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McDonald's BGA project

From ISOGG Wiki

Doug McDonald's BGA project does two types of free biogeographical ancestry tests. One is like 23andMe's "Advanced Global Similarity", except that he does more "dimensions". For people with ancestry outside Europe four of these are shown. For pure Europeans his world graph is essentially identical to 23andMe's so instead he shows a European graph, which includes (at lower right) the Adygei, a tribe living on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. The higher dimensions do not give additional information for pure Europeans so they are not shown. The results are sent to participants on graphs as .png files. Dr McDonald also does quantitative tests. These come in three flavors: first without South Asia (represented by Pakistan) and the Middle East, second with South Asia, and finally with all three, as comparison panels.

Dr McDonald previously performed BGA analyses free of charge to everyone who sent in a request. As of June 2013 he has asked that requests should be limited to the more interesting and important cases. The following message has been received from Dr McDonald:

"I am being swamped by requests for BGA analyses. I simply can no longer accommodate all these requests. I am, at least for a while, going to continue providing them free, if people will limit themselves to sending only "important" ones. These include adoptees looking for answers and people whose commercial analyses provide strange answers to whether they have Native American, African or Jewish ancestry.

Note that the new 23andMe "Ancestry Composition" is, on a "continent" level, essentially as good as my system. FTDNA and Ancestry are much less accurate and if you tested with them and they missed expected small bits, I still can take a look. If you are Afro-(Euro)American and FTDNA said you are part Eastern European, I'll check that. Try to describe the question you need answered.

I am still looking for special people to test as comparisons, mostly people with Native American not from Central America.

In particular, I really can't keep up with requests from essentially 100% European people unless they have special questions such as possible Jewish or Roma.

Also, if you have parents their children, please send only parents. Some people have sent me large numbers of files. If these people send more, I can look at them only if they have very very special needs.

Finally, if you got my address from some Web forum, please copy the above occasionally, as I do not frequent these."

If you meet the qualifying criteria for Doug McDonald's project contact him at .

Further reading

The following forum discussions provide further information about Doug McDonald's work together with screenshots of his reports:

See also