Tag Archive for 'ashkenazi'

I agreed to make my 23andMe genotyping results publicly available as part of GNZ without a moment’s hesitation. This is in part because I knew the results were actually a bit dull (in a good way, I suppose) – I’m not at vastly increased or decreased risk for any diseases (based on research so far), and I was unsurprised to find out that I have blue eyes. I was also unsurprised that 23andMe identified me as most likely of north European ancestry.

Several hours after we released our data, however, I was pointed to a post where Dienekes Pontikos wrote about the results of running all our data through his ancestry prediction program. While just about everyone was quite confidently predicted to be almost entirely of northwestern European descent, this analysis gave me a point estimate of 20% Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Within hours, several people had asked me about this, and I had no real response. So I decided to take a look at the data myself; some basic analyses are below.
Continue reading ‘Am I partly Jewish? Testing ancestry hypotheses with 23andMe data’