23andMe Reference Populations & Regions

Southern Europe, which includes the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan peninsulas as well as the island of Malta, is a region defined in great part by the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean has provided transportation routes, keeping these regions connected culturally and genetically. Broadly Southern European DNA matches several specific populations and is difficult to assign to just one.

The people of Bangladesh and northeast India share an ancient genetic history in the region where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers meet. Tens of thousands of years ago, hunter-gatherers arrived from the west. Later migrations of Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian, and Indo-European-speaking groups brought additional genetic and linguistic diversity to the region. Compared to other South Asian populations, the people of Bangladesh and northeast India generally have more East Asian ancestry, reflecting the region’s role as a genetic crossroads.

The Bengali & Northeast Indian population has the following Country Matches:

• Bangladesh
• India (northeastern regions)
• Nepal

For thousands of years, Central Asian peoples have lived at the crossroads between eastern and western Eurasia, and their genetics reflect that history. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and China’s Taklamakan desert, the region has seen the empires of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Soviet Russia come and go. Today, Central Asia is home to over 100 million people, and their DNA contains varying degrees of similarity to East Asian, South Asian, or western Asian peoples.

The Central Asian population has the following Country Matches:

• Afghanistan
• Kazakhstan
• Kyrgyzstan
• Tajikistan
• Turkmenistan
• Uzbekistan

Gujarati Patidars are members of a genetically distinct community from western India who descend from primarily agricultural and merchant classes. (Patel is the most common last name in this community and is related to the name Patidar, which means landowner). Over the centuries, as Patidars married within their community, a distinctive genetic heritage developed. Today, people with the last name Patel represent around 15% of the population of Gujarat and almost 10% of people of Indian descent in the United States.

Today, around one-seventh of the world’s people live along or near the basins of the Indus and Ganges Rivers. Most northern Indian and Pakistani people speak Indo-European languages brought to the region from Central Asia around 4,000 years ago during the decline of the Indus Valley civilization. More recently, this region was home to a series of powerful empires, including the Sikh, Gupta, and Mughal empires.

The Northern Indian & Pakistani population has the following Country Matches:

• India (northern regions)
• Pakistan

Home to the Malayali (meaning “people of the mountains”), Kerala has been at the heart of a thriving international spice trade for millennia, becoming one of India’s most diverse and prosperous states. This genetic signature reaches high levels among Christian communities who live in Kerala, a large number of whom immigrated to the United States during the last century.

Humans first arrived in Sri Lanka and the southern states of India as early as 70,000 years ago. Within the past two millennia, southern India saw great Hindu kingdoms come and go, including the Chola and Chera Dynasties as well as Vijayanagar — whose capital, Hampi, was among the largest cities of the medieval world. This genetic signature may be related to the spread of Dravidian languages, although the majority of Sri Lankans now speak Sinhalese, an Indo-European language.

The Southern Indian & Sri Lankan population has the following Country Matches:

• India (southern regions)
• Sri Lanka

Around 10,000 years ago — long after humans first reached East Asia’s inland plateaus and temperate Pacific coast — people of the Cishan culture began to domesticate millet in China’s Yellow River basin. Descendants of these farmers later founded one of the world's most enduring civilizations and transformed the genetic landscape of East Asia. Although northern Chinese and Tibetan people share ancestry dating back more than 2,000 years, Tibetans also carry the genetic legacy of indigenous Tibetan hunter-gatherers. Individuals with “Northern Chinese & Tibetan” ancestry in their Ancestry Composition results may have ancestry from one or both of these populations.

The Northern Chinese & Tibetan population has the following Country Match:

• Mainland China (northern provinces)

People of the Shangshan culture near the lower Yangtze began to domesticate rice around 10,000 years ago, and their genetic legacy was likely carried by their descendants as far away as Madagascar and the remote Pacific. Rice remains at the center of southern Chinese agriculture, but the ancestry of southern Chinese people was transformed by the expansion of early northern dynasties. Although these migrations pulled the diverse peoples of southern China toward a shared genetic identity with their northern neighbors, a distinct, southern ancestry still predominates from Sichuan to Shanghai. The large majority of Taiwanese people also share this ancestry, after centuries of migration from the Chinese mainland.

The Southern Chinese & Taiwanese population has the following Country Matches:

• Mainland China (southern provinces)
• Taiwan

By comparing the DNA of thousands of rice cultivars, Chinese scientists identified the Pearl River system as the most likely location of the world’s earliest rice domestication. Just as it once connected ancient farming societies and the southern Yue states, the Pearl River system now links millions of people in South China, from Nanning to Guangzhou and Hong Kong. A unique genetic signature can be found across the region, despite the southward expansion of the Han dynasty around 2,000 years ago. Cantonese and Taishanese—Yue dialects from the Pearl River delta—are still widely spoken among descendants of 19th and early 20th-century South Chinese immigrants around the world.

The South Chinese population has the following Country Match:

• Mainland China (south provinces)

Present-day Vietnam was the cradle of one of the world’s earliest civilizations, and one of the world’s first regions to develop rice-based agriculture. A tropical country on the Indochinese Peninsula, Vietnam is bordered by China to the north and by Laos and Cambodia to the west. The country has 54 ethnic groups, the largest being the Kinh, who make up more than 85% of the population.

Many indigenous Filipinos, including the Aeta, Batak, and Mamanwa peoples, are likely descended from one of the earliest dispersals of modern humans out of Africa. However, most Filipinos can trace their ancestry to a much more recent and widespread migration of Southeast Asian seafarers related to the indigenous people of Taiwan. Today, this genetic signature – called “Austronesian” (meaning “southern island”) – is common across the islands of the Pacific, from the Philippine Sea to Hawaii, and can be found as far away as Madagascar.

The Filipino & Austronesian population has the following Country Matches:

• American Samoa
• Guam
• Madagascar
• Micronesia
• Northern Mariana Islands
• Palau
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Tonga

From Myanmar to Indonesia, the people of Southeast Asia are genetically diverse, reflecting the legacies of several migrations beginning over 40,000 years ago. More recently, the region has been heavily influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures. Before its fall in the fifteenth century, the Khmer empire – encompassing modern-day Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia – was the largest land empire in the region’s history.

The Indonesian, Thai, Khmer & Myanma population has the following Country Matches:

• Cambodia
• Indonesia
• Laos
• Malaysia
• Myanmar
• Thailand

The Dai people of southern China belong to the larger Tai ethnolinguistic group that currently lives in parts of China, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. In China, the Dai are one of over 50 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, and are united by unique cultural traditions anchored in Dai folk religion or Buddhism. Most Chinese Dai live in southern and western Yunnan Province, and are genetically more similar to their Vietnamese neighbors than they are to the Han Chinese.

The Japanese Archipelago, composed of a whopping 6,852 islands, was colonized by multiple waves of immigrants beginning as early as 30,000 BCE. Modern Japanese people can trace most of their ancestry to the Stone Age Jōmon and late Stone Age Yayoi cultures. Yayoi DNA is concentrated in the center of Japan, while Jōmon ancestry persists to the north and south among the culturally distinctive Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples.

The Korean peninsula was first inhabited by hunter-gatherers who were genetically similar to Stone Age peoples living near the Amur River in eastern Russia. These early Koreans were later joined by Bronze Age rice farmers from southern China or Vietnam. By the 10th century, Korea was politically and culturally unified and remained so until the establishment of a communist north and a democratic south after the Second World War. Although North and South Koreans are politically divided, they remain genetically similar to one another.

The Manchurian and Mongolian population includes ethnolinguistic minorities like the Daur people — who speak a language related to Mongolian — and the Oroqen people, who speak a Tungusic language and live near the Amur River basin. These groups reside at the juncture of the Central Asian plains, boreal forests, and the Gobi Desert. Linguistically distinct but genetically similar, Mongolian and Manchurian peoples generally practice shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism.

Many ethnolinguistic groups call the northern reaches of Asia home. Among them are the Yukaghir, the Nganasan, and the Turkic-speaking Yakuts, who migrated North and East from southern Siberia between 700-900 years ago to escape encroaching raiders. Today, the Yakuts are a large ethnic minority in northeastern Siberia and share genetic similarities with other indigenous groups in the region including the Evenks, Evens, and Buryats. Indigenous Siberians are often well adapted to climate extremes, as they face some of the largest annual temperature fluctuations in the world.

Northern Asian ancestry reflects a history of rapid, widespread human migrations across the vast Central Asian plains, and along the plateaus and waterways of Siberia. Genetic markers associated with northern Asian ancestry may be relics of these far-reaching migrations, and cannot be confidently assigned to a specific region or group.

A continuum of genetic diversity stretches from Senegal to Nigeria, but the people of the coastal countries above the Gulf of Guinea — Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana — share a genetic similarity distinct from neighboring regions. The Temne people, who constitute the largest group in Sierra Leone, call this region home, as do the Mende people, who reside across West Africa. In neighboring Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the Akan peoples predominate.

The Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean population has the following Country Matches:

• Ghana
• Liberia
• Sierra Leone

The Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Ashanti people
• Ewe, Fon, Ga-Dangme, and Fante peoples
• Mende people
• Peoples of Liberia
• Temne & Limba peoples

Nigeria’s population is the largest in Africa and one of the most diverse, with over 250 ethnic groups. The country's arid north is home to people of mostly Hausa and Fulani descent, while the Yoruba people are concentrated in the southwest, the Ijaw people in the tropical south, and the Igbo people in the southeast. As much as two thirds of African-Americans' Sub-Saharan DNA may trace back to Nigerian ancestors, due to the disproportionate impact of the Atlantic slave trade on the people of the region.

The Nigerian population has the following Country Match:

• Nigeria

The Nigerian population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Bamileke and Kom peoples
• Edo & Ijaw peoples
• Esan people
• Igbo people
• Yoruba people

The people of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau share many traditions related to the history of powerful empires in the region. In The Gambia, the Mandinka people are the largest group, with historical roots along the Niger River basin, while the Wolof people form the majority in neighboring Senegal. In Guinea and Guinea-Bissau the Fulani people predominate, and may have subtle genetic links to North Africa or western Asia. In the 18th century, around 400,000 people from this region were enslaved and transported to the Americas; nearly 50,000 disembarked in the United States alone.

The Senegambian & Guinean population has the following Country Matches:

• Cape Verde
• Gambia
• Guinea
• Senegal

The Senegambian & Guinean population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Fula & Wolof peoples
• Mandinka people

For over a millennium before European colonization and the Atlantic slave trade, West Africans were united under a series of powerful empires, resulting in broad similarities in music, clothing, art, and cuisine. A gradient of genetic similarity extending from Senegal to Nigeria reflects a richly complex population history in a region home to over 350 million people who form hundreds of distinct ethnic groups. Broadly West African DNA may match several populations, making it difficult to assign to just one.

The Broadly West African population has the following Country Matches:

• Cameroon
• Mauritania

Sudan and South Sudan share a distinct genetic heritage dating to early agricultural civilizations, including the Nubian Kingdoms of Kush and Meroë that once flourished along the banks of the upper Nile. Today, the people of Sudan and South Sudan are ethnically diverse, following a long history of intermarriage between indigenous East Africans and migrants from the Arabian peninsula. However, this Arabian genetic legacy is less common in the south of the region.

The Sudanese population has the following Country Matches:

• South Sudan
• Sudan

Despite recent conflict, Eritreans and Ethiopians were united under the powerful Kingdom of Aksum for almost 1,000 years until its collapse in 940 CE, and their DNA reflects that shared history. The region has also served as a crossroads between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for tens of thousands of years. Today, most Ethiopians and Eritreans have both East African and Arabian ancestry and speak Afro-Asiatic languages, including Oromo, Tigrinya, Arabic, and Amharic.

The Ethiopian & Eritrean population has the following Country Matches:

• Eritrea
• Ethiopia

The Ethiopian & Eritrean population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Peoples of central and western Ethiopia
• Tigrinya speakers

Most ethnic Somalis live in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, or Djibouti, and speak Somali — a member of the larger Cushitic language family spoken from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania. While united by strong religious traditions rooted in the spread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula, almost all ethnic Somalis harbor ancient ancestral roots in northern east Africa and share genetic similarities with other Cushitic-speaking groups, like the Oromo people of Ethiopia. With a deep history of pastoralism, many Somalis continue to rely on goat, sheep, camel, and cattle herding for their subsistence.

The Somali population has Somalia as a Country Match.

Northeast Africa, which here spans from Sudan in the northwest to Ethiopia and Somalia in the southeast, is home to both Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan ethnolinguistic groups. The entire region has a rich history of genetic and cultural exchange between indigenous East Africans and immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula. As a result of both ancient and recent migrations within the region, broadly Northeast African DNA may be difficult to assign to a specific location.

Beginning around 3,000 years ago, the genetic tapestry of the western Congo basin was transformed by the influx of Bantu-speaking peoples from the highlands of what is today Nigeria and Cameroon. More recently, Bantu speakers in the western Congo region established the historical Kingdom of Kongo, which flourished for over 500 years until its collapse at the hands of colonial powers in 1914. Today, Bantu-speaking peoples (such as the Kongo, Teke, Mbochi, and Sangha) are significant majorities in the countries bordering the Congo River.

The Angolan & Congolese population has the following Country Match:

• Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Angolan & Congolese population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Kongo & Mbundu peoples
• Luba & Kete peoples
• Shona & Nguni peoples

Within the last 3,000 years, metallurgy and agriculture arrived in Southern East Africa with the migration of Bantu-speaking peoples from the highlands of what is today Nigeria and Cameroon. The historical center of this Eastern Bantu migration lies in the African Great Lakes region that runs along the Western edge of Kenya and Tanzania. Today, the largest ethnic groups in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda all speak Bantu languages.

The Southern East African population has the following Country Matches:

• Kenya
• Rwanda

The Southern East African population has the following Genetic Groups:

• Hadza & Sandawe
• Kikuyu & Kamba peoples
• Luhya & Luo peoples
• Maasai people
• Rundi peoples

Starting around 3,000 years ago, Bantu speakers carried metallurgy and agriculture from the highlands of Nigeria and Cameroon in two major streams – one southward and one eastward – resulting in ancestry that transcends geopolitical borders. “Bantu” is a term widely used to describe the largest of Africa’s ethnolinguistic families. Likely as a result of these rapid and widespread expansions across Central and Eastern Africa, it is difficult to assign a specific location within Sub-Saharan Africa to some chromosomal segments with a high degree of confidence.

Making up over 10% of Egypt’s population, Copts are a Christian minority who share an ancient history with non-Coptic Egyptians that predates the first pharaohs. However, after the seventh-century conquest of Egypt by the Rashidun Caliphate, the Christian Copts began to become genetically distinct from the Muslim-majority population, while the Coptic language was replaced by Egyptian Arabic outside of a strictly religious setting. Today, most Copts live in Egypt or Sudan, but there are also large Coptic communities living in the United States, Australia, and Canada.

Ancient Egyptians began harvesting crops over 7,000 years ago along the fertile banks of the Nile, relying on annual floods that were believed to be the tears of the goddess Isis. Following the Dynastic Period, Egypt was ruled at various times by Nubian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires, though these centuries of foreign rule had little impact on Egyptian DNA. Since the seventh-century Islamic Expansion — which brought additional linguistic and genetic diversity to the Nile River basin — a uniquely Egyptian genetic signature emerged. Today, this ancestry reaches the highest levels near the Nile Delta, but is also found throughout Egypt and in the southern Levant.

The Levant — comprising modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine — has been an artery of migration between Africa and Asia for over 100,000 years. By 2,500 years ago, the seafaring Phoenicians of the central Levant, whose script gave rise to most modern alphabets, founded coastal colonies across the Mediterranean. In the centuries since the fall of Phoenicia to the first Persian Empire, the expansions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire have brought additional genetic diversity to the region. Today, though it is common throughout the Levant, this ancestry reaches the highest levels in Lebanon.

The Levantine population has the following Country Matches:

• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Syria

For over 100,000 years, humans have lived in the Arabian Peninsula — a bridge between Africa and the rest of the world. Around the same time as the rise of dynastic Egypt, a handful of Arabian civilizations and kingdoms emerged, facilitating trade between Africa and Eurasia. But it wasn’t until the birth of Islam in western Arabia that the Arabic language — along with an Arab-like genetic signature — spread across much of western Asia and North Africa. Today, the peninsula is home to over 75 million people and the world’s second largest subtropical desert.

The Peninsular Arab population has the following Country Matches:

• Bahrain
• Kuwait
• Oman
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• United Arab Emirates
• Yemen

The region bordering the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean has served as an important crossroads of human migration out of Africa over the last 100,000 years. More recently, the Arab conquests of Egypt and the Levant have reinforced this shared genetic heritage, making it difficult to assign some DNA to just one population with confidence.

Anatolia, a fertile peninsula above the eastern Mediterranean, has served as a genetic bridge between Asia and Europe for over 40,000 years. Early Anatolian farmers laid the groundwork for powerful civilizations like the Bronze Age Hittite Empire, followed by centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule. The Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, survived in various forms until falling in the 15th century to the Ottoman Turks, who introduced a Central Asian-like genetic signature.

The Anatolian population has Turkey (western provinces) as a Country Match.

An 11,000-year-old settlement on Cyprus’s southern coast was home to some of the island’s first people who processed grain, made jewelry, and lived with domesticated cats and dogs. By 3,000 years ago, Cypriots were speaking a form of Greek, which remains the language spoken across half of the island, even after long periods of Egyptian, Persian, Venetian, Ottoman, and British rule. In spite of a 1974 attempt to annex Cyprus to Greece and an invasion of the island by Turkish forces in response, most Greek and Turkish-speaking Cypriots remain genetically similar to one another.

From Armenians and Assyrians to Kartvelians and Persians, the diverse people of Iran, the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia share an ancient genetic history dating back to some of the world’s first farmers. Dominated at times by polytheistic, Zoroastrian, Christian, and Islamic beliefs, the region has seen powerful empires come and go. While most of this ancestry is native to western Asia, traces of Central and East Asian-like genetic signatures were introduced as a result of Turkic migrations and the 13th-century Mongol invasion. Today, there are significant Armenian, Iranian, and Assyrian communities around the world, including many in the United States.

The Iranian, Caucasian & Mesopotamian population has the following Country Matches:

• Armenia
• Azerbaijan
• Georgia
• Iran
• Iraq
• Turkey (eastern provinces)

Roughly bounded by Anatolia in the east to Iran in the west, Northern West Asia has a shared genetic heritage going back tens of thousands of years. Domestication of grains and livestock emerged 11,000 years ago in this region, sparking the agricultural revolution that spread to parts of Europe, Africa, and other parts of Asia. Broadly northern West Asian DNA matches several specific populations and is difficult to assign to just one.

No, everyone is analyzed for every marker on our genotyping chip. The “broadly” and “unassigned” assignments mean we weren’t able to confidently assign the piece of DNA to a subpopulation. Learn more in the Aggregation & Reporting section of the Ancestry Composition Guide.

We are confident in the accuracy of your results and the science behind them. But 23andMe is a genetic testing service, which means we can only show you what is found in your DNA. If your Indigenous American heritage cannot be seen through your DNA, that doesn't mean that your understanding of your family heritage as passed down through the generations is incorrect, only that your genetic heritage does not reveal Indigenous American ancestry.

There are a few common reasons why you may not see the Indigenous American population in your Ancestry Composition results:

• If your most recent Indigenous American ancestor was more than five generations ago, you may have inherited little or no DNA directly from your Indigenous American ancestors. The farther back in your history you look, the less likely you are to have inherited DNA directly from every single one of your ancestors. This means that you can be directly descended from a Indigenous American without having any Indigenous American DNA.
• Throughout American history, people without a genetically Indigenous American background have claimed Indigenous American heritage for a variety of social reasons related to the shifting politics of race and indigeneity in the United States. As a result, many families without any genetically Indigenous American ancestors have passed down stories about Indigenous American ancestry. For examples, see this article or the book, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century, by Circe Strum.

There are a few common reasons why your Ancestry Composition might not match what you expect based on historical records or family stories:

• Some genetic populations are especially difficult to tell apart because they share common history.
• Ancestry Composition populations are defined by genetically similar groups of people, not by the political borders of countries.
• The time scale reflected by Ancestry Composition may be different from the time scale of your records.

There are over 150 possible Country Matches in the Ancestry Composition Report. These regions provide information about the countries where your ancestors may have lived on a more recent time scale than your ancestry percentages. Learn more about your genetic groups.