About results of North African testers

[smaanan]

Hi,

Yesterday I received my Autosomal test results (Family Finder), and according to the results, my ethnic makeup is divided as follows:

North Africa: 82%
Jewish Diaspora (Sephardic): 10%
European: 7% (British Isles 4%, Southeast Europe 3%)
Trace results: <1%

However, I already did the same test few months ago with 23andMe, and it shows the following ethnic makeup:

Middle East & North Africa: 88.2% (North Africa 86.3%)
Europe: 10.8%
Unassigned: 0.7%
Subsaharan Africa: 0.2%
East Asia: <0.1%

I would like to know: why the results are different between the two tests?

Is it because both companies use different samples, and the ethnic groups are differently represented?

Could there be a bias towards one group (Jewish?) in detriment of other groups?

Which one is the more accurate?

By the way, I am Moroccan (North Africa) and not Jewish (Muslim).

Best regards,

Said

[khazaria]

All Sephardic Jews carry a small amount of North African Berber DNA. So do some people from southern areas of Italy. So Family Tree DNA found some common ancestry between you and them and accidentally categorized it on their side.

The "British" DNA affinity, if it's real, could come from distant ancestors from northwestern Europe who got caught up in the Barbary slave trade.

I remember from watching one or two YouTube videos of other Moroccan Muslims that you are not the only one to score a tiny amount of East Asian DNA. One of the videos was by a woman who tested with AncestryDNA if I remember right. And they also scored small amounts of Sub-Saharan African so that part is presumably real, too.

[kingjohn]

smannan
maybe it will be good for you to
upload your dna to my heritage site
if you see things common between test and in similar %
i would say they are real
the sefhardic is probably just shared snp between you and the sefhardic reference ftdna use tahts all
not real sefhardi ancestery , even though it can also be an option given that sefhardi jews from iberia migrated also to morocoo and not only to balkan and other parts of eurpe
kind regards
Adam

[smaanan]

All Sephardic Jews carry a small amount of North African Berber DNA. So do some people from southern areas of Italy. So Family Tree DNA found some common ancestry between you and them and accidentally categorized it on their side.

The "British" DNA affinity, if it's real, could come from distant ancestors from northwestern Europe who got caught up in the Barbary slave trade.

I remember from watching one or two YouTube videos of other Moroccan Muslims that you are not the only one to score a tiny amount of East Asian DNA. One of the videos was by a woman who tested with AncestryDNA if I remember right. And they also scored small amounts of Sub-Saharan African so that part is presumably real, too.

I've heard that 23&Me include the X-chromosome in their autosomal DNA test, and I'm not sure whether FTDNA do it as well, Could that be the reason for the difference in the results?

Many thanks,

[JamesBianco]

My origins show that I have 11% Sephardic ancestry yet oddly neither of my parents (who both tested with FTDNA) show any Jewish at all so I wouldn't read so much into the results, the algorithm used is certainly flawed. My 11% should be middle eastern as it was with the first release. I emailed FTDNA and never received a response.