Who's Your Daddy?

I did a test that traces your DNA.

Not that there were any questions of paternity of children lurking out there. Thankfully, that’s one issue that I’ve never had to worry about. The testing was not court ordered but rather a test to look at your genetic origins to find out from whence your ancestors hail.

The method is the same, though. You take a Q-Tip that’s kind of shaped like a lollipop, rub it inside your mouth to get a few cells and a lot of spit, then smear it on this little card that you mail back to the testing folks.

In a few days, you get an email with your “DNA Report” outlining your heritage. The results can be pretty surprising.

The report gives some technical stuff that I don’t understand first. No surprise there, that’s one way that the medical establishment justifies the cost of something – by providing test results that nobody can really understand. After a few pages of that, though, it gets to the stuff you really want to know – “Who’s your Daddy?”

Not your immediate daddy, so Mom and Dad, you can curb your indignation. Nobody’s making any accusations. Instead, it looks at your genealogical origins back across several generations.

The first part tells your “deep ancestral origins”, which it says are the groups up to about 500 years back from which a person originates. The second part is your “Global Population Match”, which is your closest genetic relatives today, and the third group is your “World Region Match”, which shows the genetic match over major regions of the world and interactions between historical groups in those areas – i.e. “who’s sleepin’ with who” on a larger scale.

So here’s the kickers that make little sense to me given what I thought I knew about my family history.

For the “deep ancestral origins”, my DNA matches to “Central and Southern Iraq”. It’s kind of a surprise to learn that my country of birth is at war with my location of origin. I also have a hard time wrapping my mind around that – I’d always thought we were from western Europe. While I have little doubt that there was a travelling salesman or two in the family tree, I wouldn’t have guessed that!

Then, it gets even more interesting. Said salesman – I’m betting he was in either Fuller Brushes, vitamins or some other form of snake oil or a travellin' preacher -- apparently had a pretty large territory, because my “Global Population Match” is European – Aboriginal (Western Australia), followed by Central Iraq.

The World Region Match comes back to Arabian, with the next prevalent being Northwest Europe. Apparently, Australia didn’t work out and the salesman was transferred to a newer region. A colder location, which to my mind isn’t much of a promotion.

What does this say? I’m not sure. I was surprised at some of the results, but then humans have been moving around and breeding with most anything – er, “anyone” -- that would hold still long enough for eons, so I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that things are not as clear-cut as one would expect. It probably doesn’t make any real difference in my life, other than to provide a bit of trivia.

If anything, it serves to confirm that we are all, in fact, of one tribe or family and no matter what we think our heritage may not be quite as we’ve been led to believe.

And travelling salesmen have been the same throughout time.

If you can’t live without this tidbit of information about yourself, you can go to http://www.dnatribes.com/ and they’ll set you up to learn these things about yourself.