Time to sound stupid but...
I did a DNA test and found out that I was wrong, and that my ancestry is not actually native to the region but somewhere completely different, much further north along what is now the Black sea. BUT I still have an identical appearance to my fellow "ethnic peoples", because we've all been autosomally mixed. So essentially, you're correct. I KNEW it was stupid and false, and that scientific data just proved what I thought but in a different fashion. Actually, it was nothing like what I thought, but something even better.
My confusion was: Haplogroup is very very distant origins, Autosomal DNA is recent, which affects appearance. For example, Spain and the descendants of Tocharian peoples both have R as their primary haplogroup, and even Turkmenistan, but they all have different appearances. This is because the haplogroup is buried deep under hundreds of years of isolation in a specific region. In the Middle East, we see a vast difference between peoples of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. 3 countries which border each other and share a common language, yet all have a different appearance because the region is so old. In younger places however this is different, and that's probably why we have "race" in so many younger countries. Not sure, just throwing a few random ideas around.
18 Jun 2017, 5:37 am
