Outliers

 

"Ninety eight percent of women will experience...."

How many times do we see statistics that seem to put us in a box—and assume without further examination that that is where we belong? Not that I want to launch into a dissertation about standard deviations and obtuse calculations, but I have lately been reminded of a certain detail about my relationship to assertions about percentages: I am an outlier. If everyone else is part of the ninety eight percent, I'll be camped out with the two percent.

What that means is when those who know far more than I do about statistical calculations come up with their proclamations of the way the average person should be, I'm usually not in that group. In other words, when everyone else zigs, I zag. 

When it comes to family history, that scenario holds true. Several years ago, when my siblings, cousins, and I finally broke through the mystery brick wall concerning my Polish patriline, I kept on the research trail until I could pin down the precise location of where my paternal grandfather's parents might have lived: it was a specific region in what is now the country of Poland but was, back in that century, a part of Prussia known as Pomerania.

Shortly after that discovery about my roots, my husband and I traveled back east, where I got the chance to visit with my eldest paternal cousin and reveal what I had found.

"So we're Pomeranians?" my cousin quipped.

Not to be outdone, my husband—for whom I have almost pinpointed his maternal ancestry as coming from the region of Alsace-Lorraine, now in France—retorted, "Yeah, and I'm an Alsatian."

We seldom talk about these historic regions any more. They are swallowed up by larger nations without any thought about how the previous regions may have had differing characteristics which are now lost to the record. The heritage of these isolated people groups may have been lost to us, but could characteristics we think of as outliers actually owe their origin to these lost-to-time people groups?

This is not a dynamic isolated to those northern regions of Pomerania or Alsace, but expand to include other regions in Europe which also had a history as a distinct group. Catalonia as part of Spain comes to mind—as does the nearby Basque region, as well. The same holds true for the other continents, as well, as witnessed by the ongoing search to more accurately represent such people groups in the reference panels used by geneticists—and, by extension, genetic genealogists.

Conclusions based on results of studies drawn up using subjects from specific regions (or reference panels) may not apply as accurately to people who descend from a different isolated people group. In other words, a study based on the population of Japan, for instance, might not produce findings as accurate for descendants of people groups from Africa. In one way, we become each other's outliers.

On the other hand, as more of us from around the world participate in DNA testing, we broaden that universe by including our own "norm"—the outlier for those other groups—into the mix. I've read comments concerning the lack of medical studies including, for instance, indigenous populations of North America and how that could impede the ability to reach conclusions that would be more helpful for those "outliers." Likewise, I wonder how more applicable medical developments might be for those of African descent if individuals could someday pinpoint not only the regions of origin on the continent, but their specific ancestral people groups.

We may all be part of humankind, but we contain a world of difference between us. With discoveries in DNA, the more we all test, the more we can all discover about that fascinating genetic mosaic—the details we can now only chalk up to being part of a vague concept like "outliers."