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No anthropologist objects to the use of genetic testing in general. It's an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly. The issue is that interpreting genetic

No anthropologist objects to the use of genetic testing in general. It's an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly. The issue is that interpreting genetics in an anthropological context is nonobvious. What anthropologists are interested in are "people", and people are not strictly their ancestry. There are groups with similar ancestry for instance, but wildly different cultures. Slaves offer easy examples. Your can also find ancestral groups with near identical cultural traits. "Americans" are a convenient, though not precise, example. For added fun, there are even groups with similar ancestry and material culture, yet who speak languages from entirely different families. Have fun testing your preconceptions against that. What this ultimately means is that genetics alone are not sufficient to precisely capture what we're interested in, nor are traditional archaeological/anthropological methods. You need to reconcile some very different types of data into a synthetic whole. The general problem of how to do this is still being explored.

gnarbarian 9y ago
I agree. It remains true that most people inherit their culture in the same way that we inherit our genes (from our parents). Cultural paradigm shifts don't always imply the previous people were replaced. Ireland's conversion to Christianity is a good example of this. The added data points of genetic analysis can help us determine when a culture shift was due to a paradigm shift in the community or when the shift was due to replacement/displacement of the previous people. America is a perfect example of the latter, where Native Americans and their culture were largely replaced by Europeans both culturally and genetically. Of course Native Americans and their cultures still exist, but they are no longer dominant in North America. A genetic analysis would confirm that Native Americans didn't simply start building European style cities in the 1500s, they were essentially displaced by another people.

gnarbarian 9y ago

I agree. It remains true that most people inherit their culture in the same way that we inherit our genes (from our parents). Cultural paradigm shifts don't always imply the previous people were replaced. Ireland's conversion to Christianity is a good example of this. The added data points of genetic analysis can help us determine when a culture shift was due to a paradigm shift in the community or when the shift was due to replacement/displacement of the previous people. America is a perfect example of the latter, where Native Americans and their culture were largely replaced by Europeans both culturally and genetically. Of course Native Americans and their cultures still exist, but they are no longer dominant in North America. A genetic analysis would confirm that Native Americans didn't simply start building European style cities in the 1500s, they were essentially displaced by another people.