread farming from the Middle East reflected in genetics, and also what looked to be the spread of Indo-European speakers. Both of those identifications are tentative, of course--all it really showed was a large spread from the SE, and a less powerful, therefore later, spread from the east.

Some things aren't helped. It remains a mystery how Semitic languages include what until the '90s most considered the "whites" of the Middle East as well as the blacks of places like Somalia and Ethiopia. ("Brown" as a racial category is late; odd that as we deconstruct race and tried to move away from it, we decided to split up "whites" in the interests of American politics to make even more divisions to argue over.) We're still not sure how to account for yams in South American and Austronesia. White elitism? Relevance to anything important? Not so much. It pissed off Turks to see to what extent they weren't truly "Turkic" but Greek or Luwian. And Greeks were truly annoyed to see the influence of the Middle East but also of Slavs on their genetic makeup. And let's not talk about what are clearly African genes in southern Italy (thanks, Arab invaders and occupiers, but also the Phoenicians a thousand years earlier, with trade between Sicily and Carthage). If we didn't know the history of Sicily, it's written in the genes.

Malta is how you translate "War and Peace" into Genetic.

It's fun to look at the distribution of alcohol dehydrogenases in humans, for example, and the variant alleles themselves (some ethnicities metabolize ethanol more slowly than Europeans; some much more quickly--now, think about what that means for drinking and driving and the standard advice on when it's safe to drive). In some cases, there's health at stake--different alleles make medications either useless or dangerous. Or account for, say, differential rates of sodium retention and therefore the ethnic distribution of hypertension; my genetic stock says salt intake is pretty much irrelevant, but for others the recommended sodium allowance is already too high. Or diabetes in Americans with a large proportion of indio, for example, respond to refined starches differently; you can find traces of that in Europeans, but the Neolithic revolution 5000 BC or so would have led to high diabetes rates then, so Europeans would have been selected for less sensitivity. Evolution in action expressed in alleles and their distribution. Or take lactose insensitivity--it was innovated three times, if I remember correctly, and you can plot the rapid spread of one innovating center in European prehistoric genetics with the spread of milch cows.

We're curious people. It's like looking at the textual history of the Koran. Nobody's going to change anything, somebody'll get upset that others are doing it, but we're curious.

he was sure that we had Apache blood because he said that his maternal grandpa “looked Apache”.

Four out of eight of his children have taken the Ancestry.com DNA test and among us, we average about 20% NA! I’m so happy to have confirmation of our NA heritage

Personally, my test delineates that 4% is Andean, but does not break down the 16%, so I don’t know if my Dad was correct, but I’d love to claim that I’m of Apache heritage

of the Americas has been around for years, mainly based on the wide variety of native language families found in this hemisphere, so I'm not surprised that a group may have wandered around western Eurasia (which is not necessarily the same as modern Europe, and they may not have been closely related at all to modern Europeans) then wandered back over the Bering Strait or nearby to North America. Or took the Scandanavia/Greenland/North America route. Or went island-hopping to South America. Or all of the above, plus routes I haven't thought of.

It will be interesting to see what the actual paper says.

The DNA tests are new and interesting for lots of people. Why not have a Senator and presidential candidate that is interested in current things of interest? She's not playing Trump's game but rather shoving it up his ... . These are traits that appeal to me.

There are many things about human migration that need to be pegged down and I for one support the science and those that practice good science to find out all we can about everything.

heritage. She took the DNA test well after she made claims about her heritage. She took the test because she wanted to prove her previous statements were accurate.

Saying that a third of NA DNA is "European" - specifically "western Eurasia" suggests that there were migration flows from both Asia - which is what all of us learned in school AND from Siberia or western asia (I assume Mongolia etc). This is a fascinating use of DNA that might rewrite that part of history.

As to Elizabeth Warren, the test that suggests that she is about 1/32 NA - which confirms her family's stories is not changed by this. Those ancestory tests use sets of mutations that occur almost entirely in a population subset. Note that Elizabeth Warren, repeating what her family told her was not lying and she received no benefit from repeating those stories.

Many people find the stories handed down are not the whole story and may be extremely untrue. In my family, I found that my maternal grandfather's mother was either 100% or 75% European Jewish. To us, this was a surprise. Her family and the family of my grandfather's father met on a boat from Germany, became friends and settled in the same area. My great grandparents were young kids when they emigrated. Her first name Christina, was definately NOT Jewish. (In fact, when I converted to Judaism, that side of the family was the only side I did not tell at my mom's request. One great aunt (the sister of my grandfather) was a nun. )

Until one of my brothers took a DNA test and convinced my 89 year old parents to do so, there was no hint of this hidden story. He has since found relatives from that side that are 100% European Jewish heriitage. It would be fascinating to know the story behind this, but may be that even Christina had no idea of her parent's heritage. This would mean none of her children would have had any idea.

This whole thing is a nonstory. It absolutely does not matter if she is 1/32 or 1/64 or any other percent Native American. She is the person she is. She was an outstanding professor at Harvard Law School, an excellent advocate for the consumer finacial protection bureau which she largely defined and which became law via Dodd Frank. She is a strong proponent for reducing income inequality and she has been a consistent opponent to corruption.

'She is a strong proponent for reducing income inequality and she has been a consistent opponent to corruption.'

I will applaud anyone that fits this description...we need more leaders like this.

the rest is all personal motivations. We have always been a nomadic species. Basing one's personal identity on where one's distant ancestors camped out for a while is, well, limiting...celebrate different customs and cultures as if they are your own...because they are.

The DNA tests that tell modern individuals "4% Native American, 24% southern European, 48% Nordic etc." are counting up specific forms of markers that are found in the stable populations from these areas. These markers might have develop over a few thousand years, or even a few hundred (the later being the kind that allows you to relate individuals to each other, to distinguish between families that are all "Nordic" etc.).

When they say they think Native American DNA shows one third western Eurasian, two thirds east Asian, that doesn't mean that a 'pure' Native American's DNA would be indistinguishable from someone whose ancestors a couple of hundred years ago were one third west Eurasian and two thirds east Asian. All groups have developed small differences in the thousands of years since their common ancestors, and that allows us to note "southern European", "Levant", south east Asia", "Patagonia" or whatever for modern day individuals, and when you think you know where they all started in the days before mass migration, you can then start putting numbers on 'ancestry'. Of course, populations were never static, and there was still slower movement, of individuals and groups, all through history and pre-history.

What the 'one third west Eurasian' means is that while the east Asian population has ancestry that is largely separate from west Eurasian for a long time (40,000 years? I'm pulling that number pretty much out of thin air), they now think there was a population, probably in Siberia, where the two populations mixed significantly, up to 20,000 years ago, at least; and these were the people who then crossed into the Americas, but seem to have since died out in Siberia.