What made you interested in genetics and ancestry?

[Myanthropologies]

For those of you who are into that, what made you interested?

- were you curious where you came from?
- was it for nationalistic purposes?
- was it to find something special about yourself?
- did you just want to learn more about race?

For me personally, I was curious about my heritage. The origin of Afghan Pashtuns was always never clear, and I was told I had partial greek, russian, persian, bulgarian, etc ancestry, so I wanted to find out for sure. I also like to see how pashtuns compare to the world in terms of shared ancestors, etc. And I was curious about other people in general.

[Prutt]

I know my ancestry. I don't need this.

[Myanthropologies]

Bump

[Dr. Robotnik the Subbotnik]

For me it all started with a Vietnamese-American classmate who talked about his being of Vietnamese descent all the time and how epic that was. Would often ask others about their ancestry. He got me intrigued in mine and now I'm here.

[LP0956]

Mats Hummels

[Wanderer]

I don't know, really. It'd be hard to put into words. I see ethnicity sort of in terms of one's baseline for viewing & interacting with the world, if that makes any sense. In other words: an integral part of who you are. For me, my interest began with my own and has grown from there to encompass a more general interest in concepts such as ethnicity. I just find human identity to be a fascinating topic. Racial, ethnic, regional, cultural, civic identity in particular, and how identity differs along these metrics; many different non-mutually exclusive combinations are possible.

Also something that's naturally rewarding, probably because it's so fundamental to humans. I am quite collectivist in my outlook in that I completely appreciate the duality between the individual & the collective. For many people, it's all about my former, but that seems like a empty and deracinated way to live. For me, it's important that any accomplishments I've made (such as educational attainments thus far in my life) be considered credits not just to myself, but to Ukraine in a broader sense. If I came up with some brilliant invention, I'd certainly like the world to know it came from a Ukrainian. Sort of like being part of a team and what side you're on, etc. So I have an intuitive understanding of how I feel this dynamic works for me; naturally, I'm interested in how it works for others, but of course it is not always possible to pigeonhole other people into the same kinds of paradigms that I embrace.

[ЛыSSый]

this theme is hardly forced in my country for last (25?) years. And year by year our history is rewriting.

[Africa]

I know what my old family papers say about the origin of my family but I was curious to know what science says

[skbu]

In many ways, modern life is mundane. You jump the same hurdles, wear the same clothes, do the same 9-5 as everybody else. Genetics can overturn that - from superficial things like eye and hair colour to subtle things like SNPs, genetics and ancestry is a way I can feel like I'm unique and interesting. Even though I know that I, like everybody else, am not

[dddcc]

What made me interested in all this stuff is basically the need to learn if I was an Arab or a Berber.
I was Arabist since childhood (in fact when still aged something like 6 my parents made me member of an Arabist party and were prideful when at my early age I recited poems about Palestine to the party crowds)
My parents were also leftist (now they are still Arabist but became Islamist and they make prayers and fast Ramadhan) and registred me at the Soviet cultural center (it was still called the Soviet cultural center even when it was the late 90's) where I went on holidays watching beautiful Russian cartoon films and other ballet dances.
For some reason at my early 20's and thanks partly to the internet and especially wikipedia I came to the conclusion that Arabs could not have killed all Berbers and it could be that Tunisians still preserve Berber blood, later I learned about FTDNA and decided to test myself to settle down definitely my identity issue.
To my great surprise it appeared that I'm only half Tunisian, however I realized that my Tunisian half is Berber and not Arab.
Now when people ask about my ethnicity I say that I'am Tunisian and Tunisians are Berber (while still teenager I proudly identified as Arab and was one of the ''leaders'' of the Arabist youth amongst students when still in secondary school, in those days we boycotted lessons and made rallies inside the school protesting Israeli and US raids)
Also I no longer take pride in being from X or Y ethnicity (though I show curiousity and respect to my ancestors' culture and history) and I'm actually studying Berber language as well as German by myself.
Indeed because of my hypthetical Germanic ancestry I decided to learn a Germanic language (besides English) and I picked Deutsch because it's by far the most important Germanic language (it seems I have Celtic ancestry as well however I dont, actually, go as far as learning the nearly moribund Gaelic language)