May 10, 2013
On her 105th birthday, Dominguita Velasco danced so long that her worried family asked her to sit down. When she turned 111, she had a party with friends and family and blew out the blaze of candles on her cake. Never far from her daughter, grandson and great grandchildren and always involved in her Oakland [...]
May 8, 2013
The story of H is really the story of people in modern Europe. H refers to a maternal lineage — also known as a maternal haplogroup — that originated long ago in the Near East but expanded into Europe with the recession of the last Ice Age. H —with its dozens of subgroups — is the most prevalent [...]
May 1, 2013
By Amick Boone They once numbered 300 strong, but the Oregon Cavemen, members of a Grants Pass booster club formed in 1922 whose members claim to be “direct descendants of the Neanderthal,” are fading fast. Club members worry that as their numbers dwindle, soon there won’t be anyone around to [...]
February 11, 2013
Richard Hill as a child with his adoptive parents, Harold and Thelma Hill. Richard Hill spent his career working in the sciences and in marketing, but hearing about his decades-long search for family you get the sense he would have made a great detective. While shoe leather helped him unravel much of the [...]
January 24, 2013
We first met Sheridan* in the fall of 2010. As an adoptee, she was curious about her DNA and what 23andMe might be able to tell her. With the help of old friends and some new ones on 23andMe, Sheridan learned about her global origins, which include an African-American father and a mother of European descent, [...]
December 26, 2012
December was a busy month for 23andMe and in the midst of the hubbub we put out Ancestry Composition, an amazing feature that gives finer detail of an individual’s heritage going back generations. Since its release we’ve heard some great feedback saying the feature has set a new standard in the [...]
December 13, 2012
Mike and Eric Our team rolled out a new feature called Ancestry Composition last week that will tell you more about what you’re made of, or more precisely, the geographic origins of your DNA. Principal Product Scientist Mike Macpherson, former Research Scientist Chuong “Tom” Do, and Computational [...]
November 19, 2012
In another example of how fascinated we are with Neanderthals — our ancient human ancestors — last week the Colbert Report featured British paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer. In a few minutes that were peppered with quips from Stephen Colbert, Stringer managed to explain a couple hundred thousand [...]
October 30, 2012
We plead guilty to occasionally geeking out on genetics, so it’s nice to see when someone else does it too. In September, Moment Magazine got all nerdy and wrote about their Great DNA Experiment, in which they look at the 23andMe results of 15 notable Americans of Jewish ancestry and make some [...]
October 11, 2012
Not everyone would embrace their inner caveman, but in today’s Slate Ann Gibbons sure did. Gibbons, who also writes for Science, is the author of the book The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. Over almost two decades, she’s delved into the discoveries around human [...]
