The human mind and soul are full of curiosity and the thirst to know more does not get quenched ever. The dip into finding out our ancestry via ancestry tests is just another expression of curiosity. People have always wanted to know where exactly they come from and genetic ancestry testing provides them with the answer. The purpose is to know where the recent ancestors came from, in terms of geographical locations. The last few years have seen exponential growth in businesses that are providing these tests to the public. The popularity of the tests is so much so that according to an estimate, more than 26 million people in the world have gotten ancestry testing done. The testing is mostly conducting by direct to consumer companies and it has made it easy for anyone in the world to dig into their ancestors’ past locations.
Ancestry testing is not only good for looking into one’s roots; they also provide information about an individual’s relatives, as far as even pointing out 4th or 5th cousins. Most people that partake in this testing do it for fun but for many, it is much more. Adoptees or people whose ancestors were forced to migrate benefit from genetic ancestry testing greatly, it allows them to find out about their family and feel connected.
About ancestry testing, Sheldon Krimsky, the Lenore Stern Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences comments,
“make sure you’re prepared for a surprise, whether it’s a correct or incorrect one. Are you an odd mixture? Probably; most of us are. Ancestry tests are trying to give people a simple answer to what chances are was a much more complex past.”
Many people do not know this but there are three types of genetic ancestry testing that are done. One is called the Y-DNA test which is a test of the Y-chromosome and gives information about the male line ancestry. The second is called the mitochondrial DNA test which gives out information about the female ancestry line. The third, autosomal DNA test is the best bet to know most of one’s ancestral DNA information as it takes major data from the most informative DNA sites and one can get to know which ancestors contributed to their DNA in the last 300 years or so.
A third-world country like Pakistan is not well-equipped when it comes to DNA testing of any kind. The only Pakistanis that proclaim of getting the tests done are the ones that are settled in countries other than Pakistan like a British born Pakistani named Maz Halima. The few self-reported incidents of DNA tests and their results from Pakistanis all have the same tone; they were not satisfied with the results as mostly. The results showed that the majority of their ancestors were from Central Asia (specifically from Pakistan). Alas, they wanted mysterious and unusual results but all they got were facts that were so obvious that they could have just inferred it on their own.
Perhaps the only Pakistani that got comparatively interesting results from Ancestry was:
Upon an internet search, one can see that corporations offering DNA testing services in Pakistan are few and scattered across the whole country. Namely, they are:
DNA home testing is questionable as it takes only certain markers of a person’s entire genome. More importantly, the DNA home testing companies compare and connect the data based on the living population only and that too is taken from the “best representatives of a region or ethnicities”.
There are certain limitations of home DNA testing as Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London, points out,
“These companies aren’t testing your ancestry at all,” says “They’re problematic in their claims to be able to infer an individual’s ancestry.”
It is important to remember that when an individual inherits DNA, they do not inherit the whole of it from their ancestors, they inherit parts of it only which means that they tend to inherit limited genes and the numbers keep diminishing the further one traces back. Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London explains it perfectly, “You start with two parents, then four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, it goes to 16, 32 and so on. And by the time you go 10 generations back, there are ancestors from whom you inherit no DNA.”
When asked about the accuracy of genetic ancestry tests, Sheldon Krimsky said,
“We don’t know, because the companies selling these services—and there are close to 40 of them—don’t share their data, and their methods are not validated by an independent group of scientists and there are not agreed-upon standards of accuracy. People have sent their DNA to several of these companies and found differences in the results—though not necessarily radical differences. So you have to look at the percentages you receive back with skepticism.”
The first and foremost thing that one needs to keep in mind is that the further we go back in our ancestral line, the less those early ancestors would have contributed to our genes which mean an ancestor of yours from 400 years ago did not pass on any of their DNA to you.
Currently, the companies that are popular in DNA testing are known to produce results that differ from each other due to their limited baseline data, sites of interests on the genome of the consumer, and the need to provide what the market needs.
DNA ancestry test results point out where similar DNA like that of the concerned individual can be found, it does not exactly point out where the specific ancestors might have been settled on the planet. The rest is inference, it is an assumption that since similar DNA was found in those specific parts of the world then an individual’s ancestors must have belonged to that specific region too.
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