Articles
3 articles on ancient-matches, ancient-DNA research written up for readers who want the evidence, not just the headline.
An ancient match is a stretch of DNA a living file shares with a sequenced individual who died hundreds or thousands of years ago. Because ancient genomes are low-coverage and the generations separating a living person from them are many, such sharing is identity by state, not identity by descent: it measures resemblance at the markers compared, and a shared segment is never proof of descent. Read that way, the matches are a useful lens on which ancient populations a genome resembles.
The articles explain what it means to share DNA with an ancient person and what the centimorgan figures on such a match mean, compare the services that offer individual ancient matches, published statistics and one-time pricing for people looking for a MyTrueAncestry alternative, and describe how a whole-genome sequencing VCF from tellmeGen, Dante Labs or Nebula is converted to the panel's markers at upload and what changes versus a chip export.
What the Ancient Matches service includes
Looking for a MyTrueAncestry alternative? What people actually want from one — individual ancient matches, published statistics, one-time pricing — and which services deliver each, honestly compared.
How to run an ancient-DNA ancestry analysis from a whole-genome sequencing VCF — tellmeGen, Dante Labs, Nebula and similar — what happens to the file at upload, why it is converted to the panel's markers, and what changes versus a chip export.
What it means to share a stretch of DNA with a person who died thousands of years ago, why such matches are identity by state rather than identity by descent, what the centimorgan figures mean, and why a shared segment is never proof of descent.