[trainfromkansas]

I can only speak for myself, but when I got one of these tests 6 years ago, I never got such an impression. They've updated my results several times since and I never feel hoodwinked as if I had been previously deceived; I'm always just curious to see what the latest estimates are.

> I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry.

You picked out the single biggest discrepancy they report in this article, and yet even that doesn't seem to indicate an actual inconsistency to me. I would tend to interpret those results to mean that for one twin, they felt sufficiently confident to call a portion of their DNA "French and German", while in the other it fell below that confidence threshold so it got thrown into the "Broadly European" share.

This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions they have to make but it doesn't invalidate the whole test because occasionally you have enough evidence to call portion of your DNA "French and German" and sometimes you have to fallback to just calling it "Broadly European".

[ninth_ant]

> This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions

I think that’s the whole point of the complaint here. These companies pretend to have found overly precise results (which I’m sure are explained away to nothing in the fine print) and yet are subjective and lean heavily on guesswork.

[Gimpei]

23andMe told me that I was a quarter Italian. Seemed to have mixed that up with what I actually am: 50% middle eastern. For a while I wondered if there was some funny business in the family, but then my sister got the "right" percentages. This seems like a pretty huge error to me.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

I know it might can be assumed from the context of the post and thread but are you talking about your twin sister or not? Just pointing out that the chance for funny business (in your family or at your birth or at these companies) is unknown but not necessarily zero.

[toyg]

Well, Italian and ME populations were basically the same thing for more than a thousand years (basically until the Islamic Conquest promoted piracy on the Mediterranean, making it fundamentally unsafe). So it might well be that you are carrying genes that most of the Italian population also carries, and viceversa.

[hnnh44]

Is it possible one of you has a father that's 100% middle Eastern, and the other has a father 50% italian and 50% middle Eastern?