cowboypack02 said:
I found this article about genetic testing in general as well as how you get different variances between companies
https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-heritage-and-probab-1820932637
Its worth the read
Excellent article! Some important points from the article are listed below.
- Sometimes your heritage doesn't have anything at all to do with your genetics
- It's worth mentioning that genetics is also probabilistic: just because you have the gene, doesn't mean you have the trait.
- Each testing company is looking at different alleles from different parts of the genome and using different algorithms to crunch that data.
- Where your ancestors are from depends on what period in time you're talking about.
- The estimates of genetic ethnicity are variable and depend on the method applied, the reference panel used, and the other customer samples included during estimation."
- "They're not telling you where your DNA comes from in the past," he told me, "They're telling you where on Earth your DNA is from today."
- Harvard geneticist Robert Green explained there isn't an agreed-upon approach to pick the right number of markers and combine them mathematically. Everyone is sort of just making it up as they go along."
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RWW26, based on that article, I think the most likely reason for the test excluding your Native American heritage is the comparative data set does not include enough people similar to you to yield accurate results. At least that is my interpretation of the bullet I bolded. It appears there isn't some objective truth these tests reveal right now. They are like an artificial intelligence algorithm that is continually adapting to new data and refining results to improve accuracy. Perhaps with a large enough data set, the results will be more accurate, but like the author's final paragraph indicates genetics and heritage don't always agree.
Regardless, this is an interesting topic and I'm glad you posted the question on this board.