The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.
After Senator Elizabeth Warren emerged as Donald Trump’s Twitter Adversary in Chief, former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown revived accusations that she lied about having a Native American ancestor, as her family lore said, and began calling her Pocohontas. “She can take a DNA test,” Brown told reporters. However, it might not be that easy.
“It’s the percent of your DNA that’s associated with that group,” said Jake Byrnes, a manager at AncestryDNA. “We don’t try to give you the precise number of ancestors.” In addition, the biggest problem is that our DNA comes from only a fraction of our ancestors.
“If you go enough generations back there is a chance you don’t have any DNA from a particular ancestor,” said population geneticist Kasia Bryc of 23andMe. That chance rises the farther back you go.
Share this article
“If Warren did have testing and…if [Native American ancestry] weren’t found, it could be because DNA from a single Native American ancestor happened not to survive five generations of DNA scrambling,” said Bryc.
Read full, original post: Would testing Elizabeth Warren’s DNA resolve the fight over her heritage?
