Ethnic Origins
Seven years ago, there was a big trend around those DNA test kits that use saliva. I bought one to analyze my ancestry and got my results. A few weeks ago, I noticed they had updated their algorithm and analysis, so now I have new information about my genetic origins.
Even though I now believe that giving your genetic data to a multinational company is a bad idea from a privacy perspective, and considering these results have a fairly wide margin of error, here are my updated results:
Central American: 60% According to the analysis, 40% of my ancestry comes from the south, countries like Costa Rica, Panama, or Colombia, and 20% from the north, like Honduras or El Salvador. Since I was born in Costa Rica, I couldn't feel more connected to this. Maybe not everyone knows it, but in my country, we divide the Americas into three regions instead of two. Between Colombia and Mexico, we place a region called Central America. Fortunately, this DNA test reflects that division, which makes me feel like they got it right.
Iberian Peninsula: 40% The study shows that I’m 35% Spanish and 5% Portuguese. Considering how common migration between Spain and Portugal has been, that makes a lot of sense. The mixing between Spaniards and Latin Americans was very frequent during the colonization of the New World, so this part of the analysis feels quite accurate to me.
And that’s it. No African, Asian, or Oceanian ancestry. I believe most people from my home country probably have a similar genetic background. What stands out to me the most is that I never imagined living in Spain. It never even crossed my mind. And now, here I am, living in a very Spanish village on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.