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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.
“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?
