Jumping into the gene pool...

For my birthday last year, I got a DNA test done through Ancestry.com. While I was hoping to find out that I was interesting, I turned out to be as boring as I expected: 85% British. Considering that most people in the UK can only claim about 60% Great Britain on that test (according to Ancestry), that's quite impressive... in a really boring sort of way. I must be one of the most British Canadians out there!

Anyway, I wasn't all that impressed with Ancestry's breakdown of that 85%. Really, there was none. I know I have English and Scottish ancestors (at the level of my great-grandparents, I'm 3/8 Scottish and 5/8 English... including 1/8 from Newfoundland, but as far as I can tell, that family was from England, too). Ireland came in at a measly 4%, and the percentages for the rest of my trace amounts just got lower from there. Most surprising to me was the less than 1% from Scandinavia. My Scottish ancestors were from northern Scotland. Weren't the Vikings having a great old time up there, pillaging and looting and mixing their DNA into the local populace?

Anyway, I figured I'd just have to be disappointed with Ancestry's lackluster results. And then a distant cousin told me about GEDmatch. I'm still waiting for the batch processing to be complete (at which point I'll be able to see if I have any matches with family members on the GEDmatch site), but I was still able to run my DNA info through a few tools to find out my admixture. I ended up with much more information, and a few surprises.

The Eurogenes K36 test offered some interesting bits of information (sorry it's blurry... I don't know what's going on there; the images are clear if you click on them):

All percentages above 1% are represented in the pie chart. All that's missing here is North Caucasian at 0.33% and Western Mediterranean at 0.09%. Ancestry had me at less than 1% Italian, so... I don't know what that big orange wedge is all about.

The Eurogenes EUtest V2 K15 was even more interesting:

What's really interesting is what's not shown here: Red Sea at 0.55%, Amerindian at 0.12%, Oceanian at 0.40%, and Sub-Saharan at 0.08%. Now, I know that these are very small percentages and that there are probably margins of error that could explain these results away. Amerindian showed up using some of the other analysis tools as well, though, which makes me curious about that. There's no Amerindian ancestry that I know of in my family tree... but perhaps my DNA is hinting that there's something there.

We'll see if I get any matches when the batch processing is complete...