23 And You: Genes Can Lie
Quick DNA 'testing' services thread, because it bares repeating. Using the Volga Germans as an example.
Bob is from Michigan, both ma and pa have bloodlines indigenous to the Americas. He's an enrolled Mohawk, but fairly 'pale' as it goes. Which is because both ma and pa also have bloodlines that trace back to western Europe. He's independently documented back his genealogy ten generations, there is no trace to Western or Central Asia. However, one day he decides to take one of those mail-in DNA tests and he is startled to find out he's been Turkish this whole time.
Turns out, he's not, but that's because about 200 years ago a group of Germans took a trip. There'd been some wars and an Inquisition or two so the German protestants were looking for some friendlier digs. One branch of Germans ended up in Russia, for a bit. It was near the Volga River. They were fairly isolationist too, it's why we can map so precisely where they were. They were so German that for the 100+ years they stayed in Russia they are still known by historians as 'The Volga Germans'. Not Russian Mennonites, Volga Germans. Many never even learned to speak Russian, at least not well.
Those Volga Germans then moved to the Central US when Czar Nicholas decided he was sick of those annoying pacifists refusing to enlist in the military (plus when World War One rolled around what if those dirty immigrants decided to side with their evil German cousins back home?!). So many came the midwest to settle down a second time it is still thick with Germans and Dutch even now. Dozens of town names that are Germanic too: Hillsboro, Lindsborg, Gothenburg... Yet, both Ancestry and 23&Me list Bob's genetics having high degrees of East Europe and, more importantly, West Asian / Middle Eastern.
Bob is not Asian or Middle Eastern. Bob has no family that is Kazakh, or Turkish, let alone Iranian or Uzbeki. But why then does his test say he's part Turk? Because Bob has a genetic track that shows up, now, in SW Russia. Because some of the Volga Germans stayed and had kids. In other words, their map says 'this group has chunks in Russia' and their algorithm proves statistically estimates he has direct ties to historic SW Russia and Western Kazakhstan.
He doesn't. He has third cousins, part Volga German, with Russian fourth cousins by marriage he's definitely never met but really he's not related to in any way that even remotely matters. So, when someone says "My DNA says I'm Cherokee":
1) No, there is no such thing as cultural DNA, Cherokee is a culture group not a biological state of being 2) No, it says you have DNA in common with people from the same region as some Cherokee who are also in their database
The best part, and 23&Me readily admits this while Ancestry doesn't: as of 2020 of the ~10,000 sample populations they use for comparisons, barely 70 of those sample populations cover ALL THE AMERICAS. That's less than the number just for the western part of Western Europe. Meaning someone who tests as 0.2% "Native American" could have a full-blood as little as 4 generations back.
Because that Native great great grandparent wasn't one of the sample populations. Or conversely, someone "25% Native", could appear to have no indigenous ancestry at all. How...? One of the sample has a white ancestor and that's what's ending up in the match, not the 'actual' Native part.
On top of all that, it should go without saying but I know it doesn't, if they're giving you a percentage of race it's not real, it's an educated guess based on probabilities. Saying "I'm 43.8% Native American", as though that's a physical reality, is exactly as logical as saying "I'm 22.4% pregnant".
That doesn't mean those tests are worthless. DNA traces like this can be useful to someone who is trying to find out what tribes they're related to in order to flesh out the documentation they need for lost records, but that's all it can do. A connection with the people it points to is an in-person, lived experience and no biologist or anthropologist with any ethics will say otherwise. There is no such thing as "0.5% Black". Don't fall for a marketing slogan.
It is also important to say one of the reasons many indigenous groups are resistant to giving samples and expanding the various databases, to allow for better estimates, is precisely because they are well aware of how many people will turn around and claim they have some weird 'right' to Native identity based on a cheek swab. The proof is people do it all the time already, expanding the database would only make the situation worse. People need to stop believing a DNA test is proof of identity first, not the other way around.
tl;dr - DNA cannot ever tell anything except a direct bio-parental relationship back around five generations. In some cases it can't even do that well if it's a really small population who practiced cousin-marriage. Culture and genealogy is the only real metric, directly informed with deep historical knowledge of the period and peoples involved.
That is why all these celebrities who won't shut up about 'family stories' and DNA tests are derided as a threat to identity and sovereignty by indigenous rights advocates. They aren't proof of culture or heritage. They're perpetuating a marketing gimmick based entirely on the 'One Drop' Rule of race purity which was popularized by white supremacists up until the middle of the 20th Century. There is no gene for Swahili, Gciriku, Haitian Creole, or Mandarin, there is only vague guesses compounded by estimates and ratios. That's not culture, but it is racist as hell and reductive to the point of inhuman.
