This book is fascinating. ... and it helps to show that everyone is probably descended from Alexander the Great, AND Genghis Khan AND some Viking warrior, AND ...
The maths is simple: You have two parents. They each had two parents, who in turn each had two parents. Go back 20 generations. (ie. calculate 2 to power of twenty) It's a million of course. But that is only going back 400 years. If those parents only had 3 children who survived beyond childhood, and each child did likewise, then there are 3,486,784,401 people alive today whose ancestry traces back to them. And since people in those days had families far larger than just 3 survivors, the figure is phenomally large - and they can all lay claim to the same ancestor. That's just one aspect of this book.

Mostly Celt 45% Scottish (surprise) 35% Irish (expected but not in that quantity) 16% Welsh and 4% from the UK midlands area. Apparently I have some previously unrecorded rare DNA not sure what that's about and my earliest ancestor on record is from Iran...work that out lol

I'm all super-white European ancestry, no surprises there. It is kinda neat to see who my ancestors were and the paths they traveled up to now. I can see my ancestors who came to the USA on the Mayflower... And I can see hundreds of generations in Europe before that. But dammit I wish I had some relatives with melanin.....I have to use soooooo much sunscreen!!! LOL

Everyone in my family assumed we were part Native American. Turns out no. 35% Brit, 34% Irish-Scot-Welsh 12% Greek or Italian 8% Scandinavian and the rest Eastern Europe.

I had 3 surprises in mine. A relative a couple hundred years back was 100% west african, I'm 3% swedish, and 1% Ashkenazi Jew. The rest of the report was pretty much spot on with my own family tree research.

What's really interesting is the difference between ancestry and 23andme. I saw some pretty wild shifts in percentage of one group compared to another. I get they are estimates, but I wonder which is more accurate.

My mother, her sister in law and the sister in laws son all did the DNA thing. Seems Grandma was sleeping around.

Cool!

I did the genome project at national geographic . My tribe left the rift valley ,went across the caucuses into the steppes and turned back at siberia. then went to latvia and down to the alps . At that point it split I n 3 one strain went to brittany , one to basque region and my fathers to ireland . That ancestry whatever totally ignores the origins of your tribe just to avoid the religious turkeys

My results showed me to be 100% Northern European. That shocked me because it doesn't match what research my relatives have done, though I know we emigrated from Scotland in 1715.

Also helpful was the revelation that some of my health issues were based on genetic variations that could be helped with subtle shifts in my supplements and diet.

As you can see the service I used did not split out Europeans. All 4 of my grandparents came from Sicily, my maternal grandmother had green eyes and blond hair. So there is mostly southern European in me but a little northern European.

There is mine. The only surprise was the 6% indigenous American.

Thinking of doing it. Which company is best?

My DNA shows remote ancestors from the Pima or Aztec Indians , from the Bantu tribe of Africa (both about 500 years ago), and 3.0 percent Neanderthal.

I’d really like to do this, but I don’t want my genes in a database somewhere. Maybe when it’s possible to do the lab work yourself at home.

Waste of money for me, nothing I didn't know already, nothing new.

Yeah, no.

[nbcnews.com]