DNATribes Europa Upgrade

I figured as a supplement to my DNA Tribes 15-locus results I would get the add-on for the European specific regions and see how I matched up putting all the pieces together. Well, I was in for some suprises and some not so surprising results. There are some short blurbs on the various groups with pure marketing to peak the interest of people who hope to be descended from ancient Greeks or Norsemen. Of course this is how they get you!


DNATribes labels the regions of Europe where you match strongest which is pretty simple to infer from the diagram. Some of the regions where I match strongest do come as a pretty big surprise. For instance, I don't know of any real east European ancestry, yet it shows up rather strongly. The Scandinavian and Finnish regions are also rather strong without any real know connection. The only assumption is with deep British ancestry, one can expect at least some of your ancestry to come from the far north. The lack of affinity with the Meditteranean comes as a bit of a surprise, I would have expected a stronger connection, but then again...maybe not since I don't know of any family members coming from Spain or even Italy.

For the numerically inclined, there are values which indicate your strongest connection incase the various shades of yellow were too difficult to differentiate with one another. I'm not entirely sure how the scores were calculated for Scythian or Russian but they seem rather disproportionate for what I know of my ancestry. Then again, I don't really know much...which was the point of my exercise. DNATribes' little blurb on the Scythians is as follows:

Scythian: The Scythian region includes present day SouthernRussia and neighboring lands. Itwas here on the Pontic-Caspian steppe that the horse was first domesticated, and this zone has
since been home to several mobile horse riding cultures: from the
early Kurgan cultures to the Indo-Iranian speaking Scythians and
Sarmatians of antiquity to Slavic speaking Cossacks of today.

What they also don't tell you is that there were Turkic speakers here as well, in fact throughout Russia. Namely people like the Khazars...and others like Bulgars and Huns..etc Quite a heterogeneous mess.

In any event I am rather pleased with the results and they have been revealing. I wouldn't have expected such an eastern influence, but I guess everyone has a bit of skyj in them.

Till then - my 21-locus upgrade should be on its way and see if the relationship holds with another 6 autosomal markers!