Researchers Develop DNA GPS Tool To Accurately Trace Geographical Ancestry 69
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."
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Yes, I don't see that the technique is discussed for people whose ancestors don't all come from one place.
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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
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Beethoven being "black" is just speculation put forward by pan-africanists and have little to do with reality.
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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.
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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.
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You're not from Utah|Tasmania|Wales, then?
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Doesn't work for everyone (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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FTFY.
Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
Load of toss (Score:1)
"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!!!!!!" s
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I have now read the article. It's a load of toss, and so is the summary. Ultimately they were able to take people from a modern day Polynesian island, or a Sardinian village, and say which island or village they were from.
*slow handclap*
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In the past, some researchers were able to link British surnames to DNA. And it is quite simple to link surnames to general geographic areas. So this just sounds like a rehash of this technique.
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Huge garrison? Three, maybe four legions at most. Less than 20,000. Half a decent football crowd.
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According to the actual paper's abstract [nature.com]:
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Pretty much what I'd suspected from RTFA, but I didn't try to follow the references.
Considering that Sardinia is less than 100km wide by 130km long (eyeballed from Gogle Maps), then getting more than 50km from the correct location is quite likely to involve getting one's feet and neck wet.
I don't get it (Score:2)
How did they obtain a record of which genes were in which village at which time?
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Well you can use statistics. The people who currently live in the village probably have a strong correlation to a particular gene structure, Then the further out you go the correlation diminishes. So we get a good old bell curve.
So if you take one in a different area and you see that they would correlate better to a different area, then chances are their family probably had came from there.
We can tell in the United States already if someone is native to America, Asia, Europe, or Africa. We can know this w
Interesting hypothesis, have you a newsletter? (Score:1)
...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.
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UM, apparently you are not familiar with the history of the parties in this country. It is the Democrats who try to judge people according to their racial purity(and always has been).
Actually, it's the bigoted assholes of all stripes who try to judge people according to all kinds of stupid measures. To clarify your point and the previous poster's, it worked like this:
1. Lincoln (a Republican -- no real ideological relation to the current Republican party), goosed long and hard enough by the abolitionists and the thought of all those slaves rising up against their captors, "freed" (I use quotes because most of those enslaved didn't live in states controlled by the Union army) the slav
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I suppose you are referring to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" whereby he appealed to southern racists by actually working to desegregate southern schools (something which LBJ angered those same racists by refusing to do). I'm sorry, but the facts do not support your allegation that Nixon used some strategy to win the southern states, since he did not actually win them. They were won by George Wallace, who left the Democratic Party for that election and then returned to it.
I stand corrected [uselectionatlas.org]. Thank you.
However, That doesn't invalidate my primary points:
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It is partially true that both parties represent corporate entities. The primary reason for this is that too many people do not actually make an effort to change that. They do not bother voting in primaries. They do not become active in the local party and try to direct it. On top of that, too many people who do not become active, view those who do become active and are not doing so in service of corporate interests as "whack jobs".
I agree that much of our citizenry is uninvolved in the political process. This is quite unfortunate. However, I don't know anyone who considers those who do get involved in support of the public good (or at least what they consider to be the public good) rather than special interests to be, as you put it, "whack jobs."
Many of the people I know who remain uninvolved in the political process do so because they are suspicious of and cynical about it. Often, this is because they feel that they do not have a
should accept 23andme genome sequence dump (Score:2)
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.
Re:should accept 23andme genome sequence dump (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The service already exists, though they did a good job of not posting the link to http://www.prosapiagenetics.co... [prosapiagenetics.com]
However, it isn't until you get pretty far along in uploading your data that they try to hit you up for a fee (something like $20-50).
Couldn't they have come up with a better acronym? (Score:2)
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It's way cool, but read the actual study. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't read the moronic gizmag article. (yeah I know, /., as if)
See this:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... [nature.com]
It's pretty cool stuff.
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Yes, the original is much better and does not try to promise the same dip shit as /. article. Who would have guessed ;-)
That's Racist (Score:1)
Enough said.
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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
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Race [wikipedia.org]: "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 [wikipedia.org]: "Some definitions consider that any assumption that a person's behavior would be influenced by their racial categor
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PS: People with fair skin and red or blond hair have some genetic information from Neanderthal ancestors.
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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
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Crap, then I left off the point I wanted to make: The only genetically "pure" human genome, without inclusions from other hominids, is African.
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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.
Not so fast... (Score:1)
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no, we're more inbred than that. you did not have any ancestors from most towns 1000 years ago
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The study is interesting... (Score:2)
But my ancestors were nomadic native Americans, you insensitive clods!
Not good Science... (Score:1)
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/2014/04/3
Polynesian Island? (Score:2)
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.
Hint (Score:2)
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)
Warning: Do not waste your money (Score:1)
For the
How broad the results must be (Score:2)
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?