Estimates! They’re only estimates!
Yes, The Legal Genealogist got the same update in the admixture estimates at Ancestry as everyone else this week.
Yes, my estimates changed.
No, I’m not going to lose my mind over the fact that I now have no Swedish, compared to 7% last time around. Or 16% Norwegian, compared to 7% last time around. (It appears that the Swedes all morphed into Norwegians in this round of changes.)
Just as I’m not going to do any kind of a happy dance that my Germanic Europe percentage is continuing to climb — it was 20% last time, and it’s up to 32% this time. (My father was born in Germany and his ancestry can be documented back about 300-400 years in most lines on both sides.)
And it’s only going to make me giggle that my full-blood sister — who was 25% German last time — is only 12% in this iteration of the admixture estimates. Or that maybe some of my Swedes went over to her results, since she’s up to 17% Swedish this time, compared to 13%.
And on and on.
We go through this Every Single Time any of the companies changes any of the estimates.
Can we all finally just agree that — seriously — these are just estimates? Maybe a little better than they were, for some of us, and maybe a little worse for others. But estimates — informed scientific guesses — nonetheless.
Most folks agree that they’re better than they were when the first estimates came out more than a decade ago.
Maybe we don’t quite have to take them with an entire salt lick,1 but we still have to understand that we have to take them with a whole bunch of grains of salt.
Even here in 2020,2 we have got to stop thinking of these numbers as take-them-to-the-bank-snapshots-of-our-ancestors. The DNA testing companies call these estimates, and they do it for a reason.
The reality here hasn’t changed one bit since admixture results were first reported: these estimates are pretty darned good at the continental level, distinguishing between Europe, Asia and Africa, just to name three continents, in their estimates. Once they get below the continental level, to a regional or even country level, all of them start to run into issues: country boundaries have changed; entire populations have moved; people from one area have invaded and intermarried with people from another.
So every time we see a new set of estimates, let’s remind ourselves just what — exactly — these admixture estimates do: they take the DNA of living people — us, the test takers — and they compare it to the DNA of other living people — people whose parents and grandparents and, sometimes, even great grandparents all come from one geographic area. Then they try to extrapolate backwards into time. Nobody is out there running around, digging up 500- or 1,000-year-old bones, extracting DNA for us to compare our own DNA to.
So coming up with these percentages in these tests requires this fundamental assumption: that the DNA of the reference populations — those groups whose parents, grandparents, great grandparents and more all come from the same area — is likely to reflect what we might see if we could test the DNA of people who lived in that area hundreds and thousands of years ago.
In other words, let’s keep in mind, every time, that these percentages are:
• estimates,
• estimates based on comparisons not to actual historical populations but rather to small groups of people living today, and
• estimates based purely on the statistical odds that those small groups tell us something meaningful about past populations.
These limitations are true of all of the testing companies. My own results are — literally and figuratively — all over the map. I’m German with some companies, not German at all with another. My personal reported Scandinavian ancestry ranges from a low of 0% — literally none — with one company all the way up to 66.9% with another.
So… why am I mostly amused rather than upset about all this?
Because the admixture estimates aren’t really the heart of the value of doing DNA testing. Yes, I get the desire to link to specific ancestral origins, particularly for those whose origins were stolen from them in the Middle Passage. But the real value today and for the foreseeable future in doing this kind of DNA testing is in the matching — helping us connect to cousins who may have family Bibles or photographs or documents or stories to help us move forward in reconstructing our family histories.
Despite the advances, the bottom line remains: We need to educate our friends and our families, our DNA cousins, as to the limits of what these percentages can show — and to show them all the other things DNA testing really can help with.
So let’s repeat for the record here — everyone who’s ever taken a DNA test that provides admixture estimate percentages, repeat after me:
“It’s not soup yet.”3
Take the estimates with at least these grains of salt — and let’s all move forward and work on those cousin matches.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “In 2020, still not soup…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 13 Sep 2020).
SOURCE NOTES
- A salt lick, for the city slickers, is “a place to which animals go to lick naturally occurring salt deposits; a block of salt or salt preparation provided, as in a pasture, for cattle, horses, etc.” Dictionary.com (https://www.dictionary.com : accessed 13 Sep 2020), “Salt lick.” ↩
- Okay, maybe especially here in 2020! What a year… ↩
- For those too young to remember the reference, the Lipton Soup Company had a string of ads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The mother in the ad would begin preparing Lipton soup, a child would ask, over and over, “is it soup yet?” and the mother would answer “not yet” over and over until finally she’d say, “It’s soup!” So “not soup yet” means “not finished” or “not ready.” ↩
What we have repeatedly gotten are individual anecdotal results reported. I’d like to see a report on trends over time with a control group to determine if the estimates are improving
Funny thing — this AncestryDNA estimate finally came close to my document-based research.
What!!! No Iberian???? How can this be? 😉
What I found odd was the bounce-back. I keep track of these changes. I went from 19% Norwegian, to 7%, to 18%. How does that happen?
It also appeared to me that Ancestry fine-tuned (or attempted to fine-tune) its Irish and Scottish databases, as it it used to report Ireland/Scotland but now has broken that out to two categories. From my admittedly small sampling of FB posts, seems people’s Scottish ancestry changed a lot this time around. My family’s did.
Thank you Judy for your wise words, again. I must admit before I read this I was a complete biased believer.
I, for one, am much happier with the latest iteration. I’m so, so, happy to see the Norway/Sweden connection, which had been as high as 15%, disappear completely. (I have no Scandinavian names in my family tree as far back as 400 years and had to struggle with the idea of all those Viking invaders somehow leaving their DNA.) I’m also happier to see the percentages for Germanic Europe and Scotland increased to more closely match my paper genealogy.
Thank you, Judy. You said very eloquently what I have tried to tell friends and family, that the value of DNA testing for genealogical purposes is in the possible matches and connections. I met a new distant cousin last year via Ancestry and went to meet him and others in Ireland. Unfortunately, when going through the matches it is obvious too many people, the ones with no trees, did the test simply for that hokey little pie chart.
For me, this is just rearranging the deck chairs. (And my Cornish are still called Irish.) All the labs get it wrong. But as long as you know how – and what they really mean – it’s not too bad. Unfortunately, frequent changes can make that harder.
And it’s fine for me since I came into DNA knowing 15/16 of my g3grandparents and the villages they came from: DNA has just kept confirming the paper trail.
But friends have major close gaps, and adoptees just want to get started, so the ethnicity estimates can sometimes be vital to them: wasting or saving large chunks of time and effort. So ethnicity does matter. I wish the labs would be a little more forthcoming in letting people know in what way ambiguity lies – and they are certainly heading that way. So something is improving – a little.
But there is still no substitute for hearing other people’s experiences.
DNA lab confusion on many topics keeps inspiring people to join Genealogy Societies to get answers. We all benefit from that.
A perverse but happy outcome!
Another thought on puzzling ethnicity findings: perhaps somewhere along the line a non-paternal event occurred. So, not a fault in the DNA analysis but someone else was the father, not the one listed on paper.
In life, when we hear hoofbeats, we think horses, not zebras — at least if the circus isn’t in town. Right now, given the state of the science on admixture, the horse is that the reference population is off. Only if it starts to look like the circus is in town do we look for the zebra, the misattributed parentage.
My percentages have changed dramatically. At first, when I did all 3 companies Family Tree, Ancestry, and 23 and Me, my data matched fairly well across all 3 companies. Now its well shall we say interesting. As one gentleman said, taking the tests is mainly to meet cousins we never knew we had and break down brick walls.