The DNA company 23 And Me is working on using identifying living descendants of enslaved people. They are hoping that this information can help people better understand their family's history. The way they are doing this is by by gathering DNA from remains of people from the past and then comparing it to their database. In order to identify a possible relationship they then look at stretches of DNA to see if anyone has a shared stretched DNA sequence to the person from the past. But the problem is that sometimes the persons exact relationship can be quite difficult to figure out due to the centimorgans being very low. Other companies have done things similar to this. For example, a company called Gedmatch also can show people if they are related to an ancient person. One of the ancient persons they have in their data base that they compare people to is someone called Rathlan, who is one of Irelands earliest inhabitants. They also have DNA data from a couple of Neanderthals that they compare people DNA to. So the future looks bright for 23 And Me because the samples they will be looking for are much more recent than the samples that Gedmatch uses.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02478-9
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/centimorgan-chart-understanding-dna
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