One of our blog followers, Ron, asked this question:
“My late father and his brother were born and raised on Hatteras Island which was a very isolated community until relatively recent times. Curious about their genetic ancestry, I had my uncle do the Family Tree DNA Family Finder test. His results for the Family (Population) Finder were:
Europe (Western European) – Orcadian 91.37% ±2.82%
Middle East – Palestinian, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Jewish, Mozabite 8.63% ±2.82%
The 8.63% Middle East was surprising since most if not all of his ancestors, going back 4 or more generations, were born on the OBX (Outer Banks). Most of the original families on Hatteras Island trace their roots back to the British Isles and western Europe.
Since my mother’s parents were immigrants from eastern Europe, I thought it would be interesting to know what contributions my maternal grandparents added to my genetic ancestry, so I submitted my DNA samples for the same test. The Population Finder test showed that I was Europe Orcadian 100.00% ±0.00%. I was shocked that some other population did not show in the results.
Can you help me understand how the representative populations are determined and why Middle East didn’t show in my sample?”
Yes, indeed, the dreaded “Middle Eastern” result. I’ve seen this over and over again. Let’s talk about what this is and why it might happen. As it happens, the fact that Ray is from Hatteras Island provides us with a wonderful research opportunity, because it’s a population I’m quite familiar with.
Given that Dawn Taylor and I administer the Hatteras Families DNA Projects (Y-line, mtDNA and autosomal), I have a good handle on the genealogy of the Hatteras Island Families. They are of particular interest because Hatteras Island is where Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colonists are rumored to have gone and amalgamated with the Hatteras Indians. The Hatteras Indians in turn appear to have partly died off, and partly married into the European Island population. Both the Lost Colony Project and the Hatteras DNA Projects at http://www.familytreedna.com/public/HatterasFathers and http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~molcgdrg/hatteras/hifr-index.htm are ongoing and all Hatteras families are included.
As part of the Hatteras families endeavor, Dawn and I have assembled a data base of the Hatteras families with over 5000 early settlers and their descendants to about the year 1900 included. What Ron says is accurate. Most of the Hatteras Island families settled on the island quite early, beginning about 1710. Nearly all of them came from Virginia, some directly and others after having settled on the NC mainland first for a generation or so in surrounding counties. By 1750, almost all of the families found there in 1900 were present. So indeed, this isolated island was settled by a group of people from the British Isles and a few of them intermarried with the local population of Hatteras Indians.
Once on the island, it was unusual to marry outside of the island population, so we have the situation known as endogamy, which is where an isolated population marries repeatedly within itself. Other examples of this are the Amish and Jewish populations. When this happens, the founding group of people’s DNA gets passed around in circles, so to speak, and no new DNA is introduced.
Typically what happens is that in each generation, 50% “new” DNA is introduced by the other parent. When the new DNA is from someone nonrelated, it’s relatively easy to sort out using today’s DNA phasing tools. But when the “new” DNA isn’t new at all, but comes from the same ancestral stock as the other parent, it has the effect of making relationships look “closer” in time.
Let’s look at an example.
You carry the following average percentages of DNA from these relatives:
- Parents 50% from each parent
- Grandparents 25%
- Great-grandparents 12.5%
- Great-great-grandparents 6.5%
As you can see, the percentage is divided in each generation. However, if two of your great-grandparents are the same person, then you actually carry 25% of the DNA from that person, not 12.5. When you’re looking at matches to other people in an endogamous community, nearly everyone looks more closely related than they are on paper due to the cumulative effect of shared ancestors. In essence, genetically, they are much closer than they look to be on a genealogy pedigree chart.
Ok, back to the question at hand. Where did the Middle Eastern come from?
Looking at the percentages above, you can see that if Ray’s Uncle was in fact 8% (plus or minus about 2%, so we’ll just call it 8%) Middle Eastern, his Middle Eastern relative would be either a great-grandparent or a great-great-grandparent. Given that generational length is typically 25 to 30 years, assuming Ray’s birth in 1960 and his uncles in 1940, this means that this Middle Eastern person would have been living on Hatteras Island between 1835 and 1860 using 25 year generations and between 1810 and 1840 using 30 year generations. Having worked with the original records extensively, I can assure you that there were no Middle Eastern people on Hatteras Island at that time. Furthermore, there were no Middle Eastern people on Hatteras earlier in the 1800s or in the 1700s that are reflected in the records. This includes all existent records, deed, marriages, court, tax, census, etc.
What we do find, however, are both Native Americans, slaves and free people of color who may be an admixture of either or both with Europeans. In fact, we find an entire community adjacent to the Indian village that is admixed.
We published an article in the Lost Colony Research Group Newsletter that discusses this mixed community when we identified the families involved. It’s titled, “Will the Real Scarborough, Basnett and Whidbee Please Stand Up” and details our findings.
These families were present on the island and were recorded as being “of color” before 1790, so the intermarriage occurred early in the history of the island.
Furthermore, these families continued to intermarry and they continued to live in the same community as before. In fact, in May and June of 2012, we visited with a woman who still owns the Indian land sold by the Indians to her family members in 1788! And yes, Ray’s surname is one of the surnames who intermarried with these families. In fact, it was someone with his family surname who bought the land that included the Indian village in 1788 from a Hatteras Indian woman.
So what does this tell us?
Having worked with the autosomal results of people who are looking for small amounts of Native American ancestry, I often see this “Middle Eastern” admixture. I’ve actually come to expect it. I don’t believe it’s accurate. I believe, for some reason, tri-racial admixture is being measured as “Middle Eastern.” If you look at the non-Jewish Middle East, this actually makes some sense. There is no other place in the world as highly admixed with a combination of African, European (Caucasian) and Asian. I’m not surprised that early admixture in the US that includes white, African and Native American looks somewhat the same as Middle Eastern in terms of the population as a whole. Regardless of why, this is what we are seeing on a regular basis.
New technology is on the horizon which will, hopefully, resolve some of this ambiguous minority admixture identification. As new discoveries are made, as we discussed when we talked about “Ethnicity Finders” in the blog a few days ago, we learn more and will be able to more acutely refine these minority amounts of trace admixture.
If Ray’s ancestor in 1750 was a Hatteras Indian, and if there was no Lost Colonist European admixture already in the genetic mix, then using a 25 year generation, we would see the following percentages of ethnicity in subsequent generations, assuming marriage to a 100% Caucasian in each generation, as follows:
- 1750 – 100% Indian
- 1775 – next generation, married white settler – 50% Indian
- 1800 – 25% Indian
- 1825 – 13.5% Indian
- 1850 – 6.25% Indian
- 1875 – 3.12% Indian
- 1900 – 1.56% Indian
- 1925 – 0.78% Indian
- 1950 – 0.39% Indian
Remember, however, about endogamy. This group of people were neighbors and lived in a relatively isolated community. They married each other. Every time they married someone else who descended from someone who was a Hatteras Indian in 1750, their percentage of Native Heritage in the subsequent generation doubled as compared to what it would have been without double inheritance. So if Ray’s Uncle is descended several times from Hatteras Indians due to intermarriage within that community, it’s certainly possible that he would carry 6-10% Native admixture. There are also records that suggest possible African admixture early in the Native community.
So now to answer Ray’s last question about inheritance.
Ray wanted to know why he didn’t show any “Middle Eastern” admixture when his uncle did.
Remember that Ray’s Uncle has two “genetic transmission events” that differ from Ray’s line. Ray’s Uncle, even though he had the same parents as Ray’s father, inherited differently from his parents. Children inherit half of their DNA from each parents, but not necessarily the same half. Maybe Ray’s father inherited little or none of the Native admixture. In the next generation, Ray inherited half of his father’s DNA and half of his mother’s. We have no way of knowing in which of these two transmission events Ray lost the Native admixture, or whether it’s there, but in such small pieces that the technology today can’t detect it.
Hopefully the new technology on the horizon will improve all aspects of autosomal admixture analysis and ethnicity detection. But for today, if you see the dreaded “Middle East” result appear as one of your autosomal geographic locations and your family isn’t Jewish and has been in the states since colonial times, think to yourself ‘racial admixture’ and revisit this topic as the technology improves. In other words, as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out!
Roberta, I hope you definitely expand more on this in the future. In my FF results, I show up as 9.36% Middle East which I figure is around 1G to 2G grandparents. All my family was in the U.S. before the mid-1700s and many in the 1600s. So if what I am reading is correct, this could also be showing for Native American. I have also done 23andMe, and they have me as 99% European and >1 African. This is all so confusing.
Your article about racial admixture was very very interesting to me and very very well written. Keep up the good work.
Thanks Roberta for delivering your most important comments in layman terms.
It is extremely common for people who have all British Isles ancestry back as far as they can go to report similar percentages in FTDNA’s Population Finder. Doug McDonald has explained that a result such as 88% Orcadian and 12% Middle Eastern does not mean that 1/8th of your ancestors are from the Middle East. Rather, if you draw a line between the Orcadian reference sample and the Middle Eastern reference samples, your “center of gravity” would be 12% along the way.
Ann, that’s incredibly helpful and makes perfect sense. Now, why hasn’t anyone told me that, all this time?
I have 11% “Middle Eastern” and the rest “Orcadian,” while my father and brother both have 100% “French.” I’m not surprised that my brother and I inherited different combinations, from what I’ve seen at 23andMe..The “Orcadian” comes from my mother’s mother’s side, which I have a bit more from than my brother. So I suppose they had a strong, clear “Orcadian” signal for me, and in order to show it, they had to put something to balance it on the opposite end of the spectrum.
II do not believe that these Middle Eastern percentages are anything to do with Native American ancestry. I have numerous people in my projects living in the UK, including my husband and my father, who can trace their ancestry back for many generations in the UK who are showing up with this Middle Eastern percentage. None of their ancestors have ever been to to America and had any contact with Native Americans, Africans or any mysterious Middle Eastern gentlemen in the last few hundred years. The problem is that the reference databases are currently inadequate. There are no reference samples in Population Finder from the British Isles other than from Orkney. In the absence of any other reference populations the Middle East simply happens to be the nearest match. I hope that Family Tree DNA will eventually be able to incorporate the data from the People of the British Isles Project (POBI) in their database so that they can give more meaningful percentages for UK testees. POBI has shown that there are marked differences within the British Isles and distinct clusters can be found in Orkney, Devon, Cornwall, etc:
http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/people-of-british-isles-project.html
It might perhaps be significant that the people I’m seeing who do have this Middle Eastern percentage often have a large chunk of ancestry from Devon.
One of the things about genetic genealogy that is so interesting is that each person with a specialty brings focused expertise to the table. I would agree that the Middle Eastern found in England has nothign to do with Native American heritage here. However, in the US, Native heritage is often found in an admixed population, and by admixed, I mean with both Eurpean and African. In many of these families, ranging from the Carribbean through the Carolinas and Virginia to Maryland and west through Kentucky and Tennessee, we have proven admixture, proven by haplogroups and records which list these people at Mulatto in the late 1800s and in some cases, even into the 1900s. Yet, their DNA autosomal results are all “missing” African and Native, the possible two sources of admixture with Europeans that would cause a mulatto listing, and all have Middle Eastern, some in just about the correct percentages. And I see this consistently. It’s a pattern, and it is not correct. Perhaps the pattern you are seeing and the pattern I am seeing are caused by different things, but for what I’m seeing, it certainly suggests that admixture, likely mixed Native/African admixture, is showing up as Middle Eastern. This is also very prevalent in the Caribbean projects and was actually first noticed in Peter Robert’s Bahamas DNA project where every person taking the FF test was returned with Middle Eastern ancestry. That simply doesn’t wash. That population is very admixed, not primarily European, so the Euro influence there would be significantly less, yet they were consistently received 10-12% Middle East results as well. I am extremely hopeful that these new autosomal SNPs that will be used in the Geno 2.0 kit will sort this out.
Thank you Debbie, the last comment you made ( “the people I’m seeing who do have this Middle Eastern percentage often have a large chunk of ancestry from Devon”) suddenly helps me make a lot more sense of the results I recently received through FTDNA for myself and my Dad! Thanks.
http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/people-of-british-isles-project.html
It might perhaps be significant that the people I’m seeing who do have this Middle Eastern percentage often have a large chunk of ancestry from Devon…….A very interesting comment and one I believe bears considering.With our british history maritime travel.I believe we may have more of an admixture than we think.My own population finder had Tunisian,Albanian,Egyptian ,Spanish,Basque and Southern slavic as my top matches.I have uk ancestry to 1700,s/1600,s in many cases ,although my grandmother was adopted and coud prove an anomaly.I have a lot of kent/devon and dorset ancestry and having discussed this with a genetiscist ,it is possible that my results are throwing up Romany gypsy.A lot of my trees surnames travellers used.It will be so interesting when the technology tightens!
Roberta, thanks so much for answering my question. I will have to dig deeper into my ancestry to see if any of those Scarborough, Basnett or Whidbees show up. Interesting hypothesis. Actually I was wondering after doing my FF why eastern European didn’t show up from my mother’s side. Is that because of the lack of a reference samples from eastern Europe?
I’m not at all sure Eastern Europe as a population can be differentiated from the rest of Europe, Jewish excepted.
My father, grandfather and great-grandfather both ere born in Trapani/Marsala, Sicily. Sothern Italy
My mother, maternal grandfather and great grand father were born in Calabria. Southern Italy.
I took the Family Finder, Y-paternal, mt-Maternal, Deep Clade and Markers up to 67 with FTDNA
On Family Finders I am:
62% from the Middle East, Palestinian, Jewish, Beduin and Druze.
38% from Europe, Sardinian, Tuscan, Orcadian, Basque, Spanish, French.
On my mt-Maternal it shows HV1
On my y-Paternal shows I1
On my Deep Clade, shows: I1-M253
I am classified as I1-EE and they asked me to take the SNP Z140 to see if I am positive or negative to it!
When I asked FTDNA and its coordinators about this above confusion to me they weren’t able to tell me much about the above results and I did spend quite a bit of money.
They only told me that perhaps my gene goes to the Normans.
Can you be able to shed a little better light on my research about myself?
Why my percentage (%) is more Middle East than European? If I am I1 is because of my Y-paternal side so who were my mother ancestors where I have a larger percentage (5)?
Thanks for your time and explanation.
Antonino
Italy is another matter. It was settled by the Etruscans, in part, and they were from the Middle East. We find a great deal of Middle Eastern influence in the Mediterranean basin. Your haplogroup I1, remember, is only reflective of one of the many genealogical lines that combine to make up your autosomal self.
Roberta,
I got your message. Thanks.
Still I am puzzled by your answer. I know how many people lived in sicily and several culture intermingled. Still, after paying quite a large sum of money to FTDNA to pin point my DNA it seems I am more ignorant than before.
I gave you all the test results from FTDNA on both paternak and maternal side and the only wyayou can describe my results is: (Roberta wrote):<> So kindly I ask if you can to tell me what are the other genealogical lines that combine to make up my autosomal sel, beside I1? I hope you understand my dilemma and puzzlement! Thanks!
Ok, let me try to explain this a different way. Your I1 is paternal and your mitochondrial is maternal. They represent your father’s, father’s, father’s father up the tree and your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother up the tree. At your great grandparent level, you have 8 great grandparents, but your I1 only represents one of them and your mitochondiral only one of them. At your great-great grandmother level, you have 16 great grandparents, but your I1 only represents one of them and your mitochondrial only represents one of them. The other 14 are n ot represented by your Yline or mitochondrial DNA, but each of them contributed approximately 6.25% of your autosomal DNA to you.
Roberta,
Thnks for your explanation. I start to have a better picture now but still I cannot say that I grasped all of it.If only one great grandparent represent my Haplogroup I1 and not my entire lineage how sure is FTDNA to put me into this group I1? Why they allocated me in the branch I1EE ?
If the contribution genetically is more on my mother side why still I am I1 from my Y-paternal?
I really really hope I am not a pain on the neck to you but this field is quite new and for some people of a certain age like me unless we hear something logically and easy explained in simple english it is hard to grasp it. Please tell me more! Thanks a million!
Roberta, I guess you did not get the above question about tmy haplogroup. Can you be so kind to answer my questions in a easily way for me to understand? Thanks!
Each different male ancestral line in your pedigree chart has a different haplogroup. The only line they can test you for is your direct paternal line. That is the line they assign a haplogroup to. In your case, it’s your paternal surmane line. Your mother’s maternal line has a different haplogroup. To find the haplogroup of any of the rest of your ancestral lines, you need to find people descended from those lines to test. For example, if your mother’s maiden name was Smith, to discover your mother’s father’s haplogroup, you’d need to find one of her Smith male relatives to test, such as her brother, father or Smith uncles. So the haplogroup isn’t for all of your ancestral lines, but just the specific one that is being tested.
Thanks, Roberta!
On my Y-paternal by FTDNA testing I am in the Haplogroup I1-EE (Short hand M253+)
On my mt-Maternal I am HVR1 (16172C – 16298C) also by FTDNA.
Can you be able to tell me what these 2 groups represent?
Geographically and genetically?
Unless I am wrong, I believe that on my paternal side my gene is Scandinavian/Germanic/Norman
while on my maternal side the haplogroup is more related to the Middle East.
Am I right or you can shed more light to it?
Thanks. Molte grazie!
I will do a posting about how to do this since it probably applies to more than you.
It sound great. Surely there are more beginners than me.
Thanks a lot!
Is there a DNA for dummies………like a little golden book of DNA…on a first grade level.
I am not a stupid person, but all of this makes my eyes cross…..but I want to know and understand.
JSW
There isn’t. The problem is that this field changes so quickly. An early book that has been the primer every since is Trace Your Roots with DNA : Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree by Megan Smolenyak and Ann Turner. It’s a bit dated now, and doesn’t include things like we’ve been discussing, but I think it’s still a good basics book.
Thank you. It really threw my family when I received the news of 9.37% Bedouin.
We were expecting Cherokee…as we knew the history of our great great grandmother. Your reply to another explains it pretty well. That makes sense. We were very confused.
Thanks for the blog, I think it is great.
Roberta, I have almost the same results as the father. We were looking for Cherokee or Algonquin because of tribal negotiations. I suspected the same thinning of DNA contributions by 50% each generations, but I tested myself and my mother at FTDNA with the FF test. Her results were the same as mine, but more Middle Eastern ratio. We do have a Rosenberger which is in E Haplogroup of Middle Eastern DNA. I thought the Cherokee/Algonquin was too far back to show results, but reading your post, now I wonder!! Also new archaeological finds of European remains in an area that suggests the Europeans were here before or near the same time as Native Americans and add mixed earlier to suggest European DNA origins in Native tribes today.
Yeah, OK…. Thanks anyway!
I have a question about my recent results. I’ve read all the comment in this thread and understand ‘most’ of it. My results showed 97% Orcadian, 3% Papuan. The best to my knowledge my ancestors have always lived in what is now Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. I understand that Scandanavians at one time ruled, lived and intermarried with the locals. Also the Mongolians swept through the are and probably fathered some children of the local population.
One of your comments and one on the FTDNA site say something about your “center of gravity”; what would this mean for my results?
I don’t see that reference and I’m not exactly what they are referring to.
My mistake…it was in Alice Turner’s comment on her July 24 post …not yours.
Unfortunately I’ve looked at so many FAQs on the FTDNA site and can’t find the info now.
My FTDNA results were similar. 91.25 French/Orcadian and 8.25 Palestinian, Jewish, Bedouin, Mozabite, etc. My known ancestry is roughly 3/4 French Canadian and 1/4 new England Puritan stock English with the oddball here and there way back, such as a Portuguese in the 1700′s, a German and an Irishman also from roughly the same time and a Spanish basque from the 1600′s. Now I realize that the Portuguese have a good amount of moorish ancestry, but this ancestor died in 1720. Let’s say he had the typical amount of moorish ancestry for a Portuguese person, say 5-10 percent. By my generation, that should be down to almost nothing, especially since I am only descended once from him. Also I have a documented 11th great grandmother who was a Micmac Indian from Nova Scotia. We believe that a 3rd great grandmother was an Abenaki Indian from Vermont. Her family were referred to as Indians in their day, but she was listed as white on the census. there is a good circumstantial case for her being native, but how much DNA would I expect after 5 generations?
I sent my results to Doug McDonald, and he says according to what he sees, The best match for me is a mix of Irish-Spanish and Basque. ok, Atlantic European. He thought I had a dab of Indian that might very well be real.
So I tried ancestry.com. They have me as 36 southern European, 21 per cent British isles, 18 percent central European, 21 percent Finno-Uralic (yes, Finno Uralic!) and 4 per cent uncertain. I wanted to take 23 and me’s test but I can’t legally do so as I am a Maryland resident.
Whatever the actual breakdown turns out to be, I’m a member of two very old and not terribly diverse gene pools, French Canadian and New England Puritan so my results ought to reflect more or less what people with my background have.
Hello, I am a female and had the autosomal test done because I don’t have access to my father’s DNA. It came back 100% Orcadian with no margin of error. I know both of my parents had Irish ancestry (we were raised Irish Catholic) but honestly, I expected to find some admixture. I have lineage in North America that goes back to the 1590s in one maternal line and Southern heritage that goes back to the 18th century in one line in my Dad’s family. I cannot believe no one in those families got with people who were not Orcadian in origin. Are these results capturing the whole picture or is it open to interpretation?
I wish they had picked another name for this. Orcadian is just a general region. Different companies do return somewhat different results. The two most reliable are Family Tree DNA and 23andMe.
I am about an eighth Native American or maybe a little more and being female had a snp done. I do have a ggrandfather who immigrated from Constantinople and was quite dark and Greek. I came out overwhelmingly Arab with a second high score from Yemen. Also Beduoin, and the Indias, then Northern European, and japanese, Tibetan, and so forth. All my scores were very low for matching, and I figured my native scores would be low because I heard our bloodlines died out, well from a registered tribal perspectives. People still alive would have separated from the community and therefore wouldn’t be represented in the pools for comparison.
I am wondering about your comment on the Arabic thing, I don’t see how I could come out so primarily Arabic and East Indian when my relatives were Scottish, German, English, French on the white part and Souian and Mohegan/Pequot/Mohawk on the Indian part. Except for that one relative from Turkey (then Greece). New maps and analysis say there is no basis for Arabic dna in (thru migrations) into europe and asia and the surrounding areas. Is it a catchall bucket they stick things in when they don’t fit elsewhere? Can Europeans have that much Arabic? I was very little caucasian. And not African American to any extent.
People in the Southern Appalachians, specifically Northeast Georgia near the old Cherokee Nation, show almost identical proportions of Western European 95%, 5%Middle Eastern. Some claimed partial Native American blood, but no traditional Asian Native American DNA was found by autosomal testing.
On retesting at Ancestry DNA we found a mixture of Scandinavian, British Isles and Southern European, which reflected the history of invasions into Great Britain, whose original inhabitants were darker and more Mediterranean, with remnants localized in Wales and Western Great Britain. Think of the Welsh actress Catherine Zeta Jones, the singer Tom Jones and others who look almost Spanish.
The next invasions of Romans also left behind a DNA imprint, since the island was occupied under Roman rule for generations. Next came waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Normans, actually Norsemen or Vikings who invaded Normandy in France then Britain. Accounting for a generous dose of Viking/ Germanic or Scandinavian DNA, intermixed with Native British Isles.
During subsequent generations, slaves from Eastern Europe or Slavic areas also came to Britain. Others having genetic influences there might have been the French. Spanish, Sephardic Jews and Moors, who were actually Middle Eastern or North African rather than SubSaharan. The Moors were familiar enough to Shakespeare to give clear image to his audiences in Elizabethan England. Jews such as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice were also recognized and characterized, especially after the Spanish Inquisition which sent Sephardic Jews to Britain and other places where tolerance and freedom prevailed.
The net result would be admixtures in the distant past, before emigration to America. Perhaps Europeans with darker hair or good tans could claim deliberately or mistakenly that they were part Native American. Perhaps such claims allowed them to live in greater peace and harmony with their neighbors who were in fact Native Americans. My ancestors in Northeast Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia learned Native languages such as Cherokee for purposes of trade and fellowship. Some married Cherokees and went with their wives and part Cherokee children to Oklahoma Indian Territory on The Trail of Tears in the 1830′s.
Traditions of Cherokee heritage seem present in European and African American populations, but often show the same mixture of majority Western European/ Orcadian with Middle Eastern or Southern European. Might the endogamy have occurred in Britain before emigration to the Americas? After all, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s daughter also showed small amounts of Middle Eastern when tested on the show 100% English in 2006.
I’ve received my Family Finder results from FTDNA, and I show up as 94% Orcadian and 6% Middle Eastern (Palestinian, Adygei, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Iranian, Jewish). Perhaps I could chalk my mom’s Celtic side up to being Orcadian, but why is none of my dad’s Dutch/Germanic showing up?? I’m baffled that I could be 94% Orcadian. My dad’s mtDNA tests as Haplogroup J, so the Middle Eastern isn’t overly surprising, but I expected some Native American results, too. What evidence is there that Native American autosomal results can read as a false positive for Middle Eastern? Thanks!
There are many people who have proven small amounts of Native ancestry, and no Middle Eastern, who have these small amounts of Middle Eastern. Also, if you test with another company, like 23andMe, you won’t show Middle Eastern. Lots of people test at both Family Tree DNA and 23andMe.
Something is definitely up with Yemeni results. I have looked at a bunch of people’s dna results they published and most of them come up Yemeni, and one woman was told there was no Native American population to match against so she would just get whatever non-Native American matches that group usually gets. Many people with Native American heritage are coming up Yemeni. Many people with heritage come up with none and Asian and Yemeni results. So why not just tell people those populations aren’t available before they buy the test? I also wonder about contamination, is that possible? It used to be quite a common problem in dealing with such tiny samples.