Read reviews of science articles, new research and news reports on ancestry testing, ancient DNA and popular genetics
Postings from the Edge
By Donald N. Yates
They called her Mother Qualla—a stately, bluish-gray skinned schoolteacher in New York with angular features, thin lips and quick, intelligent eyes. Brian Wilkes and I drove her to her motel room at a meeting of the Southwestern Cherokee Confederacy in Albany, Georgia.
The most important human skeleton found in North America has finally been given a reprieve from legal obstacles to be studied and the resulting information published. In an article by Douglas Preston in Smithsonian Magazine titled “The Kennewick Man Finally Freed to Share His Secrets,” the amazing story of the 9,000 year-old skeleton—and the enormous lengths to which the government and tribal protesters went to block it—is told for the first time.
In the days before standardization of railway gauges, passengers were sometimes obliged to get out of the railcar when the tracks reached a border and climb aboard a waiting train on the next set of rails, which were broader or narrower in design.
Rare Chinese Allele Found Among Southwestern U.S. Hispanics and North Mexican Indians
Like about 5 percent of North Americans, Francesca Serrano was adopted and never knew her birth parents. Wishing to find out her ancestry, she took ourDNA Fingerprint Plus, an autosomal test based on an analysis of STR frequencies that can suggest overall ancestry matches to world populations. The caseworker who prepared her report was amazed at all the apparent Chinese ancestry mixed with Hispanic and Native American.
By and large, the genetics literature on American Indians has been confined to small, scattered samples gleaned from modern groups. This morass of information is vast, growing, and inconclusive.
Attempting to present the “peopling of the Americas” from such a reductive approach is like playing a game of Solitaire with important cards missing.
Did the Chinese Settle in Northern Mexico and the American Southwest?
We had just finished a meal of delicious fish tacos at what was to become our favorite Mexican restaurant on the Southside of Phoenix. The cook and owner was a lady from Sinaloa. She asked what I did for a living, and when I told her DNA testing, she immediately said, “I imagine our DNA in Mexico is a combination of Spanish, Indian and Chinese, right?”
We often are asked, “How does your ancestry analysis work,” and “What makes it different from other methods?” Principal Investigator Donald Yates was recently interviewed along these lines and here are his answers.
What Do Patrick Henry and Johnny Depp Have to Do With Each Other?
They are both mentioned in a new genealogy book….
Not everything you were told in school about the Pilgrims, George Washington and the other brave, white Christian founding fathers of America is true. In fact, according to Elizabeth Hirschman Caldwell and Donald N. Yates’ new book, some of the familiar figures were not even Christian. Appearing in 2012 after many years in development, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America ($45.00) offers a fresh perspective on the early American experience, with chapters and emigrant lists on all the original colonies, from Virginia to Georgia.
It’s been a year and a half since DNA Consultants introduced Rare Genes from History. We republish here the original press release from October 2012 as a means of familiarizing new and old customers with this unique autosomal marker test, exclusive to our company. Purchase now for only $149 ($134.10 with your customer discount).
From Teresa Yates’ work-in-progress, here is a post from eight years ago that still strikes a timely note. Yates’ new book is titled DNA and You and reprises fifteen years of the blogosphere from the early, heroic days of DNA testing. It is expected to appear this summer.
