My Grandmother LaFond always told us that she was descended from British orphans who had been sold to French Canadians. Her name had been Alberta Roy. I always found it interesting—and cute—that my grandfather, who passed when I was six and who in retrospect seems to have been something of a Hobbit, used to call her Roy, reminding her of her maiden name, indicating his relatively affluent French lineage.
My youngest son recently had one of these commercial genetic tests done, indicating that he inherited a relatively high proportion of Neanderthal genes among other things. He was skeptical of the test to begin with and chose one that confirms various attributes he could check.
Virtually all of his ancestry is English and Irish, with there being o distinction between the two according to this scheme. [I suppose all of that English master rape of Irish slaves muddied the genome quite a bit.] The fascinating finding is that my son has no trace of French ancestry—so Grandma was right, her and her husband were both English after all.
Another slave trace in his test is the finding that on his mother’s side, there was, in the 1700s a Jewish father. This makes good sense in that, according to the genealogy that his mother’s uncle did, their family is descended from Cornish slaves who escaped from their slave masters in New York, where the slave trade was dominated by Dutch Jews—no slave name, but some slave rape, on that side.
It seems that my Irish slave ancestors shipped to Maryland in the 1630s were not the only pale chattel in my family heritage.
To me though, the most important thing is that some of our Neanderthal ancestors raped some modern human bitches while their homeland was being overrun.
The Lies That Bind Us
The Foundational Falsehoods of the American Dream
James, I am a little bit leery of having one of those genetic tests done. It seems to me that that just puts more information about an individual out there in the information matrix, and allows TPTB to build a clearer profile of you. IMHO this is a "data-mining" operation just like Facebook.
Call me crazy...
I personally think that the system will eventually target all carriers of Neanderthal genes for sterilization.
I don't know if this study has any validity, but I thought you might like it.
psychologytoday.com/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/201710/your-neanderthal-quotient-and-your-personality
Thank you, Bart.
All peoples bar sub-Saharian Africans have Neanderthal genes. I think the culling might be along ideological/political lines. I've had a 23andme test done, but Shep's caution is well-founded. The family ties between 23andme and Google are much too close for comfort.