![]() N generations ago you have at most 2 N genealogical ancestors, and if some proportion of them belonged to X you might claim that proportion of ancestry from X. Often it may be quantified for example, if one of your eight great-grandparents belonged to X you might describe yourself as “one eighth X”. Thus genealogical ancestry is defined in terms of identifiable ancestors in your family tree or pedigree. You might even be able to claim ancestry in this way from more distant ancestors, based on historical or genealogical records. If one of them belonged to a particular group X, you might say that you have some “X” ancestry. You likely have a sense of these people as individuals, even if you have never met them. Consider your parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents. Genealogical ancestry probably reflects the most common and intuitive understanding of the term ancestry. Consequently, most statements about ancestry are really statements about genetic similarity, which has a complex relationship with ancestry, and can only be related to it by making assumptions about human demography whose validity is uncertain and difficult to test. We discuss them in turn, but note that only the first two are explicitly forms of ancestry, and that genetic data are surprisingly uninformative about either of them. These labels can also impose contemporary political or cultural divisions which may be misrepresentative of ancestral relationships.Īnother source of confusion is that three distinct concepts–genealogical ancestry, genetic ancestry, and genetic similarity–are frequently conflated. While convenient and sometimes useful, ultimately this is misleading about the nature of ancestry. Rather than emphasising its complex structure, results are often simplified in terms of discrete categories. Even here however, confusion arises from the way that ancestry is presented and discussed. But in a genetic context they have a more specific meaning: your ancestors are the individuals from whom you are biologically descended and ancestry is information about them and their genetic relationship to you. In wider usage, the terms ancestry and ancestors often indicate a general connection to people or things in the past. This leads to miscommunication between researchers in different fields, and leaves customers open to spurious claims about consumer genomics products and overinterpretation of individual results. We argue that this reflects widespread underlying confusion about what it means in different contexts and what genetic data can really tell us. However, although frequently discussed, ancestry itself is rarely defined. Thus, it seems that both scientists and the wider public are learning more and more about ancestry, and there is an optimistic sense that genetic data provide an exhaustive repository of ancestral information. Sophisticated methods have been developed to infer and visualise these relationships. In parallel, our scientific understanding of the human past is being transformed by studies of ancient and modern genetic data, which allow us to track changes in ancestry over space and time. ![]() Companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry now claim tens of millions of customers worldwide. People’s desire to discover their own ancestry drives the multibillion-dollar genealogy industry, which has grown rapidly in the era of consumer genomics. For many people it has cultural, religious or even political significance, and can play a key role in shaping personal and public identities. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īncestry connects genetics and society in fundamental ways. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Kaufman Foundation, and NIGMS award number to I.M. Sloan foundation, a New Investigator Research Grant from the Charles E. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This research was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Citation: Mathieson I, Scally A (2020) What is ancestry? PLoS Genet 16(3):Įditor: Jonathan Flint, University of California, Los Angeles, UNITED STATESĬopyright: © 2020 Mathieson, Scally.
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