I used to work at this historic site during the summer,
in college.
It was my favorite job--
OK, one of my favorite jobs.
This job's pretty great.
And every year, people would visit from all over the world.
I fired the cannon.
I learned to clean and fire rifles
that were from the 1870s.
I learned to blacksmith and play the fife.
Actually, I think we have a clip of that.
[PLAYING FIFE]
Whoa-- fingers, really fast.
But something that stood out to young Tracy was this one day,
we were talking out in the Fort, and these German tourists
overheard us.
And they started to talk to us about their ancestry.
And they were German.
Their grandparents were German.
Their great-grandparents were German.
Their great-great-grandparents were German.
Everything was German, all the way
back, German all the way down, if you will.
And when you're talking about where you're from,
even though it doesn't feel like it, in many cases,
we are a melting pot.
And because of this, a lot of people
want to know their family history.
It's tied to identity and sense of self.
Should I celebrate St. Patrick's Day, Chinese New Year,
Hanukkah, Carnival, Oktoberfest?
Where am I really from, like really?
Ha!
Even though sometimes the question is offensive,
where are you from really does speak
to a lot of our sense of self.
And DNA tests do offer a promise of accuracy.
But is this real?
Some people want to prove they're
part of an ethnic group.
Some had their family history severed from them.
Some want to find out really where they're from.
Others are just curious.
But DNA testing to find out your ancestors probably
ain't the best route.
Full disclosure-- Discovery paid for me to get my DNA
tested with 23andMe for a video Amy and I did a while ago.
I was told, growing up, that I was mixes of French and Irish,
German, Native American, Spanish, and Swedish.
And when my results came back, some of that was true.
And a lot of it didn't seem to be at all.
According to the company, my ethnicity
has actually changed over the years
as more people commit their DNA data
to the companies' databases.
DNA testing isn't new.
In 1984, a geneticist, Dr. Alec Jeffreys,
was studying hereditary disease in the UK,
and he discovered VNTRs, or Variable Number Tandem Repeats,
sections of DNA that are unique.
And they can be passed from parents to offspring.
And he was able to use film, photographic film,
and use a process to assess a DNA fingerprint.
This was the first indication that you could actually
use this little strand of genetics
to identify individual people, not
just by VNTRs, but as technology got
better and better, by other mutations and variations, too.
Because see, as we spread out of Africa
and into Asia and Europe, we had lots and lots of babies.
And when we did that, little mutations
popped up here and there in our genome
and in the little mutants.
We call these Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or SNPs.
Those little variations are the basis
for all of the DNA heredity you're seeing around today.
Think about it this way.
Let's say this hot dog emoji popped up in my DNA
in the 1100s in one of my SNPs.
And it didn't affect anything, but I passed it on to my kids.
And then they did, and then they did, and then they did.
Eventually, many hundreds of thousands of people
would have this hot dog mutation, hot dog.
This string of us making has all sorts
of SNPs scattered throughout it.
And with enough DNA, plus a lot of related family history,
geneticists and mathematicians and researchers
can make statistical models and start
to guess and pinpoint extended families and groups
by these mutations.
These are guesses based on data.
And the data is not yet complete.
Utah billionaire James L Sorenson
created a foundation that collected DNA
from 100,000 people worldwide.
He wanted to see exactly how we were all related everywhere
on the planet.
And that database was bought by Ancestry.com.
They now use it as the basis for their genealogy guesses.
But even 100,000 humans out of billions worldwide
only gives them a sample.
And they have oversampled from certain places
and undersampled from others.
And that's just one company.
Everybody's using different data sets.
Our DNA ancestry data today is mostly
comprised of people from Africa and Europe.
If you want ancestry data from elsewhere--
say you have a relative from Asia--
sucks to be you.
If you have ancestors from China or Korea, Japan, India,
Pakistan, one of the many other countries containing
more than 50 ethnic minorities across the hugest continent
around, well, your level of detail is [INAUDIBLE]..
Professor Jonathan Marks told McClatchy-- genomics companies
are, quote, "a mix of science and corporate hucksterism."
I mean, did anyone double-check family histories here?
Did they do actual genealogy, or did we all just accept
self-reported data?
Did they get their data from Grandma or crazy Uncle Jerry
and believe everything they told them?
It's not like there are regulations on these claims.
They're just that-- claims.
Different companies will literally
give you different heritages because of their data set.
So is this real?
Not really.
The science is still way too new,
and way more research is needed before anyone
could use your genome to find all your relatives
with any measure of accuracy.
Of course, there are also privacy implications here, too,
and it's a whole other thing.
Make sure that you look into that before you give your DNA
data to anyone.
This is a big topic.
I mean, people in politics are using their DNA history
to attack each other, which is just real silly.
So the question I have for you all is, what do you think?
Is DNA better or paperwork?
Because if we're looking to science
so that we can ignore a person's skin color or language
vernacular or ethnic identification,
traditional clothing, or even country
that their parents or grandparents lived in,
then what does that actually mean to say--
where are you from, who are you--
without your recent past?
Are these DNA mutations stronger than your great-grandma's
recipes and comfort foods, than your traditions and holidays?
How does your DNA help answer this?
Ask yourself, before you go full bore, how much this
will weigh on who you are.
Because you're the culmination of thousands of generations
of humanity stretching across continents, oceans, and time.
We are one human family.
And all of our food and music, our dancing and fashion
and holidays, they're human holidays.
Can we get some music for that?
Please share this video for more Uno Doses of Trace.
Subscribe, so that you get all of the videos on this channel.
How many more takes of that do you think we need?
I'm making new ones every week just for you.
Love you all.
We'll see you next time.
[PLAYING FIFE]