The Cellar Image of the Day

Ancestry.Com has been gathering a gigantic data base on people. Are they under the NSA now?
People go to them because they are trying to find out who they are by finding out who their ancestors were.
Newsflash Bunkie, you are who you make yourself, regardless if your descended from a King or criminal. But I digress.
Ancestry has convinced a lot of people (770,000), to submit a DNA sample and from that data has created this migration map.

Quote:

Each color on the map represents a present-day community of individuals tied together through their genetics. And the location of the dots show where each community’s ancestors lived over generations.
This unique portrait of our country thus reveals that our genes hold the traces of our collective history. But what exactly does the map show?

People moved east to west, less so north to south. See how the differently colored clusters form distinct horizontal bands? The red, blue, purple, and green dots fan out from right to left. This pattern means DNA confirms the descendants of immigrants to the East Coast moved westward.
While people certainly moved back and forth from the north to south as well, if people had moved in the same volume from north to south, you’d see the bands fanning downward and not just from east to west.
But instead you can see powerful forces pushed people westward, even showing that the Mason-Dixon line separates some of the clusters.

Catherine Ball, chief scientific officer at Ancestry and the leader of the study, commented to Wired:
“I have to admit I was surprised by that. This political boundary had the same effect as what you’d expect from a huge desert or mountain range.”
And not only can you clearly see the migration patterns westward, you can also see distinct communities of immigrants and their descendants.

I live in one of the big, Finnish dots--and believe me, you don't need a genetic test to know it.

On a moderately-related note, I just got a class action settlement from the genetic testing folks at "23 and Me" (they got sued for giving people "medical advice" without actually being doctors, so now they have to be more vague when they give you the basic facts of your genes, whatever.) But it's not a cash settlement, it's a $40-off coupon--six of them to be precise--and everyone in my family has already done it. PM me if anyone wants them.