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You have two kinds of DNA, Cellular DNA which is 50% maternal and paternal thus is being constantly mixed through the generations. The second type is MITOCHONDRIAL DNA. The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells converting ADP to ATP which provides the energy to carryout all cellular reactions. The mitochondria come ONLY from the maternal side and thus are much easier to track and trace through out time.Could this have something to do with why some cultures trace their names and lineage through the mother not the father?
My younger daughter got 23&me for her birthday (she asked for it) and sent the data to, among other places, U Chicago, which has has a program investigating human migration.
Insofar as we can tell by genealogy, my father's ancestry is English (we've got data going back to the 16th Century; reliable data for non-noble families is sparse before that, especially with things like the various English civil wars of that era) and my mother's is northern Italian. My wife's is southern Italian.
Somewhere, my daughter's DNA shows ancestry that includes Ashkenazi Jewish and the Levant.
My opinion?
Do remember that there's not a part of Europe that hasn't been invaded. Invading soldiers tend to include some portion of rapists and occupied populations include some portion of women, especially poor women, who face the choice between starving and sleeping with the enemy. Slave-holding cultures, which included all of them, would also tend to give female slaves little sexual choice. Most slave-holding societies had mechanisms for manumission (manumission was actually forbidden in some polities including, if I recall, parts of the ante-bellum US South), and children with more ancestry of the slave-holders may have been more likely to be freed (one of the circumstantial items surrounding Sally Hemings is that her children were the only slaves every freed by Jefferson, tending to support the position that Jefferson was the father).
In other words, anybody who claims to be pure European anything is either uninformed or lying.
Could this have something to do with why some cultures trace their names and lineage through the mother not the father?
Interesting. I've wondered while watching these kinds of ads on TV how you can be an odd percent of something when you have 2 parents, 2GPs, 2GGPs,etc. Every ad is like that
So quite simply Ancestry is messy. Genetics is messy, but powerful. People are horny. Life is complex.