The short answer: 23andMe does not and cannot give you Global25 coordinates. No testing company does. What 23andMe gives you is a raw data file, and that file is what the independent Eurogenes Global25 service turns into a coordinate row. This guide covers the 23andMe-specific half of that route; the full background — what a coordinate is, who produces one, and the two mistakes that quietly ruin results — is in the main guide.
Step one: download your 23andMe raw data#
In your 23andMe account, look under your profile for Resources → Browse Raw Data → Download. The
site asks you to confirm, then hands you a .zip holding a single .txt file — one genotyped
position per line.
Keep the file zipped or unzipped as you prefer; downstream services accept both. What matters is that you keep it: this file is the input to everything below, and re-downloading it later means finding the menu again.
What is actually in a 23andMe file#
23andMe has shipped several chip generations, and the generation decides your coverage. The current v5 chip (in use since 2017, based on Illumina's Global Screening Array) carries good autosomal coverage — the part Global25 is computed from — plus a useful set of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial positions, which is why a 23andMe file also works in our free Y-DNA clade finder and mtDNA haplogroup finder.
Older v3/v4 files still work but cover different marker sets. If you are unsure which generation your file is, our free raw DNA file check parses it, reports the detected format, counts usable markers per chromosome, and says which analyses can read it — nothing is ordered and nothing is stored.
Step two: the file becomes a coordinate#
Global25 coordinates are issued by Davidski's independent Eurogenes Global25 service — the G25 Requests portal at g25requests.app — not by 23andMe, and not by us. Upload the raw file there, pay their €15 per-kit fee, and receive your row; their site states 2–7 days. The process and terms are the service's own and have changed more than once, so their posting is the only authority on the details. You will receive scaled and unscaled forms of your row: keep both, keep them labelled, and never mix the two in one comparison.
Rather not handle the request yourself? Upload this same file with an Ancestrify Global25 analysis and, with your consent, we obtain your official coordinates for you from that very service (+€15, typically a few days) — your full analysis runs the moment they arrive, and the row stays yours to keep.
Be wary of the free shortcut: tools that simulate a G25 row from another calculator's output produce something shaped like a coordinate that describes the conversion, not your genome. Our authenticity check can read a row's numeric fingerprint if you are handed one of unknown origin.
Step three: use the row#
With a real coordinate row, everything else is immediate — free, in your browser, no account:
- Rank your closest ancient and modern populations in the G25 distance calculator, era by era.
- Model your ancestry as a mixture of curated source panels in the Global25 admixture calculator.
- Plot yourself on ancient-DNA PCA views in the G25 PCA viewer.
And when you want the full worked report — distances, admixture and PCA across six eras, with cinematic exports — that is our Global25 analysis. If you would rather start from the raw 23andMe file itself and get a formal, testable model with p-values, that is a different method and a different product: qpAdm analysis, which does take the raw file directly.
Terms used here are defined in the glossary.
