Tuareg Relatives

For my birthday, Shari and I mailed some of our saliva to be tested. Not for rabies. DNA.

We got our results earlier this week. They were a bit of a let-down. It turns out we are from Africa and we are related to people all over Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. That's not exactly a mind-numbing revelation.

Tom's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

I was hoping for evidence that I was Magyar and connected to folk in central and eastern Asia. In my Magyar pride, I would claim not to be Indo-European. The Magyar language is unrelated to any Indo-European language. It turns out language has precious little to do with genes. My central Asian connection, at least for the last ten generations or so, is a mere 1.3%.

I have a south Asian connection in India. I can only speculate that a Gypsy slipped somewhere into the bloodline.

My mothers' line (mitochondrial DNA, hapgroup H10h) is most common among the Tuaregs in the south of Libya, then with folks in Galicia, Wales and Spain (presumably Celts?) before we get to 39% of Hungarians. Now Mum is from a rural area in the Great Plains of Hungary, an area that is pretty much homogeneous ethnic Hungarian (whatever that means). I would expect lots of connections with central Asians and Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, plus Turks who, like the Gypsy, slipped into the bloodline. The Turks occupied Hungary for several centuries, so they have a better claim to have mixed in their DNA than the poor Gypsy. But her mitochondrial DNA is prevalent in only about twenty percent of the folks in central Asia and Turkey.

By comparison, Shari's mothers' line is haplogroup H1bm. Lots of Tuaregs in southern Libya are in that group, about sixty-one percent of Tuaregs. The group is also prominent among the Basques (27%), Portuguese (25%), Cantabrians in northern Spain (24%), and Andalucians in southern Spain (19%). That's a major connection with the Iberian peninsula that may account for Shari's ability to tan in the sun. Her mothers' line is prominent among 14% of Volga-Ural-Finno-Ugric folks (compared to my own mothers' line that is shared with 22% of such folks). Go figure. We can each claim Finno-Ugric ancestry.

My fathers' line (Y-DNA, haplogroup E-V13) is most prevalent among Albanians (one-third), then Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. My Dad is turning over in his grave. His family hails from what was northern Hungary, now Slovakia, which historically is a mixture of peoples, languages and ethnicity. He prided himself on being Hungarian (turns out, only a 9% connection) with occasional Slovak (8%), German (only 4%), and Italian (5%) ancestry. The good news for some of Dad's anger arising from Hungarian history, his haplogroup has no connection with anyone in Britain.

Mum's, Dad's and Shari's Mum's lines have representatives in French Guiana in South America, but not Dutch Suriname or British Guyana. I wonder if taking DNA tests is more common in French Guiana than Dutch Suriname or British Guyana.

Shari had to explain to me that she doesn't have a fathers' line, something to do with X and Y chromosomes, and that each person takes only some of the genetic material available from the parents' pools. Therefore, there can be significant variations between siblings of the same parents. So my report is most interesting when it ascribes the origins of my personal genetic material, going back about ten generations, about three hundred years. That's where the Indian gypsy and a sliver of Caucasian show up, as well as — gasp — British. It seems that some 17.6% of my DNA is shared with people who lived in various parts of Britain over the last three centuries. Dad just turned in his grave again.

Shari's genetic material traced to its relatives
going back ten generations.

Shari's relatives would be the envy of an Australian immigrant schoolboy. They are virtually all in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For this son of Hungarian immigrants attending a Jesuit school crammed with English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys, Shari's pedigree matches that dominant culture ethnicity. She would blend right in. Just like "Rees" or even "James" blends in the Anglo world much better than "Palotas."

I wish I had saved some spittle from Mum and Dad to see how much those results would mirror mine. Even more interesting would be to compare DNA results from my niece and nephew born of my Hungarian brother and his Chinese wife. I wonder if that mothers' line has any connection with the Tuaregs, or the fellow in French Guiana who ordered a DNA test.

To cite a trite cliché, the world is getting smaller. What is remarkably odd in these DNA reports is the superimposition of genetic distribution onto a map showing today's political boundaries. It's like Mexican restaurants in Hungary, or the largest community of Japanese (in Brazil) outside of Japan. It's all mixed up. Ethnicity doesn't really correlate with much of anything political or national. We may have our languages, cultures, and political boundaries (and the Hair Product in Chief's wall), but the notion of ethnicity really has no meaning. The notion of nationalism is equally arbitrary. The concept of different modern human races is patently absurd. Folks, we all came out of Africa and adapted. That is the mind-numbing revelation. We are all related.