AfriGeneas World Research Forum
Many people spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours tracking their origins through historical records or verbal accounts. This is an expensive and time consuming method that may or may not be accurate. With the human genome finally sequenced and recent advances is DNA technology using Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) a new type of genetic test called BioGeographical Ancestry (BGA) can be generated by analyzing your DNA. In the human populations, there are some individuals of relatively pure BioGeographical Ancestry (BGA), such as sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria, Europeans from Northern Europe, East Asians from Northern China and Native Americans from isolated regions of Southern Mexico. In other places, such as the United States, there are recently (in evolutionary time) admixed (admixture is the blending of two or more races within individuals) peoples such as African Americans (a blend of African and European BGA) and Hispanics (a blend of Native American and European BGA). Of course there are more than just four continental population groups, and a large fraction of the world population is admixed to a greater or lesser degree. SNP technology can determine your precise ancestral proportions. For example, it might reveal that you are of 80% African and 20% Indo-European, or 95% African and 5% Indo-European ancestry (or some other mix/ratio, as the case may be). ...