Bones found in an old mine at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco have scientists rethinking their understanding of mankind’s origins in Africa —
<div id="attachment_25487" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-25487" class="wp-image-25487 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/546212a-f2-300x104.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="104" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/546212a-f2-300x104.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/546212a-f2-768x267.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/546212a-f2-880x306.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/546212a-f2.jpg 946w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />A view of the site at Jebel Irhoud where the bones of early humans were found. Photo: Shannon McPherron, MPI EVA Leipzig</div>
indicating that our story there is much more complicated and goes back longer than we once thought.
The fossils — the oldest homo sapiens remains ever found — counter the idea that modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago in one verdant valley in <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and-you/genetics-101/human-prehistory-101-out-of-eastern-africa/">East Africa</a>.
Instead, the find points to the possibility that modern humans emerged as far back<a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22335.html"> as 300,000 years ago</a>, and in multiple places across Africa. Our origins were not in one “cradle of civilization,” according to the researchers.
“There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, or if there is a Garden of Eden, it’s Africa,”<a href="https://www.nature.com/news/oldest-homo-sapiens-fossil-claim-rewrites-our-species-history-1.22114"> said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin</a> of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the lead author of the studies published in<a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22335.html"> Nature</a>. “The Garden of Eden is the size of Africa.”
Not everyone agrees, suggesting that perhaps <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2017/06/out-of-north-africa.html">North Africa</a> is the site of human origin, but the findings in the journal<a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7657/full/nature22335.html"> Nature</a>, are only the latest <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-25485" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Skull-178x300.jpg" alt="" width="178" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Skull-178x300.jpg 178w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Skull.jpg 441w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 178px) 100vw, 178px" />in a series of archeological and DNA inspired discoveries in the last five years that have significantly altered our understanding of human history.
From genetic evidence of intermixing between modern humans,<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/news/the-neanderthal-within/"> Neanderthals</a>, Denisovans — and possibly other now extinct archaic humans — to new fossil remains of<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/hello-cousin/"> Homo naledi</a>, perhaps a primitive offshoot of our direct lineage, found at the so-called Rising Star Cave in South Africa. Each new bit of information has added greater complexity to the already interesting human story.
In truth the findings fill in gaps in both the fossil and genetic record that scientists are using to trace back to the dawn of humanity. The human family tree is much more complicated, and interesting, than we thought. It includes many twisting branches, some that lead to now our extinct archaic human cousins, some that curve back into our own lineage.

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Human Origins

How far back can you trace your maternal line? To your mother? Your grandmother? How about your maternal great-great-great-grandmother? Whether you know your maternal-line genealogy back ten generations or none at all, you can discover the history of your ancestors going back tens of thousands of years. Their story is in your DNA — your mitochondrial DNA, to be precise. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-300x167.png" alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-25378" width="300" height="167" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-300x167.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-768x427.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-1024x569.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-880x489.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree-1180x656.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/maternal_pedigree.png 1189w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Each generation, mothers pass down their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to their children. Both their daughters and their sons inherit mtDNA, but only women pass it on. As a result, you inherited your mtDNA from the long, unbroken line of women who make up your maternal line. 
Researchers study the genetic markers in mtDNA to trace the histories of our maternal lines. Using these markers, they can identify maternal haplogroups, families of maternal lineages that descend from the same woman.   
In fact, they&#8217;ve discovered that we are all direct maternal-line descendants of a single woman who lived in eastern Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago! As her daughters and their daughters migrated out of the cradle of modern humans, they branched out into different groups that crossed Africa and the globe. Many of these migrations can be traced using haplogroups. 
At 23andMe, we&#8217;ve just released a redesigned version of our Maternal Haplogroup report, placing customers’ own ancestral stories within the context of the broader human story. We determine each customer&#8217;s maternal haplogroup by looking at the genetic markers in their mtDNA. Then, we walk each customer step by step through the points at which their maternal line branched off from others over thousands of years. Furthermore, the report lets you know if you share a maternal haplogroup with a notable individual or groups of individuals in history.
Customers wanting to explore this redesigned report can go<a href="https://you.23andme.com/reports/maternal_haplogroup/"> here</a>.  Not yet a customer? Visit our<a href="https://store.23andme.com/en-us/cart/"> store</a>.
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23andMe’s Updated Maternal Haplogroup Report

Inside each of us is a beautiful, rich genetic story. Some of which is told through the people with whom we are related.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-25268" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/You-Related-1.jpg 414w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> 
23andMe’s new Ancestry Report has reimagined how you see these relatives — both close and distant — not just matching you with people with whom you share pieces of DNA, but putting those matches into context that tells you something about yourself.
Our new Ancestry Report introduces you to the 23andMe customers who make up Your DNA Family in a whole new way.
<h6>Your DNA Relatives, Let&#8217;s Do the Numbers</h6>
So how many relatives are we talking about, here? As you trace your family tree back in time, you can see that you have more ancestors with each generation. Look back 150 to 200 years, for instance, and you likely have 64 fourth-great grandparents. That many people have a lot of descendants. In fact, using a simple model where each family has only two to three children, we estimate that the average person has 4,700 fifth cousins out there!
You can find a number of these cousins when you use 23andMe’s DNA Relatives tool. Most 23andMe customers find hundreds, or even thousands of DNA Relatives who have also chosen 23andMe to explore their genetic heritage. That’s a lot of people — and a lot of stories — to sort through!
Your DNA Family helps you get started with a high-level overview of your 23andMe DNA Relatives grouped by their prediction relationship to you. These groups include close relationships (up to second cousins), third to fourth cousins, and distant cousins (5th cousins or more distant).
The significance of these distant cousins isn’t so much about the number of matches you have, but what these matches can tell you about your family history. You may see this in how your DNA relatives share surnames, or ancestry or hometowns. This information could help inform some of what you may already know about your ancestors and where they came from. Or you may learn something new.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-25234" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/relative_buckets_wide-1.png" alt="" width="979" height="523" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/relative_buckets_wide-1.png 979w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/relative_buckets_wide-1-300x160.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/relative_buckets_wide-1-768x410.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/relative_buckets_wide-1-880x470.png 880w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 979px) 100vw, 979px" />See Your DNA Relatives Around the World
Seeing your relatives in a new way offers you insight about your ancestry you might not otherwise have. The Your DNA Family report features map to show you the <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-25222" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-300x221.png" alt="" width="300" height="221" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-300x221.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-768x566.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-1024x755.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-880x649.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles-1180x870.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/us_map_with_toggles.png 1652w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />distribution of your DNA Relatives across the United States and around the world.
The pattern of how those matches plot on that map may reflect both decades-old migration  or more recent patterns. But they tell you a story that could include a family lodged in one region generation after generation, or ancestors who immigrated across continents or oceans seeking new opportunities.
<h6>Ancestry Composition Patterns</h6>
Human history is the story of migration, and clues to that story is also found in your DNA.
While your history is tied to the history of each of your cousins through at least one common ancestor, it is also tied to specific regions in the world.
23andMe’s Ancestry Composition can show you the mix of ancestry you have, but we’ve also added in features that help you compare that mix with your DNA Relatives.
This helps you explore the commonalities and differences in your ancestry. You can see this in a summary of the Ancestry Compositions of your DNA Relatives. You’ll find out how many different populations are represented in the ancestry of your DNA Family as well as how many of your relatives have ancestry from each of those populations.
<h6>Traits of Your DNA Relatives<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-25265" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/traits_module-300x186.png" alt="" width="300" height="186" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/traits_module-300x186.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/traits_module-768x477.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/traits_module-880x546.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/traits_module.png 918w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></h6>
23andMe’s New Ancestry Report also looks at this pool of DNA Relatives and asks what beyond segments of DNA do you share.
By looking at shared traits, the new report offers you another way of looking your DNA Family.  For instance, maybe you have more DNA Relatives who can wiggle their ears, or a chorus of singers with perfect pitch. Perhaps your DNA Family has more than its fair share of vegetarians.
The New Ancestry Report looks at  a collection of common habits, tastes, characteristics and abilities — drawn from responses to  surveys 23andMe customers answer —  and then we tell you how your DNA Family stands out. We can do that by comparing the percentage of your DNA Relatives who report having each trait to the matching percentage of all 23andMe customers.
<h6>A Starting Point for Your DNA Relative Search</h6>
Want to dig further? Connect with relatives using the DNA Relatives tool. In the tool, you can find individual relatives and explore their profiles one at a time. Message your cousins to share information, and compare DNA segments with multiple matches to find clues to your shared family history.
To begin and end with words from our CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki:
“Every day I watch people connect with their DNA family, and see how the concept of family can evolve into something greater — and even more meaningful.” 
Find out how your DNA Family can help you discover your rich genetic story.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-25231" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AC_comparison_apr12th-e1492192125921.png" alt="" width="640" height="518" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AC_comparison_apr12th-e1492192125921.png 640w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AC_comparison_apr12th-e1492192125921-300x243.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />

Meet Your DNA Family

Robin Smith, 23ndMe Senior Scientist


When did that 2 percent Yakut ancestry make its way into your family tree?
The newest <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-ancestry">23andMe Ancestry feature</a> may have the answer for you.
This feature is another first for 23andMe, which broke new ground by offering customers a detailed accounting of their genetic ancestry with the Ancestry Composition report. Customers who have connected accounts with a parent can also see what ancestries were inherited from each side of the family tree. The Ancestry Composition report also allows customers to dig deeper into their genetic ancestry with a genome map of their ancestry. (To learn more about this feature, see the <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and-you/23andme-how-to/meet-your-chromosome-painting/">Meet Your Chromosome Painting</a> blog post.)


Now, 23andMe has added a fourth analysis to the report, which we call <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-ancestry/">&#8220;Ancestry Timeline.&#8221;</a> This feature allows customers to go back in time and learn approximately when a particular ancestry entered their family tree.

Ancestry Timeline was made possible through pioneering work by 23andMe Research Scientist <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/a-conversation-with-23andmes-kasia-bryc/">Kasia Bryc</a>, whose previous <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/dna-usa-2/">research provided insights into the American melting pot</a>.
<div id="attachment_25230" style="width: 881px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-25230" class="wp-image-25230 size-large" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-871x1024.png" alt="" width="871" height="1024" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-871x1024.png 871w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-255x300.png 255w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-768x903.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-748x880.png 748w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ancestry_timeline_sarah_antonio-1003x1180.png 1003w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 871px) 100vw, 871px" />According their Ancestry Composition results, Sarah is about 25% British &amp; Irish and Antonio is about 20% Iberian. The Ancestry Timeline feature puts these results in a new context. Sarah likely had a recent ancestor (a grandparent, great-grandparent, or 2nd great-grandparent) who was 100 percent British &amp; Irish, while you have to go pretty far back on Antonio&#8217;s family tree to find someone who was 100 percent Iberian (5-8 generations ago.)</div>
23andMe determines your Ancestry Timeline by analyzing the pattern of ancestry in your genome. It looks at both the number and size of segments that derive from a particular ancestry as well as their distribution across your chromosomes. Large segments of ancestry in your genome that all come from the same population suggest a recent ancestor, while shorter segments suggest a more distant one.
An important caveat of the Ancestry Timeline feature is that it assumes that your ancestry from each population originally comes from a single (recent or distant) ancestor.
It also says nothing about where a particular ancestor was born—only their genetics. Therefore, a British &amp; Irish ancestor born in Philadelphia would look the same as one born in Dublin. Ancestry Timeline also has the same limitations as Ancestry Composition, in that it doesn&#8217;t report contributions by recently admixed populations (e.g. &#8220;Mexican&#8221; ancestry is reported as a mixture of European, Native American, and African ancestry) and trace ancestries (e.g. &lt;0.5 percent) should be taken with a grain of salt.


For a more technical explanation of how the Ancestry Timeline feature works, <a href="https://permalinks.23andme.com/pdf/23-14_admixture_date_estimator.pdf">read our white paper</a>.

23andMe’s New Ancestry Timeline

Sarah Laskey, 23andMe Product Scientist
The Chromosome Painting is one of my favorite parts of the 23andMe experience because it is packed with information. Then again, it can also be a little intimidating because it shows so much all at once. In this blog post, I’ll walk through some basics of what your Chromosome Painting shows. And I&#8217;ll explain what kinds of stories it can tell you about <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-ancestry/">your genetic ancestry</a>.
<h6>What is a Chromosome Painting?</h6>
Your Chromosome Painting is another way of looking at your Ancestry Composition results. It shows a colorful representation of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up your genome. Here is a photo of what real human chromosomes look like under a microscope, side by side with my Chromosome Painting:<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-24850 size-larger" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-880x464.png" alt="" width="880" height="464" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-880x464.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-300x158.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-768x405.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-1024x540.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype-1180x623.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1_karyotype.png 1520w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px" />
In the microscope photograph on the left, the chromosomes are laid out vertically. In the Chromosome Painting on the right, they’re shown as colorful horizontal bars. In both images, the chromosomes are shown in pairs and labeled with numbers (1 through 22) or the letters X and Y.
My Chromosome Painting has two copies of the X chromosome because I’m female. The picture on the left shows the genome of a biological male, who has one copy of the X chromosome and one copy of the Y chromosome. Y chromosomes aren’t shown in Chromosome Paintings.
In the Chromosome Painting, gray regions in chromosomes 13, 14, 15, 21, and 22 represent parts of the genome where 23andMe doesn’t test any markers because the DNA sequences in those regions are repetitive and hard to measure.
<h6>Exploring your genetic ancestry</h6>
In your Chromosome Painting, your genome is “painted” with colors representing up to 31 different ancestries. You can hover over or click on the different ancestries in your Chromosome Painting to learn where they’re found in your genome.
The 31 Ancestry Composition populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, Britain and Ireland are part of Northwest Europe, which is part of Europe. To see this hierarchy in action, take a closer look at my Chromosome Painting:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-24851 size-larger" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-880x663.png" alt="" width="880" height="663" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-880x663.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-300x226.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-768x579.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-1024x771.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting-1180x889.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2_painting.png 1476w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px" />
My Chromosome Painting shows genetic ancestry from several different fine-resolution populations like British &amp; Irish, French &amp; German, and Ashkenazi Jewish. But these are all sub-categories of European. When I click “European” on the right hand sidebar, my whole genome is colored in “European blue”:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-24852 size-larger" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-880x663.png" alt="" width="880" height="663" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-880x663.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-300x226.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-768x579.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-1024x771.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european-1180x889.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3_european.png 1476w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px" />
What can you do with your own high-resolution picture of the Ancestry Composition on each of your chromosomes? You can click on the different populations to understand how they relate to each other and where they’re found in your genome. You also can talk to family members (or connect with them on 23andMe) to learn which branches of your family contributed which parts of your genetic ancestry.
<h6>One segment, two segment, red segment, blue segment</h6>
The colors in your Chromosome Painting tell you about your Ancestry Composition, but you can learn even more by looking at the number and length of the DNA segments assigned to each ancestry. Everyone inherits half of their DNA from their mother and half from their father. When DNA is passed from parents to their children, the two chromosomes in each pair are randomly shuffled together in a process called recombination.
This process breaks up long segments of a single ancestry into shorter segments. Sometimes very short segments of ancestry are lost during recombination and don’t get passed to the next generation. This is why ancestry from your distant ancestors only shows up in a few short segments of your genome, if at all.
The technical term for the genetic mixing of previously separate populations is admixture. If you have different DNA segments painted with different colors in your Chromosome Painting, those are evidence of admixture in your genetic history. Take a look at these two Chromosome Paintings side by side:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-24853 size-larger" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-880x498.png" alt="" width="880" height="498" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-880x498.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-300x170.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-768x435.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-1024x579.png 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white-1180x668.png 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4_sarah-antonio-white.png 1944w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px" />
<h6>Every Chromosome Painting Tells a Story</h6>
These Chromosome Paintings show very different genetic histories, and not just because of their Ancestry Compositions! Even if we ignore the colors themselves, the two pictures are pretty different. The long, unbroken stretches of color on the left are evidence of recent admixture, while the short segments of different ancestries on the right suggest admixture many generations ago.
My Chromosome Painting is the one on the left. I have one grandparent whose family came from Germany, one grandparent whose family came from Ireland, and two Ashkenazi Jewish grandparents. In other words, my ancestors from different European populations just started mixing together in the past two or three generations. The Chromosome painting on the right shows someone who identifies as Latino (Antonio, an Engineer at 23andMe), whose Native American (yellow), African (pink) and European (blue) ancestors probably started mixing with each other many generations ago.
How can you use this information to understand your own Chromosome Painting? In general, if your most recent ancestor from a population was very recent, you will have segments of that ancestry on more chromosomes, and those segments will be longer, than if your most recent ancestor was many generations ago.
<h6>Thanks, Mom and Dad!</h6>
If you have a biological parent or child who is also a 23andMe user, you can connect with them to improve the resolution of your Ancestry Composition results.
Connecting with a parent will also reorganize your Chromosome Painting so that the top chromosome in each pair is the one you inherited from your mother, and the bottom chromosome is the one you inherited from your father.
<h6>Connecting or not with a Parent</h6>
Even if you are not connected with either of your parents through 23andMe, you may still be able to learn a little bit about their ancestry by looking at your own Chromosome Painting:
<ul>
<li>If you are male, you inherited all of the ancestry painted on your X chromosome from your mother.</li>
<li>If you have the same ancestry painted in the same place on both copies of a chromosome, then you inherited the same ancestry from both of your parents in that region of your genome.</li>
<li>If you share a segment of DNA with a <a href="https://you.23andme.com/tools/relatives/">DNA Relative</a>, and you know whether you are connected to that relative on your maternal or your paternal side, then you inherited that segment of DNA (and its ancestry) from the same side of your family through which you’re connected to that relative.</li>
<li>If your parents come from different genetic backgrounds, then you may be able to guess which chromosomes you inherited from which of your parents. You can do this by by looking at the ancestries painted on each chromosome. For technical reasons, this will work even better if you are connected with a parent. That is because our computational algorithm will be able to phase your raw data with more accuracy.</li>
</ul>
<h6>A deeper dive: Confidence levels</h6>
If you’ve mastered the basic details of your Chromosome Painting and you’d like to explore at an even more advanced level, click on “Change confidence level” and move the slider that appears above your Chromosome Painting. You can explore the different views of your Chromosome Painting at different confidence levels. You can also compare those different views to each other.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-24854 size-larger" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/5_confidence_1-880x218.png" alt="" width="880" height="218" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/5_confidence_1-880x218.png 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/5_confidence_1-300x74.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/5_confidence_1-768x190.png 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/5_confidence_1.png 964w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 880px) 100vw, 880px" />
The algorithm we use to calculate your Ancestry Composition analyzes one small piece of your DNA at a time. For each piece of your DNA, we calculate the probability of that piece coming from 31 different populations. The confidence slider on the Chromosome Painting allows you to explore our estimates of your genetic ancestry at different probability cutoffs. For example, if a segment of your DNA has a 55 percent chance of being Japanese, then that segment will be painted as Japanese at the 50 percent confidence level. But at the 60 to 90 percent level it will be painted with a more broad ancestry (either Broadly East Asian, Broadly East Asian &amp; Native American, or Unassigned).
<h6>Putting it all together</h6>
Everyone’s genetic history is a little different. Every Chromosome Painting has a different story to tell too. This means that you may learn more about your ancestry from some of the suggestions in this blog post than from others. Just remember – like every true work of art, your Chromosome Painting isn’t something to be understood.  It&#8217;s something to be explored.
For a detailed technical explanation of how we calculate your ancestry and paint your chromosomes, check out the <a href="https://www.23andme.com/ancestry-composition-guide/">Ancestry Composition Guide</a>.

Meet Your Chromosome Painting

DNA extracted from bones at a burial site in a rocky valley on a remote island in the South Atlantic could hold important information for those with ancestral roots in Africa.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1974" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/oldafricamap1508-300x221.png" alt="oldafricamap1508" width="300" height="221" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/oldafricamap1508-300x221.png 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/oldafricamap1508.png 350w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
A fascinating article in <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/what-dna-reveals-about-st-helena-s-freed-slaves-1.21096?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox">Nature</a>, describes work led by <a href="http://snm.ku.dk/english/staffsnm/staff/?pure=en/persons/368359">Hannes Schroeder</a> to make that connection. Schroeder, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and his team have extracted genetic material from skeletal remains of some of the thousands of slaves who were freed by the British Navy between 1840 and 1865.
Taken from slave ships on their way to the New World as many as 20,000 people, many of them children, were saved from enslavement in the Americas, but were then unceremoniously deposited on the island of St. Helena. Sick and emaciated from their brutal ordeal many of them died there. The island’s Rupert Valley is the final resting place of more than 8,000 people.

This little known history would have been forgotten altogether if the graves were not found a few years ago during a construction project. The find, and the promise of sequencing the DNA of some of the bones there, offered Schroeder and his team a tantalizing opportunity – a chance to sequence individuals who’d been destined for slavery in the New World but never got there. Their DNA could reveal what written records have failed to track, the specific regions in Africa from where slaves came.
This is the part of Schroeder’s work that is most interesting for us here at 23andMe, where our own <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/the-african-genetics-project">African Genetics Project</a> is also trying to make that connection, albeit in a different way.
While much has been done to document the history of the enslavement of the more than 12 million Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage to wind up in bondage in the New World, this effort, and 23andMe’s, offers a chance to look beyond the limitations of the written record. We know that the Africans enslaved in the Americas were not a monolithic group but individuals from different cultures and with different languages who were forced together into slavery.
Schroeder and his team have already sequenced partial genomes of about 20 individuals, and found that they represent a diverse collection of African groups. As the article notes some of the samples indicate shared ancestry with West and Central African ethnic groups, such as the Bamoun and Kongo. But for the others, matches could not be found. This is likely because there are not diverse reference data sets to compare them too. Schroeder is hoping that two medically-related sequencing efforts in Africa will help change that.
In the meantime 23andMe’s African Ancestry Project has begun to recruit people in the United States, who emigrated, or whose parents emigrated, from several specific countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to improve its set of African reference data. This will not just improve the information we can report back to people of African descent, it could also help yield new insights into the TransAtlantic slave trade.
“23andMe researchers hope to identify direct connections between locations in Africa and the Americas, possibly adding important details to the historical record,” said Joanna Mountain, Ph.D., senior director of research at 23andMe.
Like 23andMe Schroeder and his team are looking to make direct connections from specific locations in Africa and the individuals who wound up in St. Helena. In turn this may also help people of African descent living in the Americas a bridge to their own ancestral past.
Fatimah Jackson, a biological anthropologist at Howard University in Washington DC who is sequencing ancient DNA from other slave burial sites, is quoted in the Nature article as saying that his kind of research has the potential of changing people’s perception of the past.
“It&#8217;s a very personal thing for us,” Jackson said. “It&#8217;s not just ancient DNA. It&#8217;s ancient DNA of potential ancestors.”

Tracing Back to Africa

With the holiday season upon us, 23andMe is sprucing up its paternal haplogroup assignments!
With 23andMe population geneticist and Y-chromosome expert <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/a-conversation-with-population-geneticist-david-poznik/">David Poznik</a> at the lead, we’ve updated our Haplogroups <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-24528" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/paternal-haplo.001-e1478561295877-300x278.jpg" alt="paternal-haplo-001" width="300" height="278" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/paternal-haplo.001-e1478561295877-300x278.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/paternal-haplo.001-e1478561295877.jpg 591w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Report and paternal haplogroup assignemtns. The update reflects significant developments in the field over the past few years. We’re also excited to introduce yHaplo™, our new open-source software for researchers.

<h6>
Major Refinements to the Y-Chromosome Tree</h6>

Each generation, fathers pass down copies of their Y chromosomes to their sons. Small variations arise over time and accumulate in patterns that uniquely mark individual paternal lineages. To trace the evolutionary history of these lineages, scientists study DNA sequence differences between and among modern populations. Using this information they have built a &#8220;tree&#8221; that shows how global Y chromosomes relate to one another.


However, our understanding of the Y-chromosome tree had, for many years, been limited by our incomplete knowledge of Y-chromosome diversity. Because paternal haplogroup names reflected the structure of the tree, each new insight required renaming haplogroups. This in turn made it difficult to interpret paternal haplogroup assignments from one year to the next. 
Recent research, including a study published in Nature Genetics, has drastically refined the structure of the tree. For that work, David and an international team of 42 scientists used complete Y-chromosome sequences from around the world to carry out the largest-ever study of genetic variation within the human Y chromosome (<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27111036">Poznik et al.</a>). This research identified more than 65,000 Y-chromosome genetic variants. The study vastly increases our understanding of the tree and sets a new standard for tracing male lineages through migrations that have occurred over the millennia of human history.
 
<h6>
What’s Changing </h6>

Male customers on the new 23andMe website experience can expect a couple of changes to their paternal haplogroup assignment with this update. Female customers may also see changes to the paternal haplogroup assignments of male relatives and friends in other parts of the website.
First, we have substantially updated our Y-chromosome tree to reflect the work of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (as of January 4, 2016).
In most cases, the updated haplogroup assignments are equivalent to previous assignments or differ only slightly. However, since much more is now known about the tree, we can provide more information about an individual haplogroup’s history and how it relates to others.
The second major update is a change to the naming system we use to report paternal haplogroups. Until recently, the convention was to use an often lengthy series of letters and numbers indicating the path of branches from the most recent common ancestor of all men to each haplogroup.
The problem is that these names changed from year-to-year as the tree was refined, making it difficult to know from the name alone which haplogroup male customers actually carry.
To reduce confusion, we have moved to a system of shorter and more stable names. Each name uses a letter to identify the major branch of the tree and the name of a genetic marker unique to a specific haplogroup. For example, if we previously reported your paternal haplogroup as “Q1a3a,” we now report it as “Q-M3,” indicating that your Y-chromosome lineage belongs to a subgroup of haplogroup Q that bears the M3 marker. Because this new representation focuses on a specific informative marker associated with your haplogroup, it will be much more stable over time.
<div id="attachment_24530" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-24530" class="wp-image-24530 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Small-Paternal-2.001-e1478563794644-300x122.jpg" alt="small-paternal-2-001" width="300" height="122" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Small-Paternal-2.001-e1478563794644-300x122.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Small-Paternal-2.001-e1478563794644.jpg 570w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />A small section of the updated Y-chromosome tree illustrating the marker-based haplogroup naming convention. The structure of the tree was aggregated from the literature by the International Society of Genetic Genealogy.</div>
For more information on the changes coming to the haplogroups report, visit 23andMe’s customer care page, here.
<h6>yHaplo™, a New Open-Source Research Tool </h6>

The paternal haplogroup update doesn’t end with the tree. As a member of the research team at 23andMe, Poznik has developed a new algorithm to rapidly and robustly identify Y-chromosome haplogroups in very large samples. In addition, he has implemented the algorithm as the yHaplo software package.
This software is very flexible; it runs on full Y-chromosome sequences and on smaller sets of genotyped markers. Furthermore, it is easy to incorporate updates as researchers around the world continue to gather data and learn more about the Y-chromosome tree.
At 23andMe, we’re using this software to provide paternal haplogroup assignments to our customers.
As we believe the yHaplo software package can be an extremely useful tool to help drive research, we have made it available under a custom open-source software license for non-commercial research use. To learn more about yHaplo, read our <a href="https://permalinks.23andme.com/pdf/23-13_paternal_haplogroups_yHaplo.pdf">white paper</a> or head to the <a href="https://github.com/23andMe/yhaplo">code repository</a>!

Updates to 23andMe Paternal Haplogroup Assignments

To enhance its research and enrich its customer experience, 23andMe is launching the African Genetics Project, <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-24241" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-300x244.jpg" alt="Africa_icon" width="300" height="244" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-300x244.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-768x625.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-1024x834.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-880x717.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon-1180x961.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Africa_icon.jpg 2014w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />recruiting people who emigrated from, or whose parents emigrated from several specific countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa is the birthplace of all humanity, and its people are the most genetically diverse in all the world, yet our knowledge of that diversity is limited. This newest project follows continuing efforts by 23andMe to enrich our understanding of the human story and increase diversity in genetic research, while also providing more detailed ancestry results for 23andMe customers with recent African ancestry.
23andMe’s African Genetics Project is offering kits at no cost to people with all four of their grandparents born in the same African country or from the same ethnic or tribal group within one of the following countries – Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Ivory coast, Liberia, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan and Togo.
The west African countries in that list are a priority for 23andMe because the majority of slaves brought from Africa to the Americas were brought from these African locations. We are also gathering data from individuals with all four grandparents from Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia to aid in identifying ancestry for more recent immigrants and to improve our reference populations for Africa.
This effort is unique in many respects, but primarily because it allows people of African ancestry who know where in Africa their family came from, to help others with African ancestry discover more about their own African roots. The effort may also yield insights into the TransAtlantic slave trade, and migrations within Africa over the last few hundred years.
While the goals of this project are focused primarily on improving ancestry insights, the African Genetics Project is part of a long list of efforts undertaken by 23andMe to improve diversity in research. Some estimates show that<a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7355/full/475163a.html"> more than 90 percent</a> of the research into the genetics underlying disease is on individuals of European descent alone, but for many conditions an individual’s ethnicity plays an important role and the insights from those studies fall short of helping people of other backgrounds.
There are a number of reasons for the lack of diversity  – historical, cultural, economic and social – but by reaching out and recruiting people from all backgrounds it will also ensure that everyone benefits from advances in genetic science.
Over the last five years, 23andMe has undertaken several initiatives on that front including its <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/roots-into-the-future/">Roots Into the Future</a> project to study the genetics of disease impacting African Americans, the first-ever <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/a-webinar-on-the-genetic-landscape-of-the-usa/">genetic portrait of the United States</a> that mapped the country’s Native American, African and European ancestry, and more recently a NIH-funded project to develop a new way to detect disease causing genetic variants among ethnically mixed populations.
Taken together, these initiatives have helped 23andMe improve diversity in its research. The African Genetics Project is part of that same effort and it will allow 23andMe to identify genetic similarities of people from specific locations in Africa. This in turn will not only improve what we can tell our customers with African ancestry, but will also aid our research into how people migrated within and from Africa over the last 5,000 years.
Learn more <a href="https://www.23andme.com/africa-project/">here</a> and enroll today.

The African Genetics Project

A recent article in Quartz with the headline “<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-6586" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg" alt="23andMe_Logo_blog" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog.jpg 350w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />in genetics research, and biomedical research in general. 
It’s also an opportunity to address mischaracterizations of our science within the article, and motivations ascribed to our research that are just plain wrong.  We’ve raised these issues with Quartz and feel strongly enough to share our thoughts more publicly to hopefully steer the discussion in an informative and worthwhile direction, since it is a conversation that should be had by the broader scientific community. 


Genetics research has a diversity problem. This is widely recognized, but when you see the data it’s staggering. For example, a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708540/#R2">2011 article</a> cited data showing that only 4 percent (!) of all genome-wide association studies had been conducted using samples of non-European descent.
<h6>The Implications</h6>
There are very real repercussions when research is limited to just one group. The seriousness of this situation was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/science/genetic-tests-for-a-heart-disorder-mistakenly-find-blacks-at-risk.html?_r=0">demonstrated in a recent study</a> showing that due to biased research, African Americans are more likely than whites to mistakenly be told that they carry a mutation putting them at risk for the heart condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, when in fact they do not.
This type of mistake has serious emotional and medical implications.
The lack of diversity in genetics research is reflective of the general lack of diversity in all aspects of health research. There are lots of reasons – historical, cultural, political. For good overviews we suggest reading this piece from <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/10/30/racial-discrimination-modern-medicine-384961.html">Newsweek</a> and this article from <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001918">Oh, et al.</a> These authors eloquently and forcefully explain the situation.


What does this have to do with 23andMe?

<h6>23andMe&#8217;s Reference Data</h6>

Though we do conduct our own research and are increasingly able to provide reports based on our own published studies, for the most part 23andMe is dependent on peer-reviewed scientific research published by others to fuel the reports in our product. Lack of diversity in what is studied by the research community at large therefore impacts the results we are able to provide to customers. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-24211" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Ancestry-Comp-Home-300x190.png" alt="Ancestry Comp Home" width="300" height="190" /> 
When it comes to our Ancestry Composition feature (which tells people the proportion of their DNA that comes from each of 31 populations), the results we provide to customers are derived by comparing their DNA to what are known as “reference datasets”.
We use publicly available data from academic initiatives that have specifically sought to characterize large swaths of the human genetic diversity of our planet: the <a href="http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~bio336/Bio336/readings/Li2008.pdf">Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP)</a>, <a href="http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/hapmap3.html">HapMap3</a> and the <a href="http://www.1000genomes.org/">1000 Genomes Project</a>.
We augment this public data with information provided by a small percentage of our customers whose data meet our rigorous standards for being included in a reference dataset.

<h6>Is Bigger Better?</h6>

The author of the Quartz article focused in on the numbers of people in our most granular population references. She specifically questioned how we can claim to provide accurate results about her ancestry (she identifies as Korean, but her 23andMe results indicated Japanese and Chinese ancestry, as well as Korean) when there are data for “only” 76 Koreans in our reference data set. It’s an understandable worry – so much of what we hear about these days in science is the power of “big data”.  
Bigger must be better, right? Not necessarily.
For Ancestry Composition, high accuracy can often be obtained with relatively modest sample sizes. Size matters more when it comes to granularity, not accuracy.
We’ve done a comprehensive evaluation of our algorithm and reference datasets, and are confident in the accuracy of the results we report for customers with Korean or any other ancestry.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty you can check out this <a href="https://www.23andme.com/ancestry_composition_guide/">white paper</a> (in which we describe the multiple steps that go into producing accurate results and the metrics demonstrating how well our algorithm works), this <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/23andmes-newest-feature-explores-your-ancestry/">blog post</a> or this <a href="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/20121027_ancestry_painting_methods_poster.pdf">scientific poster</a>.
<h6>Granularity</h6>
The gist is that we only go as granular as we can for a given confidence threshold. Customers can adjust their results from a 90 percent confidence level (“Conservative”) down to 50 percent (“Speculative”). If we say that a section of DNA is most likely Japanese or Chinese or Korean at one of our higher confidence thresholds, we stand behind it.  If we weren’t sure that we could make the distinction, we’d go up a level and say that that DNA reflected “East Asian” ancestry.
The information would not be incorrect, simply less specific.
While the impact of adding more Korean individuals (or individuals of any of the groups we currently have represented in our reference datasets) is likely to be small in terms of improving the accuracy of our Ancestry Composition results, it could help us add more granularity to our results – i.e., groups of people from more specifically defined geographical areas. That way, for example, we might be able to distinguish between Cameroonian and Ghanaian ancestry, instead of lumping ancestry from these different locations under the label “West African.”


The author of the Quartz article correctly points out that we do have a lot of data and granularity for Europe (providing, for example, separate French &amp; German and British &amp; Irish groupings), but not for the rest of the world. She implies that this is driven by a lack of effort or concern on our part. The truth is that we have a great deal of customer data to enhance the public data available for Europeans because the vast majority of our customers have European ancestry, and several thousand of them are eligible to contribute to our reference dataset. This is not because of a “commercially driven ethnic bias,” and we have for several years been making in-roads to improve the diversity in our research and reference data.
This is where we come back to where we began – this is not just a 23andMe issue but an issue with diversity in genetics research in general.

<h6>23andMe&#8217;s Diversity Efforts</h6>

There’s only so much we can do as a single company, but we are trying. We funded the genotyping of the HGDP samples, data which are publicly available. <a href="https://www.23andme.com/roots-study/">Our Roots into the Future</a> project enrolled 10,000 African Americans in our research program, and our <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/23andmes-african-ancestry-project/">African Ancestry Project </a>helped contribute to our West African reference dataset. We recently collaborated to obtain data from for over 400 representatives of populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of our researchers was <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/news/announcements/23andme-scientists-improving-diversity-in-genetic-research/">awarded NIH funding</a> to develop new methods for uncovering genetic variants associated with disease, especially in those with non-European ancestry. There are additional programs in the works, and we look forward to sharing more as we can.


We’re also always looking for more publicly available data that we can use to improve our product and inform our research. But it’s not as simple as just pulling studies for a given group or purchasing reference data.  There are important scientific and ethical considerations that must be attended to when collecting population data and 23andMe is not willing to compromise our standards in the interest of appearing more diverse.


We can always do better. We want people – researchers, customers, journalists – to keep holding us accountable and pushing us to lead the way in consumer genetics and genetics research. But accusing us of racial bias and shoddy science is unfair. It reduces an important conversation to clickbait.


Please share your comments here but don&#8217;t limit it to our blog – discuss your ideas, raise awareness and spread the word that the lack of research diversity is a real problem. We want people to have informed opinions and conversations on this topic since the impact of genetics research will only continue to grow.

Ancestry Service — Page 15