Genetic ancestry really doesn't mean a lot as far as who we are is concerned. But it's still something I'm quite curious about. It's just interesting. I find it especially interesting to explore the variety of shapes, sizes and colours that we humans come in - truly a blessing.
My known family are all white European, probably with drips and drabs of other ethnicities mixed in there that we don't know about. All blue-eyed, some blond, some brown-haired. None of our recent ancestry could be traced back to anywhere else but Northern Europe (with a few migrating to North America over the past couple of centuries, never to be heard of again). Any ancestry from anywhere else is just rumour (such as Scandinavian history, it's just a family rumour). But what I find especially interesting is the physiological features of my family.
Everyone has something unique about them and each of the individuals in my family were no different, but common features kept cropping up, occasionally skipping generations. Things like a heavy brow, jutting and rounded lower jaw, and very wide, high-set cheek bones were quite common. On my dad's side there was the flattened, oval face, oval eyes, fatty lips and the red-hair genes that resulted in light freckling and a reddish hue to hair in bright sunlight.
The combination of the two families coming together, as well as the "all at once" expression of physiological features that normally only appeared sparsely in our family, resulted in a rather strage looking me. To the point people refuse to believe I'm not anything but Northern European.. they might be right too.
I've been asked if I'm Chinese, Native American, Japanese, Irish, German, South American, Bosnian, Spanish and even Aboriginal. Nobody seems to guess correctly that I'm Scottish though. It's really quite humorous. But it did make me interested to wonder if my families do have some kind of "exotic" history?
Then I did some contemplating and some searching. This was of course before I believed we were all descended from the same two human beings. But when I realised our ancestry from a single male and female and then for how long humans have been in existence, and how much we have mixed throughout history, it made me realise that we all probably have a little bit of most ethnicities in us. While we may be majorly one ethnicity, we probably also have either expressed or dormant traces of most other races of the world. Only very few of us could really say that they are almost pure one ethnicity, and those of us that are probably wouldn't even know it.
It's kind of sad actually when you think about all these poeple who fight for dominance of their race, thinking themselves superior, when they probably have a bit of genetic history in them of the very ethnicities they oppress and discriminate. They also shut out something that Allah has blessed us with - diversity.
I am interested in looking further into this with my own family, because it's really fascinating. Has anyone ever looked into their family's ancestry (not using DNA testing, I want to steer clear of that)? How do you go about it? My grandmother did it for a while but she had little success and was only interested in one small line of the family. She kind of gave up and isn't interested any more, I guess I could get a few tips from her, but does anybody else have any?
Genetic ancestry really doesn't mean a lot as far as who we are is concerned. But it's still something I'm quite curious about. It's just interesting. I find it especially interesting to explore the variety of shapes, sizes and colours that we humans come in - truly a blessing.
My known family are all white European, probably with drips and drabs of other ethnicities mixed in there that we don't know about. All blue-eyed, some blond, some brown-haired. None of our recent ancestry could be traced back to anywhere else but Northern Europe (with a few migrating to North America over the past couple of centuries, never to be heard of again). Any ancestry from anywhere else is just rumour (such as Scandinavian history, it's just a family rumour). But what I find especially interesting is the physiological features of my family.
Everyone has something unique about them and each of the individuals in my family were no different, but common features kept cropping up, occasionally skipping generations. Things like a heavy brow, jutting and rounded lower jaw, and very wide, high-set cheek bones were quite common. On my dad's side there was the flattened, oval face, oval eyes, fatty lips and the red-hair genes that resulted in light freckling and a reddish hue to hair in bright sunlight.
The combination of the two families coming together, as well as the "all at once" expression of physiological features that normally only appeared sparsely in our family, resulted in a rather strage looking me. To the point people refuse to believe I'm not anything but Northern European.. they might be right too.
I've been asked if I'm Chinese, Native American, Japanese, Irish, German, South American, Bosnian, Spanish and even Aboriginal. Nobody seems to guess correctly that I'm Scottish though. It's really quite humorous. But it did make me interested to wonder if my families do have some kind of "exotic" history?
Then I did some contemplating and some searching. This was of course before I believed we were all descended from the same two human beings. But when I realised our ancestry from a single male and female and then for how long humans have been in existence, and how much we have mixed throughout history, it made me realise that we all probably have a little bit of most ethnicities in us. While we may be majorly one ethnicity, we probably also have either expressed or dormant traces of most other races of the world. Only very few of us could really say that they are almost pure one ethnicity, and those of us that are probably wouldn't even know it.
It's kind of sad actually when you think about all these poeple who fight for dominance of their race, thinking themselves superior, when they probably have a bit of genetic history in them of the very ethnicities they oppress and discriminate. They also shut out something that Allah has blessed us with - diversity.
I am interested in looking further into this with my own family, because it's really fascinating. Has anyone ever looked into their family's ancestry (not using DNA testing, I want to steer clear of that)? How do you go about it? My grandmother did it for a while but she had little success and was only interested in one small line of the family. She kind of gave up and isn't interested any more, I guess I could get a few tips from her, but does anybody else have any?
Why would not you want to use DNA testing methods? They are pretty reliable etc.
Help me to escape from this existence
I yearn for an answer... can you help me?
I'm drowning in a sea of abused visions and shattered dreams
In somnolent illusion... I'm paralyzed
For the majority of Europrans their ancestry can be traced back to Iran, India and the Caucasus mountain region. Language families are a good way to determine the more recent source of a people. The European languages mostly fall into the Indo-European family of languages which contains a very large group of languages. The single largest language family, Indo-European has about 150 languages and about three billion speakers. Languages include Hindi and Urdu (400 million), Bengali (200 million), Spanish (300 million), Portuguese (200 million), French (100 million), German (100 million), Russian (300 million), and English (400 million) in Europe and the Americas. .Look HERE, HERE and HERE
It does appear that genentics and language connections do show we all originated from a single people. This diversity we see today has not always been present to this degree.
We all originated in Africa. "Race" is really a false concept. For a couple of hundred dollars you can have your DNA tested and compared through DNA Tribes and they will let you know where your deep roots come from. It is really quite fascinating.
“All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
Race and ethnicity does exist but it's not as cleanly defined as some might want you to think. It does exist in the sense that we get different types of human, but the types if you remove culture are really just different in the way that they have slightly different design for their difference in natural habitat. It makes sense to have been given dark skin if your recent origin is from Africa, because the sun is really harsh there and burns light skin. It makes sense to have light skin if you come from Northern Europe because the sun can often get really weak and dark skin can't make enough vitamin D in the absence of strong sun (though nowadays it's easy to compensate with food intake, most in Northern Europe for example don't need to worry about famine at this time). Most races overlap and blend into one another gradually to the point we can't really define where one race stops and another begins, but they do exist. IMO that phenomenon should be a reminder that although races exist, we are all ultimately the same species and should treat each other as the same species. Especially that we all share a common origin.
I'm not keen on DNA testing for the reason that I'm not fond of spending my money on frivolous things... It's not a necessity.
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Genetic ancestry really doesn't mean a lot as far as who we are is concerned. But it's still something I'm quite curious about. It's just interesting. I find it especially interesting to explore the variety of shapes, sizes and colours that we humans come in - truly a blessing.
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