Methodology deep-dives, population spotlights, and engineering notes from the Ancestrify team, qpAdm modelling, ancient DNA panels, and how genetic ancestry analysis really works.
24 stories
The original admixture project's most-used calculator: what the twelve K12b components are anchored to, what Gedrosia and Caucasus mean in modern ancient-DNA terms, and how to read a K12b breakdown.
What HarappaWorld's S-Indian, Baloch and NE-Euro components are anchored to, why it remains the reference calculator for South Asian ancestry, and how its 2012 categories map onto what ancient DNA later proved.
The program behind the bar plots in population-genetics papers: how ADMIXTURE estimates K components jointly from all samples, supervised versus unsupervised runs, choosing K, and why hobbyist calculators are its frozen shadows.
A calculator against modern populations answers 'who do I resemble today'; one against dated ancient samples answers 'which deep ancestries formed me'. Mixing up the two produces the classic misreadings.
A step-by-step qpAdm tutorial: check your raw file, merge it into AADR v66, choose sources and outgroups, run it in the browser or in R, and read the result.
Every place that sells or offers qpAdm in 2026, done-for-you analyses and DIY tools side by side, and what an analysis costs: four one-time tiers from 29.99 EUR, the add-ons, and when a subscription is cheaper.
What Davidski's Eurogenes G25 Requests portal is, what you upload, the scaled and unscaled rows you get back, their stated fee, and what to do with the row next.
How to choose qpAdm sources and right populations: the O9 outgroup set and its extensions, how many to use, the drift rule, the rank test, temporal logic, proxy labels, rotation and a worked example.
What a qpAdm p-value below 0.05 does and does not mean, the five usual causes of a rejection, negative weights and low Z-scores, the errors and odd outputs decoded (SE 9.994, every model passing, p = 0 or NA, infeasible nested models, forced weights), what to try next and when to stop.
How to download your 23andMe, AncestryDNA or MyHeritage raw data, how each file is laid out, what its chip means for coverage after the AADR merge, and what a qpAdm order does with it.
What ancient genomes say about Jewish ancestry, why a consumer 'Ashkenazi Jewish' percentage is circular and cannot fail, what a qpAdm model with a p-value measures instead, its limits for a Jewish genome, and a checklist before you buy.
Why Ashkenazi genomes read as their own category on consumer tests, what the medieval Erfurt genomes settled, and how a qpAdm model separates the Levantine and southern European halves of Ashkenazi ancestry.
What ancient DNA says about Sephardic ancestry across Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa and Iberia, why 'Sephardic' covers several different genetic histories, and how a qpAdm model separates the Levantine, Iberian and North African layers.
Why the Jewish communities of Mesopotamia, Persia and Kurdistan sit closest to the Bronze Age Levant, what the Iranian-related layer in their genomes is, and how a qpAdm model resolves a Mizrahi genome.
What ancient DNA says about the Yemenite Jewish community, the Himyarite question, and how a qpAdm model tests a Yemenite genome against the Canaanite and Arabian Peninsula sources.
What genome-wide and ancient DNA say about the Jewish communities of Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Central Asia, their Persian-Jewish core and local admixture, and how a qpAdm model resolves them.
Who the Canaanites were genetically, who carries their ancestry today, and where the qpAdm source catalog keeps their genomes: the Bronze Age populations of its Levant region.
What every number in the model record of an Ancestrify qpAdm report means, from chi-square, degrees of freedom and f4 rank to 95% confidence intervals, what the analyst checked before publishing, and a worked example read line by line, with the R code to rerun it.
A plain reading guide to the three numbers in every qpAdm result — what the p-value tests, what a standard error bounds, what a Z-score rules out — with worked examples and the mistakes that make a passing model wrong.
Global25 coordinates explained from scratch: what the 25 numbers are, where they come from, scaled versus unscaled, what you can compute from them, and the honest limits of a coordinate-based ancestry analysis.
A step-by-step Vahaduo tutorial: where to paste your Global25 coordinates, how the Distance, Single, Multi and PCA tabs work, how to build a source panel, and how to read a fit distance without over-reading it.
What a 23andMe or AncestryDNA ethnicity estimate measures, what an ancient-DNA ancestry test measures instead, why the two disagree by design, and how to run the second one on the raw file you already have.
Who the Western Steppe Herders were, how steppe ancestry spread across Europe and Asia after 3000 BC, what a 'steppe percentage' actually measures, and how to estimate yours with qpAdm or Global25 from a raw DNA file.
Who Europe's Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were — Western, Eastern and Caucasus — how their ancestry survived farming and the steppe migrations, and how to measure your hunter-gatherer share from a raw DNA file.