Thursday, October 2, 2025

23andme Update for Indigenous Ancestry


A close relative from Haiti took 23andme and shared their updated results with us. The update for ancestry composition focuses on Europe and the Indigenous Americas while eschewing "Broadly" categories. In the case of our relative, who as a Haitian, only has minor indigenous origins, their assigned to the "Central Andean and Amazonian" category. This is interesting since AncestryDNA's algorithm assigned this person's indigenous ancestry to the "Indigenous Bolivia & Peru" category. Unfortunately, there are no historical matches for this person from any indigenous background and we have no paper trail for Amerindian ancestry in our Haitian lineage. Is this ancestry from the Taino of Hispaniola? If so, why no historical matches with Pre-Columbian samples? Or is this something else, perhaps from the French colonial period when indigenous people from other parts of the Americas were brought to Saint Domingue?

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