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Ancestry (testing) today plays a role in many scientific fields, including biomedicine, forensics, biological anthropology, population genomics, and personal genealogical practices. While the term is widely used, it’s meaning is not always clear. A person’s sense of family history, ancestry and relatedness may differ profoundly from a population geneticist’s interest in “ancestry-informative markers” or other data. Different ancestry practices span different timescales: the linear evolutionary timeframe of the “molecular clock” associated with small mutations on our DNA spans several millennia, whereas social associations of ancestry refer to cultural memory that covers a few decades or denotes time in a circular manner. Moreover, ideas about ancestry, kinship, and belonging differ profoundly across the world. Such differences also play out in practices of ancestry testing. These are always embedded in historical genealogies of knowledge, the materiality of samples (such as bones, blood, and DNA), and interpretations of scientists, research participants, or consumers. These complex configurations around ancestry testing have caught the interest of anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies who have unpacked the colonial and racial legacies that have shaped concepts of ancestry and human variation in the life sciences from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. Most of these works deal with genetic ancestry testing after the sequencing of the human genome in the year 2000. Often, this scholarship is historically informed, tracing continuities and differences between current concepts of population, ancestry, and human variation with earlier forms of racialization, highlighting the need to critically examine the interface of biological and sociopolitical formations (see the section Ancestry, Human Variation, and Biological Anthropology Post-1945). Large-scale projects, such as the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) laid the groundwork for the ever-growing databases of human populations on which ancestry testing rests (see section Genetic Ancestry and Human Genome (Diversity) Projects). While Indigenous groups have contested some of the conceptualizations, sampling practices, and ELSI (ethical, legal and social implications) protocols associated with these projects, commercial companies are increasingly marketing DNA as a “true” historical record (see section Genetic Ancestry Testing and Personal Genealogies). Large-scale national projects have followed suit (see section Population Genomics, Ancestry, and National Projects). Part of the justification for such projects was the potential of population-specific genomic studies for a better understanding of health and disease (see section Genetic Ancestry, Biomedical Research, and Public Health). Some researchers are concerned with opening the black box of the epistemic cultures and practices around ancestry testing, while others draw attention to the legal, ethical, and political aspects in the wake of genetic ancestry testing, forensics, and racialized medicine.

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