Most accurate DNA test for ethnicity?

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Hey folks,

What is the most accurate type of DNA testing for finding ethnicity? Are they all autosomal? I sometimes hear that autosomal DNA tests aren't that accurate; but, then again, I've been using Ancestry DNA for the past couple of years and the ranges for my DNA vary quite a bit and is very generic (for example, I'm mixed with Korean, but they just have all of East Asia and part of central Asia lumped together), so it's not accurate by any means except for finding family members that also took the test.

Another question would be, is FamilyTreeDNA (their cheapest package) more accurate than Ancestry DNA?

Lastly, would FamilyTreeDNA's Y-DNA test be more accurate than autosomal (pardon me if Y-DNA doesn't show ethnic background to any degree -- all I know is that they do show where your paternal ancestors traveled)

Any other advice or tips are greatly appreciated! I love geneology and would love to learn more about my ancestry.

Regards,
Hyeokgeose

I recently read an article about how all the companies results vary so wildly because of their unique statistical modelling & how they make their comparisons that the results are basically useless. I think it'll take a LONG TIME for their to be a large enough databased to be somewhat accurate.

Here's the article:

https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-bot ... socialflow

I'm glad I read it because I was starting to think it might be neat to have mine analyzed sometime.. and it still might be, but, at this point you'd have to have it done by several different companies and even then it'd just be to see what their model says, not to Know with any real degree of certainty. Might be more worth doing (not the monetary expense, the quality of the results) in a few years or so.

_________________
No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

I have done several of these and the results have varied quite a lot. It's said the autosomal tests are good at distinguishing at a continental level ie European,Asian,African etc. They are not so good at distinguishing at a French- German level or a Korean-Vietnamese level.

"Ethnicity," like "race," is a real but inherently fuzzy concept -- it will always be impossible to make such designations "accurate" because the underlying phenomena are fuzzy and statistical. ("What is the most accurate measure of the edge of a cloud?" Answer: Clouds don't really have edges.) DNA tests for general ethnicity really only operate at a very broad level, based on a sample of your genes compared to a sample of genes from an "ethnicity" (which is fuzzy), etc. That said, the more genes you sample (from you and others) the clearer the fuzzy pattern will be.

On the other hand, Y-DNA and mt-DNA tests can be very precise, but they trace only a single line, paternal or maternal, and not "total" ancestry. I read about a fascinating case recently of a group of Y-DNA tests done on a "native English" population in England that turned up one clear "African" line within the fully "English" group (in an ethnic sense). Research suggested that that one line traced to a single African man who came on a ship in the 1600s (as a slave or sailor) and had melted into the local population -- and 400 years later that had long been forgotten.

Autosomal is better for matching with relatives than predicting ethnicity. I've not had much success with yDNa and mtDNA. I am the only E-Z16664* at yfull. With FTDNA Big Y I'm E-BY5219(should be E-BY5227) and have no matches on Big Y. My mtDNA is H67 . No zero distance matches at coding region level. Matches at distances of 2 and 3

HVR1, HVR2, AND CODING REGION MATCHES
GENETIC DISTANCE -2
Country Match Total Country Total Percentage Comments
Ireland 2 5845 < 0.1 %
Scotland 2 2843 0.1%
United Kingdom 1 2625 < 0.1 %
United States 1 6306 < 0.1 %
GENETIC DISTANCE -3
Country Match Total Country Total Percentage Comments
Ireland 1 5845 < 0.1 %

Thanks for the article, Goldfish.

As for the rest, that's interesting. It would be nice if I could find very distant relatives in various parts of the Earth, that would help give me some more idea.

I don't understand the point in them.

They are not all that accurate. It's not like what the police use in their DNA tests.

Basically, they look at various markers and try to identify what populations have those markers. Then if they find the marker in your DNA, they assume that you are a percentage of the populations identified as having those markers. Of course, there aren't that many pure populations out there today and so which ethnicity is represented by which marker is nothing but probability that may not be very accurate.

There have been reports of sending in samples from identical twins without identifying them as idential twins. The results can come back from reasonably close to very different.

I read a couple of months ago that at least one company was even intentionally including bogus information in the report knowing full well that it was a lie. If the report was correct, for some people with "white" names, especially from places seen as more probably racist, they would identify them as having some amount of "black" DNA as well.

In general, though, the DNA tests might be worthwhile if they had access to DNA taken from different people around the world over the last several thousand years and used that to build their models. They obviously don't have that so they are trying to construct it from samples taken today.

Treat the report as fiction. Look at it and say, "Oh. I'm part Polynesian", chuckle a minute or two, and then toss it in the trash and go find something worthwhile to do.

Ethnicity calculation is still not overly accurate except at an European vs Asian African vs European etc level. The real value is in cousin matching. It's an additional tool for adopted people trying to trace their birth family.