Originally Posted by
jetshop
My 23andme kit (beta enabled) predictably gave me 99.1% Ashkenazi, 0.5% Broadly European, and 0.2% Broadly Levantine. But to my surprise, my MyHeritage kit puts me at ~82% Ashkenazi and ~18% Greek and South Italian. I uploaded my 23andme kit to MyHeritage back when the site was allowing you to do that for free, and the results are basically the same except they gave me a little bit of just "Italian" in addition to Greek and South Italian. Looking through my top matches on MyHeritage, I noticed that almost none of them score 100% Ashkenazi. (So far I have only found one person who has 100%.) Their reports have something else, usually including one or more of Mizrahi, Sephardi, locations from the MENA region or even Central Asia, or Greek and South Italian like I have. These additional percentages roughly range from 2-20%. Maybe some of them do have ancestors who belong to these groups, but the fact that I got so much Greek and have found other Ashkenazim who have had similar discrepancies between MyHeritage and 23andme makes me wonder a) what MyHeritage's model/range for Ashkenazi actually looks like and b) whether these additional groups MyHeritage is giving people actually point to some meaningful variation or geographic differences, and what those differences actually are.
Does anybody here have insight into these questions?
For what it's worth, I tried comparing myself to random South Italian, Sicilian, and Greek GEDmatch kits I found on Google and I did routinely get lots of matches in the 5-7 cM range with people from various Greek islands, especially the Peloponnese. But I got a lot of matches like that from other peoples in the Eastern Mediterannean so I don't know what the significance of that is...
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