Where are you from?

No, not you.

Your ancestors.

Where were they from?

Were they from here?

Questions like these, and more, lead people from a variety of backgrounds and economic classes to search out answers to the question of who they are. There is an inexplicable tie to our ancestors who existed before us that has permeated the ages, going back to the Middle Paleolithic era (Culotta, 2009). At the same time, with one foot in the past, we take a step forward into the future into new technology the promises it offers: DNA testing can reveal your ethnicity down to 1%. It’s scientific, so it has to be true…

… but what if it wasn’t?

The first time DNA was identified was back in 1878 by Albrecht Kossel, though it was called a “nuclein” instead (Jones, 1953). It wasn’t until 1953 that the double-helix structure of DNA was identified (Crick & Watson, 1953). In 1984, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys discovered the process of DNA Fingerprinting – a way to identify individuals and by extension, their relatives, through DNA analysis (Jeffreys, 2013). There are some children born today, in 2025, whose parents’ births predate that of the discovery of DNA Fingerprinting, for context of how recent that is in the grand scheme of things.

The more recent a technology is, the more likely it is that it will need fine-tuning. Not even 50 years after the discovery of DNA Fingerprinting, people are rushing to discover if they can have their DNA tested to discover their ethnic makeup. These ethnicity estimates work by looking at the DNA of gathered groups of individuals who have ancestors that all lived in specific locations, and then comparing an outside person’s DNA to the similarities of those samples. It’s an imprecise science, a probability rather than a guarantee; despite this, many companies do not call what you receive from “ethnicity estimates.” In fact, they call their algorithms “ancestry calculators” or the process “ancestry analysis.” Slowly companies – including GEDMatch – are walking away from these phrasings towards the aforementioned “ethnicity estimates” or “ancestry estimates.”

At the time of writing this, the accuracy of these ethnicity estimates has not been quantified. There are scientific sources that exist explaining how to make the tests more accurate, but the inaccuracies are not tabulated for readers to peruse.

References

Crick, F. H. C. & Watson, J. D. (1953). Molecular structure of nucleic acids. NATURE.

Culotta, E. (2009). Origins. On the origin of religion. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326(5954), 784–787. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.326_784

Genomelink. (n.d.). Unlock your ancestry: dive into DNA insights with Genomelink. Retrieved July 13, 2025. https://genomelink.io/product/ancestry

Harrington, C. (2020, October 2). Your ‘ethnicity estimate’ doesn’t mean what you think it does. Wired. Retrieved July 13, 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/your-ethnicity-estimate-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-does/

Jeffreys, A. J. (2013). The man behind the DNA fingerprints: an interview with Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys. Investigative genetics, 4(1), 21. https://doi.org/10.1186/2041-2223-4-21

Jones, M. E. (1953). Albrecht Kossel, a biographical sketch. The Yale journal of biology and medicine, 26(1), 80–97.

Lovell, D. (2021, April 15). Biology professor breaks down science behind ancestry, heritage tests. Syracuse University. Retrieved June 29, 2025.

Rutherford, A. (2018, October 15). How accurate are online DNA tests? Scientific American. Retrieved June 29, 2025. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-online-dna-tests/