Test Request Form Ancestry Chart: Fill & Download for Free

The text of this question has changed significantly over the past few months. Originally, the question focused on ancestry, but has been expanded to include reaching out to DNA relatives.If you're using DNA to find either close or distant relatives and compare paper records of ancestry, any of the companies will do an excellent job of this, and this has become a dominant way to fact check biological descent and to find out biological descent in the absence of other records, such as happens with adoption.That said, if you're using DNA testing to determine your ancestry, in terms of which countries your ancestors immigrated from, or to determine ethnicity, the answers are much less reliable. In short, for this, I recommend none of them.image: screen capture of 23andMe - DNA Genetic Testing & Analysis page. Green cone=meNo matter which of the companies you give your sample to, from the very best to the very worst you will see a picture like the one above, typically generated using some form of PCA. This is a process by which millions of dimensions (such as found in variations of the genetic composition of individuals) can be broken down and transformed such that the first few dimensions contain most of the variation in individual character. This doesn't "reduce" the number of dimensions, per se, just reorders them in a way that maximizes distance on a graph of one or two dimensions.So my first critique of why you shouldn't bother with genetic analysis is that there's not a lot it will tell you that you don't know from looking in the mirror: white people top left, asians top right, africans bottom left. Literally, there's no way I can plot that chart without it having some racist connotation, because of one of the flaws of these services: if you try to be everything to everybody...image: screen capture of Genetic Ethnicity Details at AncestryDNAAt best, each of the sites is trying to make an inferral about where specific pieces of your DNA come from some earlier point in time. Let's talk about how I have 36% Scandinavian and 2% Finnish DNA.My father's father was first generation American, born in Ruthenian Austria. 27% Eastern Europe explained. My mother's mother was born here, but her mother was 1st generation good Horan from Tralee, Ireland. Grandma's father was from Walldorf, Germany. My mom's dad's family descend from a well documented German family line, the Feistels, who married into Civil War era Porters from NY/Ohio, who were probably SAR/DAR, and then to the Zehs, German farmers from Long Island. So a good %age, say 37%, should be Western Europe or British Isles, and another dose, 12%, Ireland. My father's mother was born here, but her parents were fairly German, Lohrmann/Hemerlich. another 25% or so Western Europe.image: screen capture of Family Tree DNA - My OriginsOK. So if you look at my distant (presumed IBD) relatives, and assume 75% western Europe and British isles, 25% Eastern Europe, the picture above is a bit more... truthy. My scandinavian descent is probably coming from common Celtic origins, and my membership in J2b1a mitochondrial haplogroup probably dates in some distant way from the North, since I have a mutation that is associated with warmer body temperatures. As you can see below, my maternal line contains five additional mutations beyond J2b1a unique to me (and probably also mom)image from PostWhich brings me to a second important point: what are you looking to get out of genetic genealogy? In the chart above, through full mitochondrial sequencing, I can trace my lineage back to Clan Jasmine of Eve, of the modern mythology from Bryan Sykes. Unlike the ancestral analysis in the previous three graphs, mitochondrial sequence is short enough that each mutation can be called out and labeled individually and is guaranteed* (some limitations apply, check store for details) to come from your maternal line. It's absolutely true, and absolutely meaningless, because each step backward is perhaps thousands of years. Yes, we all descended from a line of women who all descended from a single woman's mitochondria. We don't know what she looked like, or if she was more ape than man.My great-great-great grandmother's name was Johanna, and so in deference to J, let's call that the Johanna line. Services like Family Tree DNA and other "first generation" providers used forensic style markers: Y-STR and mt-DNA HVR SNPs. They only used sex-determining DNA, not autosomal DNA, and not X-chromosomes. These companies, and the oversized personalities that promoted them, made a lot of blanket, simplistic statements, like who were Kohens, or who were Nialls, or Khans. For many, it was like past life regression- with a soupçon of science thrown in. Most companies who provide results call out Jasmine (NB: not Johanna), dot dot dot, a bunch of tenth cousins and you.Having had my sequenced haplogroup "Johanna" published and publicly available for about 5 years now, I am utterly bowled over at the resulting... silence. I've managed to connect to about 5 people who I can say with any scientific certainty are distant relatives I didn't know before DNA testing. None who give me any insights into the gaps in my family tree, and the only one who might confirm my paper trail genealogy hasn't returned my match request on 23andme. Am I a special case? If you're a Kohen, or a Jefferson, or (disproven in 2007) a Tsar's daughter, there's probably some merit in one form of testing, either first-generation STR/SNP or second gen gene-chip tests like those I have listed above. But most people will just get a chinese-fortune level of truth, and beware any "reading" that says you're descended from Nefertiri; it's probably more like her 4th cousin's daughter's roommate, good old third spear-catcher from the left. I'm not scoffing at the desire to find family, particularly if adopted: I'm just saying, these things are always "be careful what you wish for". Humans are, if anything, non-monogamous.Which brings me to what you might want to try if you've got some serious scratch (or exhibitionist streak) and want to try for full genome sequencing. It's not going to tell you much more than the gene chip, but if you're seriously investigating the whos and wheres of certain genetic traits, you can certainly do a lot worse than the free full genome sequencing of the Personal Genome Project. I've just gotten my results back and they represent calls on 96% of the currently "callable" sequence (89.4% of all my human DNA, since even today 10% of the genome is still "dark matter", mostly long repeats and stutters). Ping me again in a couple years when I finish looking through the 1 1/2 gigabyte file that shows all the data.Which is my third and final point: ancestry research has always been a mix of part legend, part half-truth (pardon the Yogi Berraism), part truth-you-allow-yourself-to-hear. The individual companies (as well as I) can bloviate at length about the level of scientific accuracy, the "coverage", the meaning of any one snp, but unless we have lots more ancient preserved DNA sequenced, there's little hope to uncovering real hard facts about the descent of man. And, unless you're one of the lucky people to have a "trailblazer" loon like myself in your family, you're going to see a lot of data, very little of it meaningful or relevant.Take, for example, my Ashkenazi wife. Her family tree happens to be a mobius strip, as does many Ashkenazim, because (not so) many generations ago, pairs of cousins intermarried. As a result, her genotyping looks far more recent than it actually is, since it is subject to less mixture with non- or very distant- cousins. She has huge loops that match with millions of people alive today, whereas the likelihood that you will find direct descendants within 7 generations of me is very slim. Most of my matches exceed 9 generations, and only the Feistel line, most in Germany, most(all?) of whom have not been genotyped, has any trace of documentation back to the heady days of the 18th century. If you ask Grandma, she'll tell you it's because we're secretly illegitimate Hohenstaufens of Prussia and if that fact ever gets out, we'll all be murdered in our beds... um, I wasn't supposed to tell you that part.That said, this is a game of luck, of chance, where the odds of winning go up a lot as more people publish unredacted full genotypes or genomes. That's a big if: we still don't know what most of that spaghetti code means, whether it codes for things like good looks or exquisite manners or talent with math, whatever you might hope your genome to say. We don't actually know how to make people live longer, or live better, or have a better chance at being rich or talented. As far as we can tell, within statistical error genes don't code for any of that. There are even lots of people who have genes that definitely code for bad things, yet those things never befall them. Those of us who are pioneering genetic mapping are banking on a future society which is less totalitarian, less fascist. We are banking that there's nothing in our genes that might embarrass our kids, our grandkids, our parents, our cousins. We're banking that DNA evidence won't be used against them, or planted falsely. From where I stand, the risk is worth it, and I've basically dragged all of my relatives, tested or not, along with me for the ride.I can't, though, in good conscience, recommend that anyone do any of that. the likelihood of you discovering some breakthrough, some big scientific or genealogical barrier felled by your drops of spit, is near close to zero. More likely you'll wind up at some company or on some chat group that will tell you you are the lost prince of oobleckistan and you're going to spend a lot of time conflicted, unsure of who is telling the truth, and who is just an internet loudmouth. I would know: I'm an internet loudmouth.

Jonathan, I hope you didn’t A2A me on this to get tips on how to generate income and wealth, because this young adult is only focused on making it to the end of the year without once going into the red!So, my situation: I am an unemployed (sorry, economically inactive) postgraduate student that is currently being sponsored through law school. My sponsor has generously paid for all my school fees on top of providing a small stipend for living costs. But as you know, I live in a very expensive city so that stipend doesn’t take me very far :-)My current goal is thus to make sure I live decently and comfortably without having to seek part-time employment that would inevitably detract from my studies. The good news is that I don’t pay rent or council tax in London, which is a HUGE weight off my shoulders.At the same time, I want to save up a little each month to make sure I get to do a little bit of travelling around Europe before coming back to London to get a part-time job to allow me to survive financially up till January, which is when I start my Legal Practice Course.But I tend to be a VERY VERY compulsive spender and over the past few months I have managed to whittle away what little I had of my stipend on things as ridiculous as:A weekend sojourn to CopenhagenA DNA/ancestry testA mini food processorGym fines (THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T CANCEL CLASSES AT THE LAST MINUTE, JOSEPHINE)A teal blue mermaid blanket (a MERMAID blanket! with a TAIL and everything! A taaaaail!)A muffin tray (I don’t even bake muffins!!)A Gourmet Society membership card (spending money to go out and spend more money, brilliant idea, Josephine)Mini speakers (because I thought it would be a good idea to play music for 5 minutes a day in the shower, totally worth the cost, I know)So yeah, I don’t tend to be the best person to ask when it comes to managing money.But still, I try. Partly because I have to, mainly because I want to.The only way I ‘manage’ my finances right now is by doing these two things:Keeping track of every cent that goes in and out of your purseKeeping money as far away from my greedy paws as possible!So here’s how I do these two things:1. Keeping track of expenditure.I mainly use a physical book called ‘Kakebo’ as well as Monzo. I’ll explain each one in turn.KakeboFor those of you who understand Spanish, this lady gives a really good overview of the notebook (and she uses the exact same book as me!):Kakebo is basically this little financial organiser that lets you budget and record your spending and income to the most minute of detail. I’ve got mine in Spanish because the Spanish notebooks are the cutest (they are the most vibrant and colourful with the cutest little piggy cartoons to keep me motivated), but I believe these notebooks are also available in French, English, and Italian.So the first thing you see for each month’s entry is this:On this bit of the book you list all of your income (ingresos) for the month as well as your fixed costs (gastos fijos), which have already been neatly organised into categories such as ‘rent/mortgage’, ‘water’, ‘electricity’, ‘gas’, ‘telephone’, ‘transport/travel cards’, ‘gym’ and so forth. Then on the next page you tally up your total income and savings, deduct the total of your fixed costs from it, and you get the amount of money you have available to you in that month. Then you write down how much you’re willing to save for the month, and the remaining amount of money is how much you’ve got to spend.You may also reflect on your goals and promises for the month if you’re the journalling type, but that might be a little hardcore for some, so we’ll leave it at that.Next we’ll go to daily/weekly spending:As you can see, here we have a daily breakdown of costs, as well as a weekly tally of spending per category. The four main categories are loosely translated as follows ‘survival costs’ (superviviencia) which covers groceries, medicine, transport, children and pets; entertainment and vices (ocio y vicio) which covers bars, restaurants, fast food, clubbing, tobacco, cosmetics and clothes; culture (cultura) which covers books, music and shows; and of course, miscellaneous costs (extras) which covers trips, presents and general household expenditure.I would strongly recommend all Kakebo-users to not only calculate the total amount you spend a day, but also the weekly total that you spend per category (and sub-category) as it makes it easier to plot annual graphs later.At the end of the month we see this:Here we get to see your weekly total spending for each month, which you can use to compare with your initial savings and reflect on how much you have REALLY saved (as opposed to how much you wanted to save at the beginning of the month). You also have a small table to record credit card expenditure. On the following page you have a small survey at the bottom that asks you if you have managed to fulfill all your promises for the month (plus a bit of reflection on what you can do better), and you get to tally your weekly spending per category (survival costs, entertainment and vices, culture and miscellaneous costs).Then once you get to the end of the year (hopefully with a very full Kakebo booklet!) You get to plot all sorts of graphs and barcharts and pie charts to reflect on your annual spending if you so wish:Lastly, if you’re out and about and not in the mood to carry your trusty Kakebo companion around, you also get to bring around a mini, passport-sized Kakebo to record purchases! It doesn’t get any better than that.MonzoBesides Kakebo, I also use Monzo to track my expenditure. Monzo is a modern, London-based fintech project that aims to revolutionalise the banking industry by creating a solely digital bank. All you have to do is download the app on your phone, and you get to sign up and have a Monzo debit card.The best and worst thing about Monzo is that everything is on your phone (so make sure you don’t lose it!). You can freeze and de-freeze your card automatically and request an extra copy of your card through the app alone.Monzo works by you topping up money from your main bank account into it, and it automatically stores all your transactions — this is such a huge contrast from mainstream banks where you have to wait a couple working days for all of your transactions to show up on your bank statement.And even better still, Monzo automatically identifies each transaction and records it under one of their many categories of expenditure (eg. ‘General’; ‘Eating out’; ‘ Transport’; ‘Groceries’) and so forth, and you get to see a record of your spending (in both list and chart form) straight away.2. Keeping money as far away from myself as possible.By this I mean making it prohibitively unreachable, both virtually and physically, at all times.In terms of virtually making it unreachable, I ensure that my money is very spread out — I don’t bring my main debit card out and about and I only use my Monzo contactless for daily purchases (which is great because I only have about £50–100 stored anyway which already automatically limits how much I can spend at any one time. At the same time I make sure I only have very little on my HSBC current account, just enough to top up Monzo by about £50 at a time when I get into a bit of a pickle. I have also deleted my HSBC banking app, which would mean that I would have to resort to online or telephone banking to transfer money from my savings account over to my current account.As for making it physically impossible, I make sure the bulk of my savings is stored in little Chinese red packets around the house (yay East Asian heritage!), buried under folders and folders of documents, making it hard to reach for and virtually impossible to access when I’m out and about. I know many finance-y types are probably now freaking out about losing out on interest and all that but I’m an economically inactive student and I don’t have much I can possibly earn passive income from anyway. So best keep what little money I’ve got waaaay out of sight and waaaay out of mind.Once I start my job next year I’ll be earning an actual income, so I’ll start using less, ah, unconventional ways of managing my finances, but for now, this young person’s gotta do what she has to do to make it till then.Thanks for the A2A.

Indigenous groups look to ancient DNA to bring their ancestors homeLocal communities and geneticists are working together to sequence DNA from remains that were taken from their homelands decades ago.Indigenous groups look to ancient DNA to bring their ancestors homeLocal communities and geneticists are working together to sequence DNA from remains that were taken from their homelands decades ago.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01167-w#author-0David Edwards, a Mutthi Mutthi elder, welcomes the return of remains that had been taken long ago. Credit: Lisa Maree Williams/GettySeveral years ago, Gudju Gudju Fourmile welcomed back several members of his Yidinji community who had been taken from their homes in northern Australia almost a century ago. Like many other Indigenous communities in Australia, the Yidinji have worked for decades to bring the bodies of their ancestors home — which Aboriginal communities describe as returning to Country.Many of the ancestors are off Country as a result of the dehumanizing practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was common for white collectors to loot graves and sell the remains of Aboriginal people to museums in Australia, the United Kingdom and other countries. “When our remains are off Country, we try to make sure they come back,” says Fourmile, an elder in the community who lives in Cairns. “They need to be comfortable. That’s a big thing for many tribal groups.” And when his community finally reburied its ancestors in 2014, “everybody was so happy. And the Country felt good again,” Fourmile says.Before the Yidinji elders laid their ancestors to rest, they received a request from scientists who had been analysing the DNA of living community members: could they sequence the ancestors’ genomes, too? With permission granted, a team led by evolutionary geneticist David Lambert at Griffith University in Brisbane extracted DNA from the remains of one individual, and confirmed that the ancient person was closely related to Yidinji people alive today. “When you find something out like that, you jump for joy,” says Fourmile. The event also marked a turning point in the mindset of the community, he says, when members started to realize the potential of DNA analysis to help bring their people back home.In the past 30 years or so, museums have responded to complaints by repatriating thousands of human remains and sacred objects to Indigenous Australian groups such as the Yidinji. But many more — possibly thousands — lack the information necessary to return them to one of the dozens of distinct Indigenous groups in Australia. That is a source of great distress for communities. Lambert’s team published a study in 2018 showing that ten remains, including those of one ancient Yidinji individual, could be linked to specific Indigenous communities through genetics.Now, two teams in Australia, including Lambert’s, are partnering with Indigenous communities to create genomic maps that connect ancient and historical remains with present-day groups. Such catalogues could eventually be used to help return remains to the right communities.Facing up to injustice in genome scienceResearchers from under-represented groups are making genomics more inclusive by working with communities that have been overlooked or abused.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01166-xAustralia is one country where this approach is being trialled. DNA research is confirming that many Indigenous groups have lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years. In some places, it has established that ancient individuals are closely related to present-day groups living in the same region1. Drawing such links in other regions, such as North America, has proved more difficult, because ancient populations there seem to have moved around more.One of these projects could eventually be used by Indigenous people who are still suffering from past government actions, particularly a racist Australian policy lasting until 1970 that removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families. These children became known as the ‘Stolen Generations’, and many of them are alive today. A DNA database of Indigenous groups could help some individuals to understand their genetic heritage and identify their homeland.But such efforts raise concerns. As a result of the history of mistreatment, some Indigenous people fear that unscrupulous governments or scientists might misuse their genetic information. And there are tensions over who should control the data and whether scientists can freely share genomic sequences.Fourmile says that Yidinji people agreed to the study because they had control of the data. “We’ve done a flip, and now we’re wanting them to study us for our own benefit to bring our people home,” he says.Going back to CountryThe arrival of European colonizers in Australia in the late 1780s marked the beginning of a scientific grave-robbing era there, when white people collected Indigenous human remains for research — including now-discredited ‘racial science’ theories linking intellect with anatomical differences. By the end of the nineteenth century, most major museums around the world housed Indigenous Australian remains.The collection of such remains was part of the broader subjugation of Indigenous Australians by Europeans, which has led to generational trauma. Authorities determined where people could live and work, whom they could marry and whether they could keep their children. Tribal groups were also systematically moved off their land and placed on reserves and missions, where their movements were restricted. “They were trying to get us away from our traditional lands,” says Michael Young, a member of the adjoining Paakantyi and Parrintyi tribal groups, which stretch across a large swathe of southwestern New South Wales.Aboriginal groups began fighting for the return of their ancestors in the 1970s, as part of a wider movement against the ongoing discrimination against them. By the 1980s, the growing pressure prompted some museums to introduce policies to return human remains and sacred objects to their communities.Tracking down the traditional owners of ancestral remains is important for Aboriginal people because it is part of reclaiming their identities after being forced to assimilate into white Australia, says Young. “Repatriation is healing some of that wrong that has been done to us over the last 230 years,” he says.So far, Indigenous communities have regained custodianship of more than 2,500 sets of ancestral remains from Australian museums, according to the government’s repatriation programme (see ‘Mapping ancestors’). And in the past 30 years, more than 1,500 sets of ancestral remains have been returned to Australia, mostly from the United Kingdom, but also from the United States, Canada and half a dozen European nations, although some museums still refuse to repatriate remains and cultural objects.But there are probably several thousand sets of remains in Australian museums whose origin remains unknown, says Deanne Hanchant-Nichols, an anthropologist in Adelaide with experience in trying to identify unprovenanced remains and a member of the Tanganekald and Barkindji (or Paakantyi) communities. Many of the bodies are simply labelled ‘Aboriginal’, with no other identifying details, she says.In 2016, Lambert laid the groundwork for ways to solve this problem, as part of a team that was charting the continent’s genetic history. Lambert worked with elders to collect DNA samples and shared the team’s findings about the ancestry of some contemporary Indigenous Australians. During these conversations, the elders and Lambert discussed whether DNA could also reveal where ancient remains in museums had come from. Lambert said it was possible, but he was cautious not to predict the result before they did the analysis. “We’ve got to be careful about this kind of research,” he says.Lambert got permission from the elders of 11 Aboriginal groups, including the Yidinji and the Paakantyi, to test the idea; several members of Indigenous communities, including Fourmile and Young, joined the study as co-authors.” His team sequenced DNA from 27 sets of human remains — mostly bones, but also teeth and hair — from individuals who died before British settlers arrived and whose burial location was known1. Most of these remains have been repatriated.Despite Australia’s sweltering heat, which degrades DNA in remains, the team, co-led by Lambert and evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, obtained mitochondrial genomes from all 27 remains and full or partial nuclear genomes from 10 of them1 (see ‘Mapping ancestors’).The DNA in mitochondria — cells’ power plants — is generally inherited maternally and is present in many more copies in cells than nuclear DNA. But Lambert’s team — which included Joanne Wright, then a PhD student at Griffith University — found it was of limited use in linking remains to contemporary groups: 11 of the remains had no conclusive match in a database of more than 100 mitochondrial genomes from Indigenous Australians, and two were linked to the wrong geographic area.Nuclear DNA proved a much richer source of ancestry information for matching remains to present-day communities. Lambert’s team compared the 10 ancient nuclear genomes to those of 100 Indigenous Australians living across the country. In all ten cases, the ancestral remains were most closely related to the Indigenous people in their study who came from the same geographical area.For instance, one of the ancient individuals is estimated to have lived at least 2,000 years ago, and their remains were excavated from a well-known Aboriginal burial ground in the Willandra Lakes region in far western New South Wales in 1974. The closest relatives of that person are members of the Willandra groups who live in the area today.Lambert is now negotiating with the Queensland Museum and its board of Indigenous advisers to sequence about 300 unprovenanced remains housed at the museum, to test whether their place of origin can be identified. Young agrees that genetic matching could be a powerful tool for repatriating ancestors to the right community. But he would like to see more proof of its accuracy before the approach is applied to unprovenanced remains. The risk of repatriating remains to the wrong community could be reduced, he adds, by combining genomic analysis with anthropological evidence. Incorporating cultural knowledge from communities and information from museum archives could also help.Moreover, Young says that such efforts should include more Indigenous scientists, who are aware of the culture and can discuss with communities how the research can help to reinforce their connection to Country. He is working with Lambert and others to set up scholarships for Aboriginal people to study genetics. “I’d love more Aboriginal people to get into that area,” he says.A map of the pastIsabel O’Loughlin has spent the past six years building trust with several Indigenous communities. She is one of two community consultants working on the Aboriginal Heritage Project, another effort to look at DNA from remains of Indigenous Australians.The group is sequencing hair samples that were collected mostly by ethnologists Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell from 1928 to the 1970s in what are today seen as racially motivated studies.The Tindale and Birdsell teams drew family trees that name more than 50,000 people, including some who lived before British settlers arrived in 1860. The collection, which is held at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, also contains photographs, sound recordings, films and drawings. More than 5,000 hair samples are stored in a restricted area in the museum.Elders from Indigenous communities from the Willandra Lakes region visiting the ancient DNA laboratory at Griffith University in 2008.Credit: Renee ChapmanWhen ancient-DNA researcher Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide first heard about the collection a decade ago, he wondered whether it could be used to determine where Aboriginal Australian communities lived before British settlers arrived and spread throughout the country. Although the hair samples were collected from the 1920s — when Aboriginal people were already being forced from traditional lands — the detailed family trees meant that the team would be able to trace some people’s families back to these locations. So, in 2014, Cooper’s team started reaching out to Indigenous communities to get permission to analyse the remains.Lewis O’Brien, an adviser to the Aboriginal Heritage Project, remembers Tindale visiting Point Pearce, the mission where his aunt lived in 1938. Tindale interviewed O’Brien, aged 8, and his brother, and measured their heights and the length of their arms, among other things. Tindale also snipped a lock of O’Brien’s hair. “I felt like a guinea pig,” says O’Brien, an elder with the Kaurna people, who is now 89 and lives in nearby Adelaide. O’Brien didn’t like how Tindale studied Aboriginal people, but he can see that the collection is a valuable resource for unravelling history for some communities.The project’s data could also be the starting point for creating a service for present-day Indigenous people to compare their DNA against the reference map built from the hair samples. The service could allow some people — including members of the Stolen Generations — to explore whether genetics can reveal anything about where they might have come from, when conventional methods of finding such information fail, says Ray Tobler, a population geneticist at the University of Adelaide. But more work to reduce uncertainties is needed before such a service would be possible, he says. Hanchant-Nichols thinks a broad discussion among Indigenous people is needed, too. O’Brien supports a genetic-comparison service. He is often approached by Aboriginal people who were removed from their families and are desperate for information about their ancestry. “I want to be able to say, ‘we’ll get you tested and help you find out where you come from’,” he says.Cooper and Tobler also visit communities to explain their efforts. Families whose records form part of the Tindale collection then have private meetings with the team to ask questions and raise any concerns. Some worry that their family’s genetic results could be misused, for instance, by government agencies to test their status as an Aboriginal person, says Cooper. But he says that status is based on community recognition and cannot be defined genetically. There is currently no DNA test of Aboriginality (despite claims to the contrary by some conservative politicians in Australia). The geographical information accompanying the genetic data is not specific enough to resolve land-title claims — another concern. “To boil someone’s identity down to their DNA is unethical and scientifically flawed,” adds Tobler.O’Loughlin says the project has been embraced by the communities largely because Aboriginal people retain control. Of almost 180 families that the team has approached, only two decided not to participate in the project, she says.After performing the analysis, the team returns with results. The community learns about the history of Australia and the relationships of different Indigenous groups. And individuals get information about their ancestor who provided the hair sample. O’Loughlin and her colleague Amy O’Donoghue also alert families in advance if the results show that biological relationships differ from families’ known relationships.In 2017, Cooper and Tobler’s team published its first map of Aboriginal groups, based on mitochondrial DNA from 111 hair samples from three Indigenous communities3. The genetic analysis suggests that the first Australians arrived from Asia by about 50,000 years ago. This is broadly in line with most archaeological evidence and previous genome studies(see ‘Mapping ancestors’). Australia’s Indigenous groups also say their connection to the continent is ancient. Within a couple of thousand years, this founding group split into populations that expanded west and east — and then largely stayed put. On the basis of mitochondrial lineages, at least, there hasn’t been a lot of movement around Australia over broad geographical and time scales, says Tobler. “That’s remarkable because you don’t really see that anywhere else.”Cooper and his team have now sequenced the nuclear genomes of about 150 hair samples. They plan to seek permission to sequence DNA from up to 1,000 hair samples.However, the project has been on hold for almost a year while the team has worked to comply with state laws on conducting research with Aboriginal participants. The project is set to resume this month.Although the hair samples are not being repatriated to the families, the map that is based on their DNA could help to match unprovenanced remains in museums to present-day groups, enabling their return.Tales of the Ancient OneIn the United States, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and similar state legislation oblige museums to audit their collections and return what they can in the way of ancestral remains and sacred objects to Native American communities.So far, NAGPRA has led to the return of hundreds of thousands of culturally affiliated ancestral remains and artefacts. And in the past few years, the US government has cited ancestry information gleaned from ancient DNA in returning some unaffiliated remains to tribes.One of the most contentious is the 8,500-year-old skeleton of ‘Kennewick Man’, which was uncovered by teenagers in 1996 in a riverbank near Kennewick, Washington. Several Native American groups claimed the remains of the individual, whom they call the Ancient One, as ancestral and demanded their return under NAGPRA. But a coalition of archaeologists argued that the person lived too long ago to be culturally linked to present-day Native Americans under the law, and won a 2002 federal lawsuit to block their repatriation.The remains were stored out of view in a Seattle museum, available to scientists and Native American groups, for over a decade. But several years ago, the US government asked Willerslev whether his lab could test the remains for DNA. After consulting with all of the Native American groups seeking Kennewick Man’s return, Willerslev’s team obtained enough DNA to generate a low-quality genome sequence.Comparisons with DNA from present-day individuals confirmed that Kennewick Man was more closely related to Indigenous groups in North and South America than to other global populations4. They also determined that Kennewick Man was closely related to members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, who had participated in the study — one of the five communities seeking repatriation — but also to other groups in the Pacific Northwest and even to some in Central and South America. On the basis of the DNA tests, the US government determined that Kennewick Man was Native American, and therefore eligible for repatriation under NAGPRA. The remains were reburied in 2017 by members of the Yakama Nation, the Wanapum Band and the Nez Perce, Colville and Umatilla tribes.The US government again cited ancient DNA evidence generated by Willerslev’s team when repatriating remains from Nevada in 2016, including a 10,600-year-old male human skeleton known as the Spirit Cave Mummy. As with Kennewick Man, the DNA analysis determined that the remains were Native American, but the study did not link them to any specific groups5.Linking ancient remains to present-day groups is challenging because of huge gaps in scientists’ understanding of the population history of the Americas. Few genetic data are available for ancient remains in the Americas, says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen at the University of California, Berkeley. The preliminary analysis of DNA from remains such as Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Mummy suggests that ancient populations in the area moved around, so the ancient inhabitants of a region are likely to be the ancestors of many different Native American groups.Drawing connections between ancient remains and modern groups is even more difficult, because there are relatively few genomes from present-day Native Americans against which to compare ancient remains, Nielsen adds. “Genetic results are only going to be as good as your comparative database,” says Ripan Malhi, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who works with Indigenous groups in North America. The paucity of contemporary Native American genomes is a legacy of the poor treatment of Indigenous groups by non-Indigenous scientists, he adds.In one case, researchers collected DNA from members of the Havasupai Tribe in Arizona, for health research. But they failed to seek permission when the samples were later used for other kinds of studies, so many Native Americans are now reluctant to share their details.Some scientists in Australia have also failed to give Indigenous groups proper control over their own data. Such incidents have led to agreements where Indigenous groups decide how their information can be used. For instance, Indigenous communities involved with Lambert’s study permit their data to be shared with other groups wishing to verify the results, but only if the scientists get ethics approval. If researchers want to use the data for other purposes, they must get consent from the participants.Some researchers have criticized such restrictions, saying that they could prevent Indigenous groups from seeing the benefits of future studies using their data. But Lambert and Indigenous groups say it is about time that non-Indigenous scientists ceded control.And Aboriginal people are starting to embrace the chance to be involved, says Hanchant-Nichols. “For many, many years, science kept us out. We had no role in museums other than for them to steal our stories, steal our artefacts and steal our bones.”