THE NATIVE AMERICAN TRAIT TEST — WHICH OF THESE ARE REAL?

The Native American trait test — which of these are real? Most physical signs of Native American ancestry you have been told to look for are worthless, and the famous one is the worst. High cheekbones mean nothing. But four traits do occur at far higher rates in people with Indigenous American ancestry, they sit in the published research rather than in folklore, and one is on the back of your own front teeth. Four seconds and a mirror. QUESTIONS THIS VIDEO ANSWERS • Do high cheekbones mean Native American ancestry? • What are shovel-shaped incisors, or shovel shaped Indian teeth? • How do I check my own teeth, and what gives a false result? • Does Type O blood indicate Native American ancestry? • Is there a real Native American blood marker? • What physical features really suggest Native American ancestry? • Can you tell ancestry from an old family photograph? • Does carrying one of these traits make me Native American? THE CHEEKBONE PROBLEM. Prominent cheekbones occur in every population on earth — Scandinavia, West Africa, eastern Europe. Nobody has found a population where they are rare enough to carry information, and Native American facial features, nose shape and bone structure all fail for the same reason. The claim survives because a cheekbone is the only thing visible in the photograph a family has. SHOVEL-SHAPED INCISORS, THE ONE YOU CAN CHECK. Run a fingernail along the inner surface of your two upper front teeth. In most people of European descent it is smooth. In a large share of people with East Asian or Indigenous American ancestry there is a raised ridge down each edge with a hollow between, like a shovel's bowl. It is graded, so faint counts. Two things will fool you: decades of wear flatten the surface, and any filling, crown or veneer buries it — that is no result, not a negative one. Shoveling comes largely from one variant in the EDAR gene, V370A, which also thickens the hair shaft. Kamberov and colleagues, Cell 2013, traced it to central China roughly 30,000 years ago: about 87% in Korea, 78% in Japan, 100% of pre-contact Native American remains examined for it, virtually absent in Europe and Africa. So it is not Native American in origin. It is an old Asian variant the first Americans carried in with them. THE OTHER TWO. A third root on the lower molar appears in 0 to 3.4% of populations not of Asian descent and can exceed 40% in New World and Aleut populations — Christy Turner used it in 1971 to place the first Americans in northeast Asia, and it sits on every dental radiograph you have had. Then the Diego antigen: roughly 0.5% of Europeans against up to 49% in the Kaingang of Brazil. THE MYTHS CLEARED. Type O blood — some South American populations approach 100% type O, but roughly 4 in 10 Americans of European descent have it, so the inference is arithmetically dead. The Inca bone. Dark straight hair. Reduced body hair. Missing wisdom teeth. And the most damaging: that Native people process alcohol differently. Joseph Gone states there is no evidence of greater biological susceptibility, and James Cunningham's team found 60% of Native Americans abstain entirely against roughly 43% of whites, problem drinking rates essentially the same. The belief is backwards. WHAT A POSITIVE RESULT MEANS. Every real trait here points at two things at once and cannot separate them, because they all mark a deep shared ancestry between northeast Asia and the first Americans. And no trait is identity — as Kim TallBear puts it, Native Americans do not use genetic ancestry tests to define citizenship. CHAPTERS 0:00 Go and Find a Mirror 0:12 The High Cheekbone Myth 1:58 Trait One: Your Front Teeth 2:32 How to Actually Check 3:22 Two Things That Fool You 4:48 Where the Trait Came From 5:45 Trait Two: Hair and Sweat 6:57 Trait Three: The Extra Root 9:07 Trait Four: The Blood Group 10:01 The Myths Cleared 13:30 What a Positive Result Means 16:16 Tell Me What You Found WATCH NEXT There Is a Native American Blood Marker. It Is Not Type O Which U.S. State Has the Most Native American DNA The Cherokee Trait Test The Scots-Irish Trait Test #NativeAmericanAncestry #NativeAmericanDNA #Genealogy #AmericanHistory #FamilyHistory #Ancestry #AncestryDNA #NativeAmerican #AmericanBloodlines #Genetics