New My Origins Results

[John McCoy]

Human populations today tend to be diverse rather than homogeneous. There is good reason to believe that much of Europe has a history of diversity rather than homogeneity as well. The statistical derivation of a "cluster" or "reference group" that is relatively genetically homogeneous is therefore, to some extent, an artifact of the methodology.

Cluster methodology, for example, automatically places the samples in relatively homogeneous groups, regardless of where they came from, and regardless of how much diversity was originally present in, say, "Scandinavia". It's up to the analyst to discern what degree of clustering is appropriate for the application and what the clusters finally selected actually represent. We can look at the methodology in many different ways, but the "reference groups" will always be proxies or substitutes for the real long-dead ancestral populations that we cannot sample.

[PaulHosse]

Disappointed Big Time!

In my case, the new MyOrigins results are wrong. Gone is my Greek ancestry (my paternal line is originally from Greece; settled in England in 1550) and my Ashkenazi ancestry (my maternal line was Belarus/Ukrainian Ashkenazi and Sephardic---oh and the Belarus ancestry is missing too). This is a bad as 23 & Me which has me as Native American and Yakut! MyOrigns does, however, have me as 7% Eastern European. I think that's part of their mistake.

[willy]

OK so I am not alone to find that new MyOrigins results are wrong I will say very wrong surely the people who made the algorithm is completely incompetent or the reference population is confused ? or the twice ?

In my case, the new MyOrigins results are wrong. Gone is my Greek ancestry (my paternal line is originally from Greece; settled in England in 1550) and my Ashkenazi ancestry (my maternal line was Belarus/Ukrainian Ashkenazi and Sephardic---oh and the Belarus ancestry is missing too). This is a bad as 23 & Me which has me as Native American and Yakut! MyOrigns does, however, have me as 7% Eastern European. I think that's part of their mistake.

[dave21286]

Did My Origins have another update recently? I, like just about everyone, got new results a few months ago. I decided to check the other day, and the results changed again! In two months, I went from 15% Scandinavian to basically zero. My Western Europe went from a small amount to about 20%. I'm now showing zero British Isles when it was at about 20%(Ancestry has me at 25%). Just about the only thing that all of the testing companies get right is my Italian classification. It seems to me that one of the problems for someone like me who is quite admixed is that we get an averaging effect. This is especially true for me on the GEDMATCH calculators, where my northern, central, eastern and southern European lineage comes out as Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, etc. The new My Origins is also showing me as 17% Middle Eastern (Asia Minor), which I understand is quite common for someone of Italian descent (mother's paper trail is 100% Italian, with strong Norman features). We have no record of any Middle Eastern heritage, so if it's there, it must be quite old. My gut tells me that Ancestry's classifications are probably the most accurate since they are working with larger sample sizes.

[Banquo]

My Origins needs to be fixed

Hopefully FTDNA can see this function needs to be fixed, as the current version is wrong. My mother and uncle are in the database as well, and these percentages make no sense in our small cluster. I note the recurring theme of thousands of testers now getting an "Iberian" result, where none existed before.

I possess the Scots Modal YDNA and come from a well documented line stretching several centuries. Even assuming NPE in a the non-YDNA lines of my autosomal heritage, it would still not compute to my British Isles background being truncated by more than half, my 1/3 Scandinavian heritage being all but wiped out and a heretofore non-existent Iberian heritage rising up to make 13% of my background.