Your Ethnicity Estimate is based on how much your DNA is similar to the DNA of the people in those groups. So instead of comparing your DNA to that of a single common ancestor, the autosomal ethnicity estimate compares your DNA to that of a founder population: a group of people who have proven ancestry going back at least 6 generations in a given region or ethnic group. That’s why haplogroups can give you information going back hundreds of thousands of years.Īutosomal DNA, by contrast, is inherited in random combinations from both parents, which means the DNA from a specific ancestor will become mixed and “watered down” from generation to generation. Because mtDNA and Y-DNA are both inherited more or less intact from the maternal or paternal line, these sequences, or haplotypes, are also passed down more or less unchanged from mother to child (in the case of mtDNA) or father to son (in the case of Y-DNA). Haplogroups are combinations of unique genetic sequences that tend to be inherited together from a single parent. The MyHeritage DNA test is an autosomal test, and haplogroups can only be identified through mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) tests. The Group Timeline for a Genetic Group on MyHeritage Why does MyHeritage not provide haplogroups? The heatmap indicates the concentrations of people belonging to this group around the year 1600, showing you where your ancestors likely lived around 400 years ago.

When you review your Genetic Groups, you may notice that the Group Timeline below the map goes back to the year 1600.

You can learn more about how MyHeritage estimates ethnicities based on DNA in the following article: What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities How far back does the Ethnicity Estimate go?Įthnicity Estimates are calculated based on founder populations that can trace their roots to a specific place or ethnic group going back 6–15 generations, or roughly 100–400 years ago. In this article we’ll discuss what those ethnicity reports really tell you about where your ancestors were from. After you receive your DNA Ethnicity Estimate from MyHeritage, you may wonder: how far back do these results go? And how reliable are they?

My heritage dna