At what amount would admixture be visible?

[Sam Ryan]

Say someone has a 3rd or 4th great-grandfather from Portugal but the rest of their ancestors are from the British Isles. They wouldn't have more than 2 percent Portuguese admixture and the rest from NW Europe. Is 2 to 3 percent of something visible or would it be impossible to discern, drowned out by all the other influences?
Any real-world examples of a 2 percent admixture being visible?

[Leto]

2, 12 or even 20 percent Portuguese in a British person will not be visible because it's also a European ethnicity. Non-Caucasoid races are a different story, though 2-3% is (normally) too small an amount even for that type of ancestry.

[mitalit]

2% is very little. But a great-grandparent (12%) is probably visible

[Flashball]

Doesn't work like that...


In genetics, reasoning like this: "from 3 to 25% is too low, so extra-European genetic variants will not be expressed" is not correct.

This would be rather exact to say : from 3 to 25%, the genetic variants are always present in the genome, however the level of expression of these non-European genetic variants (old or recent) is variable according the percentage.

For example, the rate of ancient North African among Galicians is at the highest of 11% and 2.6% (I believe) among Catalans, so it must be understood that there is more probability of expression of genetic variants non-euro in a Galician village with 10% old North African than in a Catalan village with 2% old North African... but that does not mean that it does not exist among Catalans with 2%, you have to see everything this in terms of "probability of expression of genetic variants", not so much in terms of "11% is low, so no chance of expression of genetic variants", because it is incorrect and unscientific reasoning.

[Petalpusher]

It's indeed more a probability of expression, visible expression i would add in that case. Even 1% of admixture out of the typically few thousand of snps tested, translate into a lot of genes overall that could peak in a very different ethnicity. Statistically some features more prevalent in a particular group could show up even at very low level of admixture but are decreasingly likely to be dominant in many visible ones, as much as in the invisible ones such as complex organs like the brain which requires much more genes than anything visible in the phenotype. People are obsessed with visible features when talking about genes, admixture and so on but 1/3 of all our genes expressed and active serve the brain alone. This is the highest proportion of genes expressed in any part of the body.


People with the same or very similar admixture don't all look the same or even siblings can look quite different and more important have different personality, only twins do look the same and think the same (some striking studies about this), as they have an identical gene expression out of the same pool.

[RareNightmare]

Porutgese people are europeans and it is 1/50th. Also, if you took a full Portuguese person and a full british person stripped them down and asked a random non anthrotard person to guess their country of origin/ethnicity and if they were the same, they probably couldn't discern the two especially if you grabbed someone who was as much as a quarter Portuguese and then someone who was a full blooded brit. Call me retarded, but I wasn't able to tell that even Tom Hanks was half portuguese. 114236

[Roy]

2, 12 or even 20 percent Portuguese in a British person will not be visible because it's also a European ethnicity. Non-Caucasoid races are a different story, though 2-3% is (normally) too small an amount even for that type of ancestry.

Somehow though we've seen Hungarians and Romanians with 1-3% of Asian DNA which imho shows up subtly in them phenotypically. And don't forget a Mongolian spot on newborns that show up even on those with a very minimal Asian input in their DNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot

[Luke35]

Any amount can theoretically be visible. Question should be, what amount of admix is consistently visible. For that I would say 12-25% range.

[Zoro]

Somehow though we've seen Hungarians and Romanians with 1-3% of Asian DNA which imho shows up subtly in them phenotypically. And don't forget a Mongolian spot on newborns that show up even on those with a very minimal Asian input in their DNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot

You wouldn’t see Asian facial features if it was only 1-3%. This number is meaningless because it doesn’t tell you how much older and more recent total Asian DNA they have. All the number says is they have 1-3% above the Romanian or E. european references. What they don’t tell you is how much E. Asian older and more recent E. Asian those Romanian and E. European references themselves have !!

[Roy]

You wouldn’t see Asian facial features if it was only 1-3%. This number is meaningless because it doesn’t tell you how much older and more recent total Asian DNA they have. All the number says is they have 1-3% above the Romanian or E. european references. What they don’t tell you is how much E. Asian older and more recent E. Asian those Romanian and E. European references themselves have !!

So these tests are faulty in their design?

[Sceptillionaire]

As others have pointed out, it depends on how dominant or recessive the admixture is, and how distant the two populations are from each other. Sub-Saharan admixture in a European is likely to be visible from a higher single digit percentage, and vice versa, while full 50% central or northern French admixture in a Brit may not even be noticeable, as the two populations are very similar to each other, share a fairly recent common ancestor (Bell Beaker) and have been mixing for two millennia anyway.

I don't think 2% admixture is likely to be visible even in extremely distant populations. Different groups of humans are not very genetically distant to each other, even on the 'racial' level, due to our lack of long-term geographical borders meaning we frequently mix with each other throughout history. Chimpanzees, with a population of ~150,000 worldwide, are more genetically diverse than humans with our near 8 billion individuals. Our ability to build boats to cross rivers, thick coats to cross mountain ranges, and cars to make travelling extremely fast makes these geographical boundaries not really work as they do for other species. There is probably no type of admixture that would be immediately or at all visible at 2%.


Porutgese people are europeans and it is 1/50th. Also, if you took a full Portuguese person and a full british person stripped them down and asked a random non anthrotard person to guess their country of origin/ethnicity and if they were the same, they probably couldn't discern the two especially if you grabbed someone who was as much as a quarter Portuguese and then someone who was a full blooded brit. Call me retarded, but I wasn't able to tell that even Tom Hanks was half portuguese. 114236

I don't think you're retarded for not picking it up; I didn't even know he was half Portuguese until I saw this post. With a beard he looks mega Iberian, without he's just undiscernible European, which is fairly accurate given his ancestry.

[J. Ketch]

It would be discernable to the trained anthrotard. If you didn't have curly hair or brown eyes you would at least smell of Nando's.

[Cristiano viejo]

I didn't even know he was half Portuguese until I saw this post. With a beard he looks mega Iberian, without he's just undiscernible European, which is fairly accurate given his ancestry.
Looking mega Iberian is just indisputably European.

[RareNightmare]

As others have pointed out, it depends on how dominant or recessive the admixture is, and how distant the two populations are from each other. Sub-Saharan admixture in a European is likely to be visible from a higher single digit percentage, and vice versa, while full 50% central or northern French admixture in a Brit may not even be noticeable, as the two populations are very similar to each other, share a fairly recent common ancestor (Bell Beaker) and have been mixing for two millennia anyway.

I don't think 2% admixture is likely to be visible even in extremely distant populations. Different groups of humans are not very genetically distant to each other, even on the 'racial' level, due to our lack of long-term geographical borders meaning we frequently mix with each other throughout history. Chimpanzees, with a population of ~150,000 worldwide, are more genetically diverse than humans with our near 8 billion individuals. Our ability to build boats to cross rivers, thick coats to cross mountain ranges, and cars to make travelling extremely fast makes these geographical boundaries not really work as they do for other species. There is probably no type of admixture that would be immediately or at all visible at 2%.



I don't think you're retarded for not picking it up; I didn't even know he was half Portuguese until I saw this post. With a beard he looks mega Iberian, without he's just undiscernible European, which is fairly accurate given his ancestry.

Portuguese are somewhat germanic but anyhow, I have double digits in non eurpopean admixture and you can't even discern me from the average white person. I mean I'm imagining that OP doesn't really look very portuguese unless they're looking very hard for portuguse features.

[Polak]

Somehow though we've seen Hungarians and Romanians with 1-3% of Asian DNA which imho shows up subtly in them phenotypically. And don't forget a Mongolian spot on newborns that show up even on those with a very minimal Asian input in their DNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot

I'm around 3-5% Central-East Asian (Tatar ancestry) and you can't tell, but you can with my father and great grandmother (it's like it skips a generation).

[RareNightmare]

I'm around 3-5% Central-East Asian (Tatar ancestry) and you can't tell, but you can with my father and great grandmother (it's like it skips a generation).

Lmao the trace elements

[Sam Ryan]

114670 Why do people generally try to make Italians look darker than they are? I looked at an Italian news channel on Youtube and they don't look that darker than lots of the Brits interviewed on the BBC.

[Vegtamr]

It honestly depends. I have seen quadroons that look like really ugly white people, but I have also seen quadroons that look clearly like lightskin Africans. I also agree with Leto insofar as that I doubt Portuguese would have much phenotypic impact unless present in large proportions.

[Ratmir]

This ex-couple had twins and then sextuplets (six babies born at once), they all look very, very Asian, even though they're only one quarter Korean. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they all were born premature and with the help of fertility treatment?


on October 8, 2000, she gave birth to twin girls, Cara Nicole and Madelyn "Mady" Kate, who were premature at 35 weeks gestation.[7] Gosselin became pregnant through fertility treatment because polycystic ovary syndrome left her unable to conceive otherwise. After further treatments, Gosselin became pregnant again and, on May 10, 2004, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, she gave birth to sextuplets: sons Aaden Jonathan; Collin Thomas; and Joel Kevin; and daughters Alexis Faith, Hannah Joy, and Leah Hope. She gave birth at just shy of 30 weeks gestation. The sextuplets were born 10 weeks premature, which is common in the multiple births resulting from fertility treatments.[citation needed] The early birth required the six infants to be placed on ventilators.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Gosselin

https://uploads.celebrityinsider.org/uploads/2019/05/jon-kate-gosselin-1.jpg
https://cdn.thehollywoodgossip.com/uploads/2018/10/kate-and-her-fam.jpg