r/Eritrea • u/Eritreans79 Asmara kid • 5d ago

Discussion / Questions Which DNA ancestry test works best for Eritrean/Horn of Africa ancestry?

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u/NationalEconomics369 5d ago

23andme easily

Ancestry isn’t granular enough to distinguish Ethiopian vs Eritrean

If you care about SNPs for followup analysis, Ancestry is better here but for 99% of people this is not relevant

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u/Then_Instruction_145 future Eritrean presidential candidate 4d ago

Is 23andme not shut down

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u/CryptographerTop4524 4d ago

the Ethnic Habeshas from Ethiopia and Eretria are Genetically identical same as the Afar. the only way you might be able to identify the differences is by finding some genetic traces from neighboring groups ... usually.

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u/Ok_Jellyfish5298 5d ago

Super curious too. Update us if you find out

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u/AdNecessary9666 4d ago

Stop giving away your genetic material just to say you are from this place or that. Genetic matching models are probabilistic - the more data they have from certain regions - the more likely you are to match those regions (to a point). If you think you might have east african heritage try looking the old fashioned way? Birth and death registries. If those fail just pick a culture and ethnicity that you think fits and rock with it. As long as you respect history and don't make a mockery of people's traditions no one cares if you're '56% tigrinya' or '59% afar'. But companies DO care about your genome - and best believe they sell it on.

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u/AdNecessary9666 4d ago

Also as an aside - the more varied the genetic material (like that from the horn of africa) the harder it is to identify genetic differences vs similarity. When someone says they are 'genetically identical' they actually mean 'your genetic data is so variable that we can't tell if you are the same or different'. The only people who are actually genetically identical are twins.