Can one trace one's ethnicity via dna testing?

Question

I.E. can dna testing identify one's true race like to just one generation up and not way back to the birth of the indigenous race?

Answer 1

Two answers.

First, there is no genetic base for ethnicity. Ethnicity is a social constructed notion which includes you parentage, your language, your lifestyle, your clothing, your music, etc. The history of the blackness in this country is very clear on this. There was considerable mingling of white slave-owners and african slaves during the period of slavery. Whether you were white or black simply came down to which house you were born into, although dark skin-color (a single gene!) made it hard to pass as a white. You could be 90% european parantage and as white as eminem, but if you were born in a black house, grew up going to a black-church, you were high-yaller black, and not white. The same is true today. What you choose to check off as your ethnicity is a matter of your social background, not whom your grandparents were.

Now, the second part of the question is can you trace your ancestry using DNA testing, and the answer is yes. There is a very detailed HapMap (it is published and searchable on the web) of the human species so we know that certain genetic varients came from different parts of the world. This map was developed from DNA sequencing of people with documented ancestries and status as indigenous inhabitants of various parts of the world. You can thus find out if you have ancestros from Mongolia, or Scandinavia, or South Africa by getting a DNA test. But these aren't indigineous races, there was only human race that evolved, and we have simply diverged slightly over the millenia, acquring new adaptations as different groups of humans settled in parts of the world with different environmental conditions.

Answer 2

I don't know what you mean by "true race", but in some circumstances you can make a good guess at ethnicity from a DNA sample, but you have to know what you're looking for; the genome is a large haystack.

Different ethnicities can be considered different genetic populations on the time scale required, and will certainly have different inherited markers in their DNA. For example: there are a panel of three muations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (which lead to increased risk of breast cancer) that are found only in the Ashkenazi population. There are other such mutations in Dutch, Icelandic and Swedish populations. If you tested DNA and looked for these mutations, you could distinguish, with fairly high probablility, the ethnicity of the source.

Of course, with all this in mind, you'd have to know what you're looking for, and I'm not aware of any databases that track such markers for a wide range of populations. Furthermore the ethics and usefulness of such research is questionable.

On the other hand, there is one research project aimed at sequencing the DNA of as many individuals from as many differnt populations in the world as possible. Their goal is to verify current models of the movement of human populations out of Africa.

Answer 3

Yes

Answer 4

yes i believe so