Broad To Fine Scale Population: Fill & Download for Free

Most of the English, particularly from their eastern and southeastern lands, are closer to the Dutch, because the Dutch are also, like the English, a mix of a more Northwestern European (broadly “Celtic-like”) component with a more Northern European (broadly “Nordic-like”) component. The latter had some impact on the genetic history of the people of Ireland, but much less so than in England and, even more strongly, in the Netherlands. Besides, the English and the Dutch seem to share a lot of Germanic influence that came from broadly the same populations, those that lived between the coast of Netherlands, North Germany and Jutland. Much of the Germanic contribution in Ireland seems to have arrived there with the Vikings, from Norse-speaking areas of the Scandinavian peninsula, and not from the continent.As you can see in the PCA graph above, the modern English are basically plotted between the Dutch and the Welsh, descendants of part of the ancient Brittonic people native to Britain, but they are much further apart from the Irish. Diachronically, you can see the English of today look basically like a mixture of the people of Iron Age England (when it was still Celtic) with the Early Middle Ages Anglo-Saxons, and could be described as Roman Era English people somewhat shifted toward the genetic profile of the Dutch.For more information on the genetic history of the English people:The fine scale genetic structure of the British populationIron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history.(PDF) Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons

Being Irish or British has very little to do with genetics nowadays as people from around the world have made these islands their home. Furthermore, there has always been such a large degree of engagement with the wider world from Ireland and Britain as to render an archetypal Irish gene or British gene meaningless.Nevertheless, patterns can be discerned within fairly stable ancestral populations. What they show is that both Irish and British have broadly the same genetic markers, with considerable degrees of similarity between Irish, West Scottish and Welsh. We all essentially have very strong Celtic and Viking markers, where as ancestral groups from other parts of the UK show stronger Anglo Saxon influences in their genetic makeup.More information can be found in this study: The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland

No, it simply means that the DNA testing company than ran the tests that analyzed your genetic makeup does not have a sufficiently large and specific database of French and German DNA samples, classified and distinguished on a regional basis, to use two sufficiently distinguishable reference populations to compare your DNA results to. There is no scientific “determination” that the French and the German must be lumped together. The company simply decided that, for their purposes, that was fine enough.It may also indicate, additionally, that the test done by the company didn’t have a resolution high enough to pick the fine-scale distinctions between the French and the German (as there is a lot of genetic similarity between Northern/Eastern French and Western/Southern Germans), so they prefer not to speculate much assigning part of your ancestry to either, instead lumping them together.German ancestry is admittedly a bit hard to set aside as a distinct reference popopulation in genetic analyses, because, being a sort of bridge between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, Germans of different parts of the country and family backgrounds often have varied genetic profiles that roughly range from French-like Western Germans to Danish-like Northern Germans and Slavic-shifted Eastern Germans.Ditto for the French, who have a pretty broad range (for European standards) of genetic variation from the Spaniard-like Southwest French to the German-like Northeast French. I actually find it a bit strange that named this reference population in their classification of DNA samples French-German, unless they are referring to a very specific subset of the French and of the Germans, mainly Northeastern French and Western Germany.In any case, genetically distinguishing one European population from another, especially in Northern Europe, is sometimes a hard task, because genetic heterogeneity between populations is quite low, and the modern borders do not necessarily represent any perceptible difference between people on one side of the border and the other.