HOW GHANAIAN AM I? MY LIVING DNA RESULTS #GIFTED

Thursday, 7 March 2019

I am a bit of a biology geek. I love understanding how the body works, why we look the way we do, why we do the things we do. I always question, whether it is nature vs.nurture. One of the things I geek out about is DNA and ancestry results. I watch numerous videos on YouTube about DNA ancestry and I always wanted to take part. By fate, the team at Living DNA reached out to me last year asking to take part in a review. Thy gifted me a DNA test kit, in which I filmed the process on my Instagram stories. Just click DNA Results (the house icon). In a nutshell, the process was super easy.

Using the Living DNA kit

Firstly, you're presented with a Living DNA kit, with a swab, a specimen bag, instructions on how to use the kit, and your online profile information, to which you set up your account on Living DNA. So I swabbed my cheeks, placed my DNA in the bag and sent the kit away to be analysed.

The results
DNA works by you taking 50% of your DNA from your Mum and 50% from your Dad. To make you! Living DNA analyses the data in 3 ways, (autosomal, motherline and fatherline). However, if you're a female, you'll never know your fatherline from your DNA. Only males receive this, you'll need to get a close male relative to receive this.

They track your ancestor's movements at several points in time between 80,000 to 150,000 years ago from the point modern humans migrated out of Africa to where they moved through several eras spanning thousands of years. How sick is that? Not to mention they go back 10 generations.

Sooo, without further ado... here are my results:

I am 93.1% African mostly West African, and 6.9% FRENCH.

Yorubaland- 84.5%
Here's what Living DNA say about this!

Centered around the Niger River Delta, the Yorubaland genetic cluster extends over the modern day regions of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, and parts of Niger and Mali. From Ile-Ife to the Oyo Empire, this land has been home to an array of historical city-states and kingdoms, and the people that live here today have an incredibly rich regional heritage. In addition to the Yoruba people themselves, ethnic groups such as the Igbo of Nigeria and Akan and Gaa-Adangbe of Ghana fall into this cluster, with a high level of genetic similarity between the different peoples of this region.

So I am Ghanaian, with a dash of other countries lol.

Mandika- 6.5%
Here's what Living DNA say about this!

The Mandinka are found predominantly in the Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, and Mauritania. Empires such as the Mali Empire and Songhai Empire were hotbeds of international trade and scholarship over a thousand years ago and were well known throughout the medieval world for their riches and powerful rulers.

East Africa- 2.1%
Here's what Living DNA say about this!

The expansion of the Bantu people across Africa started roughly 3000 years ago in West Africa, where a small group of people started to master how to grow crops and work iron. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle was exchanged for farming, leading to the growth of villages and towns, able to support a relatively high population density and the formation of increasingly powerful chieftains and kings. These new agriculturalists appear to have then spread out from their West African homeland across the continent - perhaps due to population pressures caused by their growth in numbers.

French- 2.1%
Here's what Living DNA say about this!

If you have French ancestry inferred that you didn’t expect: We have observed that mixtures of British and Italian ancestry can sometimes be partly mistaken for French. Other mixtures such as of Germanic and Spanish ancestry involving countries neighbouring France may behave similarly. These issues are because it is difficult to tell apart having mixed ancestry recently, compared to having French ancestry causing sharing of DNA with people from similar regions, a little further in the past. French ancestry is also similar to British ancestry for people who have ancestry from all over the UK.

So that's it, I know who I am.. genetically. I am encouraging all my friends and family to do this. Now I need to get my Dad to do it so I can work out our fatherline ancestry.

Thanks Living DNA