Bengalis — The Fourth Ancestor and the Missing Reference Panel
Copyright: Sanjay Basu The fourth ancestor in Bengali DNA is real. But the two claims that made the video spread are not really about Bengali biology. They are about missing data. I watched a sixteen minute video on this last week. Most of it holds up. The East Asian piece is really there. The date is close to right. The way it rises as you move east across Bengal is a real finding. Someone did the homework. The two moments built to make you share it are the ones that break. A software tool that locates people by their DNA could not place Bengalis on a map. A team in Brazil looking for the closest living Asian relatives of Native Americans ended up pointing at Bangladesh. The video tells both stories as if the DNA were so strange that the instruments gave up. That is not what happened. In both cases the tool worked fine. The list it was comparing against simply did not contain the right answer. That difference is the whole point, and I run into the same mistake every week at work...