The ethnic breakdown of 23andMe customers

The ethnic breakdown of 23andMe customers

According to Your Genetic Genealogist, it is:

1000 African American
3500 Latino/Hispanic
5500 East Asian
3400 South Asian
4900 Southern European
6200 Ashkenazi Jewish
56,000 Northern European
1,000 First generation from two continents

I’m kind of surprised that there are so few African Americans, since the marginal return on ancestry matching technologies for the black American community is going to be higher than for other groups. If these numbers are true then I have on the order of ~10% of the 23andMe genotypes for black Americans in the African Ancestry Project. Zack Ajmal referring to the over 3,000 South Asians quips: “Now if 10-20% of them would participate in Harappa Ancestry Project!” My main concern is that if HAP gets more well known Zack will have hundreds of Tamil Brahmins sending him pretty much duplicate genotypes.

Razib Khan