Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TallGuyShort 2321 days ago
Out of Africa feels less PC to me, but I won't pretend to understand the rationale behind what is and isn't considered PC a lot of the time. But I agree with GP: we have relatively few DNA samples and try to draw pretty big generalizations between them. Ituitively, I would expect patterns of migration in and out of Africa and all the continents to be far more complex than 1-time events from which entire populations then developed complete independently.

edit: On a related note, my siblings' DNA test results say that they're something like 4% Native American, yet we have very reliable documentation of pure British genealogy back on all lines almost all the way back to the 1500s. Very unlikely to actual have a modern link. I'm sure the companies are likely overplaying the similarity more than anthropologists would, but am I to conclude that I have a closer link to Native Americans than other random samples from Europe?

3 comments

> I won't pretend to understand the rationale behind what is and isn't considered PC a lot of the time.

It's whatever opinion/theory the person speaking disagrees with.

The poster clearly said that so that they can stay on topic, not sure we need to derail the main conversation to air personal grievances.
The DNA tests just look at haplogroups and mtDNA lineages etc. to make _very_ broad generalizations about what population set some of your ancestors _may_ have belonged to.

It's more likely that at some point in the last 15,000 years someone in your lineage had a child with someone with some Siberian background way far back.

What if one of your ancestors cheated on their spouse? Isn't that possible?
There weren't a lot of Native Americans emigrating to the British Isles pre-1800, east India, or Zambia, but sure anything's possible.