The Kinds of Things You Can Learn About Your Family for $99

Here’s a rather amazing thing I recently learned about myself from 23 & Me: “You inherited a small amount of DNA from your Neanderthal ancestors. Out of the 7,462 variants we tested, we found 257 variants in your DNA that trace back to the Neanderthals.” 23 & Me further told me I have up to 2% of Neanderthal DNA in my genome.

I’ve also checked out many hundreds of my 4th-6th cousins. They have many hundreds of last names and, based upon the profile photos, they come in every size, shape and skin color. They reside in dozens of countries all over the world. I have numerous relatives born in Africa, Asia and Australia. Six of my relatives are Egyptian. 34 of my closest 5,000 relatives are at least 25% Ashkenazi Jews.

As I’m learning these things, I’m recalling the joyous presentation A.J. Jacobs made about his expansive family tree at this TED talk.

That a company can reliably tell me these things for $99 would have been unfathomable even a few decades ago–It wasn’t until 2003 that scientists could read the complete genetic blueprint for building a human being (the Human Genome Project). These findings and this modest cost to learn these things are stunning. So stunning that, as I found ever more about my family tree tonight, I even chuckled a little Neanderthal chuckle.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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    Erich Vieth

    I’m still reeling from all the new information I found out about my ancestors from 23 & Me (I also tested at Ancestry.com and learned many other things including a huge additional list of ancestors). I found myself surfing and found a kindred spirit, Tim Urban, who diagrammed the number of ancestors we each have if we only go back seven generations, to the early 1800’s. Simple math shows that we each had about 128 ancestors back the, most of them total strangers to each other. If they had not met and mated at precisely the right time, you would be here to read this. Here’s an excerpt:

    The top row is the 128-person group of your great5 grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents’ great-grandparents. The thing that I find surprising is how recently in time you had such a large number of ancestors. Estimating an average generation at 25-30 years, most of those people were your current age around 1800-1825. So the early 19th-century world contained 128 random strangers going about their lives, each of whose genes makes up 1/128th of who you are today.

    Here is Tim’s diagram to illustrate the geometric explosion of relatives looking back only 200 years.

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