31-05-2025
Who do we think we are, anyway? DNA testing is rewriting national histories
Family histories are notoriously prone to works of artistic falsehood. Shows like Who Do You Think You Are? work by showing people what lies behind half-remembered stories and occasional dubious paternity cases. National stories, however, are solid. We might be uncertain about our precise roots as individuals, but we know who we are as a nation.
At least, that's what I thought. But just as cheap DNA testing has blown up fondly-held family tales – none of my ancestors were Huguenot, and one ancestor in Cork may have had to explain to Saint Peter how the Iberian ended up in my genome – it's also rewriting how we think about history.
Some stories turn out to be true. King Alfred succeeded in fighting back the Danish Vikings, who left 'no obvious genetic signature'. Neither, for that matter, did the Romans: the white English as an ethnic group are essentially German, and the Welsh really are closer to the pre-Saxon people of Britain than everyone else.
Other results are less expected. Ashkenazi Jews draw part of their ancestry from Levantine populations, but may draw even more from Italy. The people who built Stonehenge were replaced by the people of the Beaker culture almost entirely, leaving their fate an unpleasant mystery, and raising the uncomfortable thought that prehistory may have been a bloodier place than we like to think. And while black Americans can learn more about their African roots, they also learn about their European heritage; the descendants of slaves are also the descendants of slave-owners.
It's fascinating, and it's a delight and a privilege to live in a time where we can lift some of the veil over our collective history to catch a distant glimpse of the people who made us. But does it have any real world impact?
Perhaps not. I can't see the Balkans engaging in a festival of brotherly unity on realising Serbs and Croats are pretty much the same people. Even leaving aside methodological disputes – I could have written this piece claiming the English are actually Danes – there's a reason we forgot these population movements.
The point of national myths isn't that they're true, but that they give us something to cohere around. They tell us who we are and how we relate to each other with such strength that other ties are forgotten. DNA may rewrite ancient history, but for better or worse – the present is here to stay.
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