ndrosen

Thursday evening, I got a link to my genetic information from 23andMe, and I’ve been looking at some of the results. I am supposedly 48.1% Ashkenazic Jewish, 25.4% French and German, 3.9% British and Irish, 2.3% Italian, 1.0% Scandinavian, 13.2% broadly Northwestern European, 3.2% broadly Southern European, 2.8% broadly European, and 0.1% broadly East Asian and Native American. This seems to make sense, given that my father was the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, my maternal grandfather was Alsatian (with an apparent Swedish ancestor from about a century and a half before his birth), and my maternal grandmother was American, with, I presume, British and some Irish ancestry, and perhaps other European ancestry.

I supposedly have 263 Neanderthal variants, giving me fewer than 68% of 23andMe customers. (I have a high forehead, little in the way of brow ridges, and a rather gracile build, so I don’t look like someone with much Neanderthal ancestry.) I am alleged to have a Neanderthal variant associated with having less back hair (I don’t have much back hair), and another associated with height, although I don’t know whether that makes me taller or shorter than I would be if the archaic Homo sapiens sapiens invaders of ice age Europe had not interbred with the natives.

I have the J1c5 maternal haplogroup, making me a descendant by mitochondrial DNA of a woman who lived about eleven thousand years ago, and a distant cousin of Richard III. One 23andMe customer in 280 shares this maternal lineage.

One in 610 shares my paternal (Y chromosome) haplogroup, J-M410, going back to a man who lived about 34,000 years ago.