---
title: "Eurogenes K36 explained: fine-scale components and why the maps mislead"
description: "What the 36-component Eurogenes calculator can genuinely show, why its regional labels invite over-reading, what a K36 heat map is actually plotting, and when a distance ranking answers the question better."
canonical: https://www.ancestrify.io/blog/eurogenes-k36-explained
date: 2026-08-31T08:20:00+00:00
updated: 2026-11-01
author: "Andi Thomaj"
---

# Eurogenes K36 explained: fine-scale components and why the maps mislead

Eurogenes K36 is an admixture calculator on GEDmatch, released in March 2013 by Davidski of the
Eurogenes project, and it is the fine-grained one: thirty-six components with names like Fennoscandian,
North Sea, Iberian, Italian, North Caucasian, Armenian, Arabian. It is the calculator behind the
colourful "K36 maps" people post, and it is simultaneously the most detailed and the most over-read tool
in the GEDmatch family. Both things follow from the same design choice.

The general rules for
[any admixture calculator](/blog/what-is-an-admixture-calculator) apply here with interest; this post is
about what raising K to 36 buys and costs.

## What K = 36 actually does

A component calculator holds K allele-frequency profiles and explains your genome as a mixture of
them. Raise K and the clustering carves the same reference data into thinner slices: with
thirteen components northwest Europe is one profile, with thirty-six it becomes several
neighbouring ones (North Sea, Fennoscandian, North Atlantic and their kin). The slices are
there in the data, in the sense that the clustering found them; whether they are
*separable in one person's genome* is a different question, and mostly the answer is no.

Neighbouring K36 components are heavily correlated. A genome with ancestry from one North
Sea-adjacent population will scatter weight across three or four adjacent components, in
proportions that shift run to run and chip to chip. One independent guide to the Eurogenes project
says the K36 results become more refined *and less confident* at once. No patch would change that,
because it is the trade K buys, and it is also why the same person's
[K13](/blog/gedmatch-admixture-calculators-explained) and K36 profiles do not contradict each other even
though they look nothing alike.

Davidski built it for a narrower job than the maps suggest. His 2013 announcement calls K36
"mainly a chromosome painting utility", meant to help users work out the origins of local areas of their
genomes, which is why it has so many categories, some of them very specific.

## The 36 components

GEDmatch prints them alphabetically, which hides how they relate. Sorted by name into regions they
look like this; the groups are ours, as a reading aid, and the calculator knows nothing of them.

| Group | Components |
|---|---|
| Northwest and central Europe | North_Atlantic, North_Sea, Fennoscandian, French, Central_Euro |
| Eastern Europe | East_Central_Euro, Eastern_Euro, East_Balkan, Volga-Ural |
| Southern Europe and the Mediterranean | Iberian, Basque, West_Med, Italian, East_Med |
| Caucasus and Near East | North_Caucasian, West_Caucasian, Armenian, Near_Eastern, Arabian |
| Central and South Asia | East_Central_Asian, South_Central_Asian, South_Asian |
| East Asia, Siberia and the Pacific | East_Asian, South_Chinese, Indo-Chinese, Malayan, Siberian, Oceanian |
| Africa | North_African, Northeast_African, East_African, Omotic, Central_African, West_African, Pygmy |
| The Americas | Amerindian |

## The right way to read it

Read K36 output as a *texture*, never as an itemised list:

- **Cluster the components yourself.** Sum the Scandinavian-adjacent ones, the Iberian-adjacent
  ones, the Caucasus-adjacent ones. The sums are far more stable than any single line, and they
  are the level at which the calculator is informative.
- **Ignore the tail.** Fifteen components at 0.3 to 2% are the optimiser distributing noise across
  thin profiles. In a 36-way split the noise floor rises to a meaningful fraction of the small
  entries, and no error bars exist to flag which are real;
  [none ever do in this family](/blog/how-accurate-are-admixture-calculators). Davidski expected many
  Europeans to score a few percent in non-European clusters, because the test reaches much deeper than a
  testing company's ethnicity estimate, so a small line of that kind is no surprise.
- **Treat the labels as peaks, not borders.** "Italian" is where that profile is modal in the
  training references, not a statement that some ancestor was Italian.

**Reading a K36 label as a place of origin**

Davidski's own example: if you are English and score 12% Iberian, that does not mean you have recent
ancestry from Spain or Portugal. It means 12% of your alleles look typical of the reference samples
classified as Iberian, and it might only point to recent Iberian admixture if the figure is clearly
higher than other English users' scores. Compare with people of your own background before you read
anything into a line.

## What a K36 map is plotting

Third-party K36 maps interpolate your component scores over modern political geography: attractive, and
two full steps removed from your genome, once by the clustering and once by the cartography. Davidski
offered a more useful sense of the word. He wrote that the proportions work like map coordinates, placing
you with a very high degree of accuracy on a genetic map of other users, which only works when you read
your scores against theirs.

## K36 versus K13

K13 is the same project's coarser calculator, and its thirteen components are North_Atlantic, Baltic,
West_Med, West_Asian, East_Med, Red_Sea, South_Asian, East_Asian, Siberian, Amerindian, Oceanian,
Northeast_African and Sub-Saharan. GEDmatch's own page calls K36 the best choice for people whose
ancestry is largely European, while the community's rule of thumb points to K13 or K15; the
[map of GEDmatch's projects](/blog/gedmatch-admixture-calculators-explained) sets out the whole family.

| | Eurogenes K13 | Eurogenes K36 |
|---|---|---|
| Components | 13 | 36 |
| At GEDmatch | Updated version added in November 2013 | Added in March 2013 |
| Its author's description | More useful for Central and South Asians than his other tests, thanks to new reference samples | Mainly a chromosome painting utility |
| [Oracle](/blog/gedmatch-oracle-explained) | One of his four tests with an Oracle in November 2013 | He expected none at release, because the calculator effect would make it useless |

## When K36 is the wrong tool

If the question is "which populations am I closest to, at fine grain", the question K36 maps
appear to answer, a plain distance ranking answers it directly, without forcing your genome
through thirty-six correlated profiles. The free [G25 distance tool](/lab/g25-distance) ranks
reference populations by straight Euclidean distance across six eras, and the
[PCA viewer](/lab/g25-pca) shows the neighbourhood itself. For mixture percentages against
*dated, ancient* references rather than modern regional constructs, the era-scoped
[Global25 admixture calculators](/lab/admixture) are the modern equivalent of what K36 was
reaching for in 2013.

And if a K36 line is about to become a claim ("the Armenian component proves a Caucasus
ancestor"), that is a hypothesis for a method with a test attached. A
[qpAdm model](/qpadm) can reject a proposed source; a 36-component optimiser
[never can](/blog/qpadm-vs-admixture-software#is-qpadm-worth-it).

K36 remains the most entertaining calculator in the family, and the entertainment is legitimate.
The trouble only ever starts when the thirty-six numbers get promoted from texture to fact.

Terms used here are defined in the [glossary](/glossary).