I think my DNA made me stupid.

National Geographic and IBM have teamed up for the Genographic Project https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html a "landmark study of the human journey." I got all excited when I heard about it, so Davy bought me a participation kit for my birthday. I swabbed my cheeks and sent in my samples and I waited, and waited, and waited. And while I waited, I fantasized about what my results would tell me. Mainly, I couldn't wait to find out about my racial makeup, which would tell me once and for all whether the story my Nana liked to tell about some ancestor (Her grandmother? Her aunt? Why can't I remember to write the important stuff down???) being part Cherokee had any truth to it at all.

Well my results came, and WTF? I don't understand a freaking word of it. Apparently my mitochondrial HVR I sequence varies from the Cambridge Reference Sequence at two points by a nucleotide base mutation in which a pyrimidine base is exchanged for another pyrimidine or a purine base is replaced with another purine. Like me, you'll be comforted to know that this mutation, called a transition substitution, is the most common type of single point mutation.

Oh yeah, and this mutation apparently means that I'm a part of Haplogroup H--which I think means my ancestors came from somewhere in Europe. See for yourself: https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/report.html

(Really. Log in as fwn95d6c9v and see what you can make of it--free lunch to anyone who can 'splain it to me. . . )

So anyway, I could have told you without a DNA test that I had ancestors from somewhere in Europe. Now, finding out where in Europe I originally came from would have been of interest to me. Finding out whether my I was part Cherokee would have been way cool. But finding out I have ancestors from somewhere in Europe was not what I was hoping for.

Maybe there's more there and I'm just too thick to figure it out. On the bright side, I've never been more sure that skipping a career in genetics was the right move for me. . .