Ancestry’s 2023 Ethnicity Updates

This year’s ethnicity updates introduced a few new regions, but nothing new for the Polynesian categories.  This has made people’s results seem to fluctuate just a little where they find a small increase or decrease in percentage with various existing categories.  For some, there might be new categories (if they received a new region) and for others, the new category that they received is usually something very small, usually less than 5%.

For the ever-evolving categories relating to Polynesians, we have seen how the number of samples has significantly increased over the years, compared to other populations.

Looking through Ancestry’s white paper from 2013 and how since 2018 they have been updating yearly, I extracted the following numbers of reference samples for specific categories created for Polynesians.

The Polynesia category was first created in late 2013  and that category consisted of just 18 samples.  Apparently, they had the same amount for Melanesia (previously reported as 28 samples).¹

In 2018, Ancestry made its first ethnicity update since implementing the Polynesia category. They increased their 18 samples to 58, and in 2019 made a significant increase up to 188 samples.  In that same year they also introduced a Samoa and Tonga category which would now allow the small 1% – 4% to show up for some Polynesians, mainly Hawaiians and New Zealand Maoris.   But Samoans were finding a large percentage of Tonga showing up in their DNA results, just as Tongans noticed the same with the Samoa category in their DNA results, and to a lesser extent they both might have 1% – 2% Polynesia.  This is expected given how we see overlap with other populations that are similar to each other.

In 2020 they renamed the Polynesia category to Eastern Polynesian & New Zealand Maori while continuing to increase the number of samples for all three categories.  An interesting choice for a category name that seemed to specify one Polynesian population and all others relegated to a region – east.

Two years later they decided to split that category into two.  Hawaii, and New Zealand Maori.  This would leave both populations having some percentage of the other population in their results, just as with Samoans and Tongans and other non-Polynesian populations.

While it’s not accurate, it does allow us to quickly see what ethnicity or population the DNA match is from. At least with Hawaiians and New Zealand Maoris, there is about a 70% – 30% ratio, the dominant being the population that the person really is from.

Perhaps with the ever-increasing amount of Polynesians getting DNA tested and if they have good trees, we could have even more specific island populations appearing. We have seen how they tried that with the DNA communities although they have not recently updated those communities.  Given that the communities are based on DNA matches and how they connect/network with other matches, and how we already know that we could easily match other island populations despite having no recent genealogical ties to each other, I do not expect to see any changes with those.