Making sense of new Middle East on Population Finder vs. NA

[bkilpatrick]

Just discovered my Population Finder results have been updated. Now I'm confused.

My original results were straightforward, if a little dull :-)
The ever-popular 100% European, with a "below the map" note of Orcadian.

Then, I sent my raw data to Dr. McDonald, who found a small but significant
.3 % Native American, which he explained can also reflect Sammi-rich Finnish.

Now, my PF results have been revised to:

95.38% European
4.62 % Middle East: Palestinian, Adygei, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Iranian, Jewish, Mozabite (error 1.74%)


What conclusions do I reach from this, beyond the likelihood that there seems to be "a little something else" that slipped in to my Scottish and Slovenian families!

All along, I'd hoped to find some possible Jewish heritage. Maybe this is it. (And not that Finnish non-paternal event I'd been speculating about.)

[dwight]

Thanks for the heads up. Mine too have been revised.

I would think that Middle Eastern would certainly cover your looked-for Jewish component.

In mine, Mozabite has been added to the mix of my "Middle Eastern" component, which resulted in the Middle Eastern map being expanded to cover all of North Africa.

Fascinating. I still know of no relatives or branches having anything to do with that part of the world (Azerbaijan to Morocco - sorry, nothing in my history here.) The Middle East % was dropped from 7.something to 6.something.

Just discovered my Population Finder results have been updated. Now I'm confused.

My original results were straightforward, if a little dull :-)
The ever-popular 100% European, with a "below the map" note of Orcadian.

Then, I sent my raw data to Dr. McDonald, who found a small but significant
.3 % Native American, which he explained can also reflect Sammi-rich Finnish.

Now, my PF results have been revised to:

95.38% European
4.62 % Middle East: Palestinian, Adygei, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Iranian, Jewish, Mozabite (error 1.74%)


What conclusions do I reach from this, beyond the likelihood that there seems to be "a little something else" that slipped in to my Scottish and Slovenian families!

All along, I'd hoped to find some possible Jewish heritage. Maybe this is it. (And not that Finnish non-paternal event I'd been speculating about.)

[Red Rover]

It could just mean you have ancestry in an unrepresented population that is towards that part of the world.

[dwight]

I'm not sure who your reply was directed to. In bkilpatrick's case, it's certainly possible that PF picked up some Jewish/ME background.

In my case, a reasonably well documented family tree shows nothing south of the Netherlands nor east of Denmark on the Eurasian landmass. Y-DNA testing points to northeastern Europe, mtDNA to central Africa, and FamilyFinder results have picked up some cousins scattered about a broader area but these must all be pretty-to-very,very distant and I can't fathom how they would show up in enough intensity to score a 6+% "Middle Eastern".

Doug McDonald's test found this, in my case:

"Dwight: you test 100% European, with a wide variety of pairs
of populations matching. The best take is the "spot on the map"
which is right on the coast of Holland. The chromosomes are also
all-Euro."

I find the PF results still mystifying.

It could just mean you have ancestry in an unrepresented population that is towards that part of the world.

[Red Rover]

Oh sorry I was referring to bkilpatrick's results.

His mid east could just be his Slovenian ancestry showing up and PF doesn't have any samples from that area so it defaults to the nearest reference group: Mid East.

But of course it could also be Jewish. If he does have Ashkenazi ancestry, even if from a long time ago, he should have some pop up in his distant relative matches. Due to how they always married within the group a lot of little segments get passed onward and seem to persist for a long time even after someone converts out of the community.

I would use Family Finder results in order to determine if actual Jewish ancestry exists rather than PF.

[DelawareNative]

There seems to be several of us whose results show only 2 populations Orcadian + Middle East.

My new PF results are:

• Europe (Western European) Orcadian 89.87% - 3.29%
• Middle East Palestinian, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Jewish 10.13% - 3.29%

[Yaffa]

Im back to having ME % again. They now lowered my AI % and knocked off Pima as one of my Indian matches and gave me south American tribes. Sorry FTDNA but my family although not Pima lived closer to the Pima than any other tribe you got me listed as. I think you need to go back to the drawing board on this test.

[MoberlyDrake]

Mine have been updated too. It was 100% French before with a minuscule margin of error.

Now it's 86.42% French, Orcadian, Spanish and 13.58% Tuscan, Finnish, Romanian, Russian.

But look at the margin of error now!!! 12.95% It looks to me like they are trying to make more people happy at the expense of accuracy. And what kind of population is Tuscan, Finnish, Romanian, Russian? That sounds like quite a mixture of populations!

Given that "French" covered France, Germany, the Benelux area, etc., they were pretty close before, only missing the British Isles component in my ancestry. However, I have recently discovered that I have a little bit of Swiss from some Swiss ancestors who moved into the Bas-Rhin area of France around 1700.

Carol Anne

[banshee]

Count me in amongst the suddenly revised PF club:

I was originally
Europe (Western European: French, Orcadian) 84.08% +/- 11.89%
Europe (Romanian, Tuscan) 15.92% +/- 11.89%

And FTDNA says I am now:

Europe (Western European) Orcadian 91.13% +/-2.4%
Middle East Palestinian, Adygei, Bedouin, Bedouin South, Druze, Iranian, Jewish 8.87% +/- 2.4%


------

[juliemusial]

How far back in time does the population finder go? I too am confused but thrilled to discover Middle Eastern heritage yet I really cannot reconcile this data within five or six generations.

[CAM]

Pf

My uncles PF has also changed to
Continent (Subcontinent) Population Percentage Margin of Error
Europe (Western European) French, Orcadian 92.99%

[CAM]

Pf

Continent (Subcontinent) Population Percentage Margin of Error
Europe (Western European) French, Orcadian 92.99%

[Daniel72]

Hi there.
Count me in as one of those who have now:
92% Orcadian and 8% Middle Eastern/Jewish etc

My FF matches dont help me anyhting, because they are ALL US-Americans, but however 99% of them beeing almost completely from Northwest-European stock.

I have an 23andMe account too.
There I match mostly Germans, then Brits and then Norwegians. There is however one 8cM long block with a Turk (all 4 Grandparents Turks with this guy), the only match that, at least to me, looks "far off".

The 23andMe anchestry finder does not find any blocks that are typical related to Jewish anchestry.

Dienekes "Celto-Germans versus Balto-Slavs" experiment matched me with "Celto-Germans".

And experiment that excluded Hungarians put me in a Scandinavian-German box.

And an experiment that did include hungarians put me to those 60% of the German peorject members that clustered with the Hungarians rather than the 20% that clustered with Brits and Scandinavians or the 20% that clustered with the French.

Davidskis "supervised" experiment only showed one thing that is totaly unusual for any known anchestry of mine:
A Uralic propability that surpasses anything in Germany, Czechia (surname connection), Poland (surname connection and Y-DNA) or Lithuania.
More typical for fullblooded Swedes or Ukrainians. Wich I am not and dont have any known anchestors from these parts.

[bkilpatrick]

Oh sorry I was referring to bkilpatrick's results.

His mid east could just be his Slovenian ancestry showing up and PF doesn't have any samples from that area so it defaults to the nearest reference group: Mid East.

But of course it could also be Jewish. If he does have Ashkenazi ancestry, even if from a long time ago, he should have some pop up in his distant relative matches. Due to how they always married within the group a lot of little segments get passed onward and seem to persist for a long time even after someone converts out of the community.

I would use Family Finder results in order to determine if actual Jewish ancestry exists rather than PF.

Well, you are certainly right that there is no Slovenian reference group!

However, I don't think the 4 % Middle East figure could simply be a "best match" for Slovenian. If that were the case, the ME percent would have to be larger, since my ancestry is half Slovenian (my mother's immigrant family, paper trail back to all 4 g-grandparents so far.)

Am I wrong to think this?

Also, Slovenia (with a small, very homogeneous Slavic population) is pretty solidly European. I'd speculated that this might show up as Southeast European on my PF results, but apparently it fits better into Western Europe. (Funny, that's how Slovenians have often preferred to identify: more like Austrians than their Balkan neighbors to the south and east!)

So, I'm convinced that this is something else. From reading the FAQ's, it seemed to fit with the example of a single g-g-grandparent with ancestry from a continental group that is significantly different from all the others, who are all from another group. (See FAQ ID 1205, #30 under Population Finder.) They present a scenario of someone with 6 % African ancestry they can't explain, since they are only aware of European ancestry.

http://www.familytreedna.com/faq/ans...?faqid=22#1208

Yes, very true about looking to FF for matches to confirm Jewish ancestry. I corresponded with Bennett Greenspan about this after I got my mtDNA results. He said that since the FTDNA database includes so many people with Jewish ancestry, if you don't come up with any matches it makes it highly unlikely that have any identifiable/traceable Jewish heritage.

Thanks for you thoughts.

Blair

PS I'm a "she" :-)

[Daniel72]

@bkilpatrick:

In the Dodecad Project of Dienekes, there are 2 full blooded Slovenians.

In the experiments so far these clustered like this:

Celto-Germans versus Balto-Slavs: The 2 Slovenians beeing: "Celto-Germans"

In that, 100% of the British, Scandinavian and German samples went to "Celto-German" cluster.
Also, 25% of the Poles and all the Slovenians.

While 100% of the Lithuanian, Belorussian and Russian samples aswell as 75% of the Polish samples went to the "Balto_Slavic" cluster.

In another experiment, the 2 Slovenians clustered with Norwegians, Swedes and Germans into one cluster. While Poles clustered with Lithuanians, Belarussians and Russians.
Serbs and Croats clustered with Romanians and Bulgarians.

In yet another experiment, the 2 Slovenians clustered with 60% of the Germans, 50% of the Austrians and almost all Hungarians. While again, Serbs and Croats went to a seperate "Balkan Peninsularian" cluster.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact, that Slovenia was part of the "Holy Empire": http://academic.udayton.edu/williams...ederick_II.jpg

Not only that, it was also part of the core part of that empire, the "Regnum Theutonicorum" = "Kingdom of the Germans"
http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/o...ISH_09_209.gif


The southern part was called "Regnum Italicum" (Kingdom of Italy)