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Researchers Develop DNA GPS Tool To Accurately Trace Geographical Ancestry
Zothecula (1870348) writes "An international team of scientists has developed a process that allows them to pinpoint a person's geographical origin going back 1,000 years. Known as the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, the method is accurate enough to locate the village from which the subject's ancestors came, and has significant implications for personalized medical treatment."
Just to be clear, they only did this for two populations of people: Sardinia and polynesia, both of which have the nice property that they are isolated and thus would not mix very much with the rest of the human population.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
"Known as the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, the method is accurate enough to locate the village from which the subject's ancestors came"
Short answer: No it isn't.
Long answer: No it isn't.
That is an astoundingly facile thing to claim. I'm British, heritage Scottish, English, some Irish -- for whatever that means (practically fuck all, genetically, given that the Scots, English and Irish have been interbreeding for millennia, and please spare me the "But the English came across in 500AD!!!!!!" stuff because while there was definite interbreeding with people from Germany and Denmark back then for one thing the majority of the genes are pretty stable and for another they bred with everyone and everyone bred with each other, because that's what humans do. The idea that the "English" came along and committed genocide on a massive scale and that there is somehow some mystical intrinsic difference between "Celtic" peoples (who were never "Celtic" in the first place; the Atlantic Celts are also a myth; common language does not imply either common culture or common genetics) and "Saxon" peoples is a myth perpetrated by the ill educated and the politically motivated). Unless they've somehow got accurate DNA maps of every village not only in Europe but, given we're talking *1000 years* here, every village this side of Mongolia and quite a few beyond, too -- which they haven't, because they do not exist -- they can't make this claim. Unless they're banking on the sheer weight of ancestors meaning we can all be placed in every fucking village in the whole of Eurasia. 1000 years is roughly 300 generations, working on a crude dead reckoning of 30 odd years per generation. Pep quiz: what's 2^300? Answer: a first guess at the number of ancestors you had in 1014AD! That's a fucking big number. Obviously we have to cut it down to account for inbreeding etc., but even 2^100 is a hell of a lot of people, and some of them will be from entertainingly distant places.
The conclusion is either these people are selling snake oil (likely); the summary is bullshit misrepresenting what they actually said (near certainty); the answers they'll give are so general as to be meaningless (likely); or they'll actually perform some heavy filtering on their data so they can blithely say "your ancestors were from Denmark and we know that many were from the village of Aalsgard!!!!!!" and somehow keep a straight face (likely).
Proviso: I haven't read the article, because this is /.
How did they obtain a record of which genes were in which village at which time?
I have a DNA sequence from 23andme. I'd like to see the first service do any kind of analysis where I can upload my genome sequence and see the results of the analysis.
GPS is already taken by something else. This could cause some confusion.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Yes, I don't see that the technique is discussed for people whose ancestors don't all come from one place.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Don't read the moronic gizmag article. (yeah I know, /., as if)
See this:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...
It's pretty cool stuff.
Wow, this sounds like a really great idea. Except that 50 generations ago, there were theoretically 2^49 possible contributors to my DNA. Of course that number, 562,949,953,421,312, is far greater than the total number of humans who have ever lived, which implies that most of my ancestors must be "repeats". To put that another way, we are ALL inbred in the grand scheme of things. A familial relationship can be established between any given pair of living humans by going back less than 50 generations. That's right, Malcolm X and the Grand Wizard of the KKK are cousins. You knew that already -- it's not like there's anywhere else for humans to come from than other humans. The implication for this purported study, I think, is that it is nonsense. Pick any living human, and any 1000-year-old town. Yes, that person "came from" that town.
PS: People with fair skin and red or blond hair have some genetic information from Neanderthal ancestors.
You might be carrying 5 very rare genes that now have GPS coordinates of origin - this could tell you all of your origins.
And even in the very mountainous Dolomites of Northern Italy they demonstrated that Ötzi (4000+ years old) has almost the same DNA as the people living there TODAY. Some some genes can stay in the same spot for a VERY long time.
It is a pun on that thing, so no.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
But my ancestors were nomadic native Americans, you insensitive clods!
It's a technique with significant problems and that can and will give fairly meaningless results. Go back 1000 years and you don't have one ancestor you could have millions if not billions of ancestors, the vast majority from which you inherit nothing.
Not to mention the dodgy nature of authors declaring they have no financial interests in the paper then set up a company selling the results for a profit.
For proper look at the paper see the comments by one of the original reviewers:
http://jkplab.org/2014/04/30/review-geographic-population-structure-gps-of-worldwide-human-populations-infers-biogeographical-origin/
And a summary of some of the problems in this write up:
http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/driving-in-wrong-direction-with-dodgy.html
I think this would probably work in my case.
My Mom's people come from the Channel Islands, and while her ancestors did a lot of night visiting to French and English shores, it was mostly to smuggle goods, not so much for the nookie. These days, the Jervais pretty much continue their illicit activities but for now they do so "within the law" as International Bankers--- a different kind of piracy. But that's neither here nor there.
The point is that in 1066, roughly 25 generations back, my Mom had 33 million ancestors, and just about all of them were from the Channel Islands which never had a living population of more a few tens of thousands. So she was definitely the product of a homogenous gene pool. Not inbreeding as such, but more a churning of a healthy gene pool with very little else mixed in.
On the other side, my Dad's ancestry is well documented through parish records and the Domeday Book to 1066, and a small corner of Merrie Olde England that was awarded to a distant ancestor (of Flemish origin) who joined William the Conqueror in his grand adventure. The records show that those ancestors did not stray outside of a pretty discrete gene pool until one of them crossed the pond in the 1500s to settle on Long Island. There was certainly some mixing going on then for a hundred years or so, what with the taking of young squaws as slaves when New England Indian tribes needed to be subdued, and then there were the cute little Dutch girls of New Amsterdam. But my progenitors did pretty much stay in one particular part of Long Island until my Dad and Mom met in college, and settled near Boston to raise me and my sibs.
So assuming even a tremendous amount of adulteration of the lineage when the American branch of my Dad's ancestry formed, that's still 2,050 ancestors mostly from an area in Long Island that never has had a living population of more than a few hundred. So even on my Dad's side, the genetic mix has almost certainly been homogenous and identifiable within perhaps a hundred mile radius of Setauket, Long Island, NY.
I'm guessing that GPS would easily identify my Channel Island ancestry, and identify that my other roots were Old Stock New England (if that terminology is still in use). So yeah, I think this technique might have some merit. But how much value it might have in dx and tx of diseases is questionable: there is a huge amount of research that would need to be done before more than a handful of diseases could be associated in any way with genetic predispositions.
Which Island? It might work on a small island like Mauke (in the Cooks) but it isn't going to work with The North Island.
You might be carrying 5 very rare genes that now have GPS coordinates of origin - this could tell you all of your origins.
No.
Five very rare genes would tell me the origin of no more than five of my ancestors. Since I have eight ancestors going back just to great-grandparents, and the eight didn't originate in the same villages, that's not anything like "all" of my origins.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I would be a poor candidate for this, too. I have to go back 6 generations just to find one ancestor couple that was born and raised in the same town.
Hint: even if your chosen phrase is the one that perfectly describes your invention, discovery or whatever, it's best to check that its initialism isn't already in popular use for something else.
(inventor of the individual biometric measurer)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're not from Utah|Tasmania|Wales, then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Beethoven being "black" is just speculation put forward by pan-africanists and have little to do with reality.
For the people that HAVE gotten results, all you get for the money is a point on a Google map. If you are a pure-bred ethnic whatever, that point means something. If you are the child of a parent from Fiji and an aborigonal Australian, the point on your map will be halfway between those locations: useless information. Considering that a lot of us are children of parents from quite different locations these days, the odds of you getting a point on your map that means anything are not high.
If they don't get back to me by this coming Tuesday (2 business days), I'm charging it back via PayPal.
What a bunch of crap.
Honestly, that's not what it does. Rather than tracing your actual ancestry, it's looking at the geographic distribution of the various genes in it. Thus, it can't tell you the names of your ancestors, but it can certainly tell you where they probably came from.
Clear, Dark Skies
No it is not. Read the fine (nature) article. Furthermore, there are no human races. Race implies human-driven selective breeding.
BTW: A racist implies that there are certain groups of humans which are better (on an absolute scale) than other and that they are therefore superior and should rule over the other or even exterminate (greeting from the daleks) those other humans. In reality we are all different and in that property we are all equal, especially in rights. At least in theory that is. In Reality we are only worth our stock of gold pressed latinum.
There is no such thing as race in conjunction with humans, as this would imply selective breeding. The equality of people do not mean that we are all equal in genes. That would be quite confusing, if everybody would look the same. We are all different and equal in rights.
Actually it appears that the gene for red hair present in Neanderthals is different than the gene causing red hair in Cro Magnons and their descendents. Parallel evolution, apparently. There are other genes though, and they tend to be more prevalent in European populations than elsewhere. Denesovian genes are also present in European and Asian populations, and an influx from another 'unknown' hominid as well is found in several Asian populations. The book 'Children of the Ice Age' brings up some of that, although I think the red hair gene was in a Scientific American article a few months back.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Crap, then I left off the point I wanted to make: The only genetically "pure" human genome, without inclusions from other hominids, is African.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Assuming an average child-bearing age of 20, 1000 years back would span 50 generations. 50 generations of parentage is well over 1 billion people. How could anybody in the modern world's lineage possibly be traced back to one (or even 4) location?
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. I was discussing a while ago that 53 generations ago (perhaps 1325=53*25 years ago, if a generation takes 25 years to cycle) I had 2^53=9,007,199,254,740,992 different ancestors, if there was no inbreeding. There was obviously some inbreeding, because even today there are only about 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, give or take. But amongst those 9,007,199,254,740,992 people 1325 years ago there is a high chance that some were from Europe, some from Africa, some from Asia, but there is a much lesser chance that some were Native Americans, or native Australians, or the now extinct, native Tasmanians. I probably share quite a bit of common ancestry with Native Americans too, probably even more than with subSaharan Africans, but it has to go back to a time before they crossed the Behring Strait between Siberia and Alaska, unless some intermixed with Eskimos up north, who in turn got around to the other continents and transported ancestry that way, after the Behring strait was crossed. My most distant relatives are probably the native Australians, but even they came from Africa less than 200,000 years ago, because that's when modern humans first appeared.
If they can pinpoint exactly which village you came from, then you have a severe inbreeding problem, because every village should have people from hundreds of other villages, and such variation shouldn't be duplicated from village to village, so on a country level, out of say 10-50 million people you're probably talking at least half a million different villages they could have come from. Everyone's unique, everyone has a different fingerprint - unless they are genetically identical twins. People will sometimes prefer their very own kind, but sometimes someone very distant as an inbreeding fighting measure. Who you find physically attractive is a very subtle process, as you both are responsible for yourself first, then your family, then your kind, but you have to protect yourself, your family and your kind from inbreeding defects too. Everyone is responsible for themselves, if you take care of yourself, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot by taking care of yourself. If you take care of your family and kids, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. If you take care of your own kind, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. Am I my brother's keeper? Sometimes I cannot afford to be. I cannot expect you to care about someone else's children more, or even equally, to how you care about your own. If you disagree, we have a whole lot of court cases where paternity issues are fought, and all you gotta do is show up and offer that they don't need to fight in court, because you will accept the child support deductions from your paycheck, for millions of cases that happen. Or if you cannot accept a million deductions, just do one such case. Chances are you will not go for it, and be altruistic like that to a random stranger. Most people that adopt a child as their own, they don't just get a paycheck deduction, but they get human contact out of it, so in a sense it's selfish. However there are lots of catholic charities that collect donations for say, kids in the Philippines, and the people get a picture of the child in exchange, but you can only do that if you take care of your own turf first, I also cannot expect you to care more about me, than yourself. Though there are martyrs, heroes, kamikaze's, who will take care of their kind before taking care of themselves, but in a sense they are taking care of themselves better by taking care of their kind, than if they took care of themselves themselves. Your ultimate kind is human, and we could even get as specieist as saying that we'd be willing to see every other creature and species disappear if that saved humans, but we would probably not be racist enough to say that we'd be willing to see every other human race disappear to save our own, or every o
Just because there are very few blood types out there, and it has something to do with heredity, it does not mean that there are only those few genetic variations of people, because within each blood type there are many different looking people out there - can you tell someone's blood type with high accuracy just by looking at a picture of their face? I don't think that's possible. Same goes for other genetic markers, such as mitochondrial DNA that strictly follows the maternal side. But life with bloodtype, just because your mitochondrial DNA is the same it does not mean you're closely related - well, it's a much tighter determining factor than blood type, but there are other things that matter too, such as the paternal side genes. Mitochondrial DNA only comes from the maternal side and you can trace ancestry along maternal sides that way, skin color, and beigeness, for instance, depends on both parents, and I think blood type does too. So good luck messing around with family trees and tracing your ancestry very far into the past. It's kind of hard to keep track of 9,007,199,254,740,992 different people 53 generations ago, especially the intricate inbreeding relationships when different generations slip in time against each other, and get out of sequence, so someone who's your great-great-great-great-grandfather's great-great-granddaughter might be your wife and you wouldn't even know it.
Race: "Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or social affiliation."
This study is enabling not only genetic but geographical distinctions. The connective "and/or" is synonymous with the logic connective "or" which is inclusive.
Racist: "Some definitions consider that any assumption that a person's behavior would be influenced by their racial categorization is inherently racist, regardless of whether the action is intentionally harmful or pejorative, because stereotyping necessarily subordinates individual identity to group identity."
While it is true that, in itself, mere genetic distinctions do not imply any distinctions in behavior, it is also true that if one finds genes influence behavior (which one can clearly see in the distinctions between species) then one can reasonably impute that there will be statistically significant distinctions in behavioral predispositions between genetically distinguishable groups. This "reasonable imputation" does not have to be proven or shown to be the case to be applicable in practical everyday life for the average person -- it merely needs to be not disproven to that average person.
Seastead this.
But with humans, it isn't so, except some remote villages or tribes far away from other humans, which for one or several generations are related only to people within the same group. In any other group of people (of none-sibblings or directly related humans), you always find at least one who has ancestors no other person within that group has.
...We can tell in the United States already if someone is native to America, Asia, Europe, or Africa...
And what does this tell you (and us) about POTUS?
--
Intelligence is realizing that nobody knows what they're talking about. Wisdom is realizing that you don't, either.