MyWhat Is Ancient DNA?
"Ancient DNA" (often abbreviated aDNA) is genetic material recovered from the remains of people, animals, or plants that lived hundreds or thousands of years ago — teeth, bone, and occasionally preserved soft tissue are the most common sources. Unlike the DNA in a modern saliva or cheek-swab sample, ancient DNA is degraded, fragmented, and often contaminated with DNA from soil bacteria and the people who handled the remains after excavation. Extracting a usable genetic profile from it is a specialized field of its own, distinct from the consumer genetic testing most people are familiar with.
How scientists recover and read ancient DNA
Ancient DNA research became practical in the 2000s and 2010s as sequencing technology improved enough to piece together a genome from thousands of short, damaged DNA fragments. Researchers typically drill into the densest part of a skeleton — usually the petrous bone at the base of the skull, or tooth roots — because dense bone protects DNA from the microbial and environmental damage that destroys it elsewhere. The genetic material is then sequenced, cleaned of contamination, and compared statistically against other ancient and modern samples.
Large-scale ancient DNA studies, published by groups such as the Reich Lab at Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have sequenced DNA from tens of thousands of archaeological individuals spanning the Stone Age through the medieval period. That growing public and academic reference base is what makes it possible for a company to compare your DNA to, say, a Bronze Age farmer from the Pontic steppe or a Roman-era individual buried near Pompeii.
How this differs from a standard "ethnicity estimate"
A standard consumer ethnicity estimate — the kind offered by most DNA testing companies as a default feature — compares your DNA to reference panels built from living people with well-documented family histories in a particular region, typically going back a few hundred years. It answers a question like: "Which present-day populations does your DNA most resemble?"
An ancient-origins report asks a different question: "Which archaeological populations, sampled directly from bones dated to a specific time and place, does your DNA most resemble?" Because it's built from actual ancient specimens rather than modern proxies, it can point to specific historical groups — Iron Age Celts, Viking-era Scandinavians, Imperial Roman-period Italians — rather than just modern country-level regions.
What ancient DNA testing can and can't tell you
| It can tell you | It can't tell you |
|---|---|
| Which sampled ancient populations your DNA most closely resembles | That you are a direct, unbroken lineal descendant of a specific historical individual |
| Broad population movement and admixture patterns over thousands of years | Your genealogical family tree or the names of ancestors |
| A rough sense of how "steppe," "farmer," or "hunter-gatherer" ancestry components blend in your genome | Precise dates or locations for when specific ancestors lived |
Why this became a consumer product
For most of the 2010s, ancient DNA comparisons were the domain of academic papers and niche third-party tools used by genetic genealogy hobbyists. That changed in 2025, when MyHeritage partnered with the ancient-DNA analysis company Illustrative DNA to launch Ancient Origins, offering ancient-population comparisons directly inside a mainstream consumer DNA platform for the first time at scale — comparing customer DNA to more than 150 ancient civilizations and archaeological sample sets. We cover that feature in detail in our MyHeritage Ancient Origins review, walk through the actual testing and upload steps in our ancient DNA test guide, and compare it against AncestryDNA and 23andMe in our DNA ancestry services comparison.
Notable ancient DNA discoveries that made this possible
The reference data behind modern ancient-origins tools didn't appear overnight. A handful of landmark studies built the foundation:
- The Reich Lab's Allen Ancient DNA Resource — a continually updated public dataset of tens of thousands of ancient human genomes, maintained by Harvard Medical School's David Reich laboratory, widely used as a reference panel across the field.
- The 2015 steppe migration papers — two independent studies published in Nature that used ancient DNA to demonstrate a large-scale Bronze Age migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe, reshaping how geneticists understand European ancestry.
- Viking-age genome sequencing — a 2020 study sequencing over 400 Viking-era skeletons found that "Viking" identity was cultural rather than a single genetic population, with substantial genetic diversity across Scandinavia and the British Isles.
- Ancient Egyptian genome studies — sequencing of mummified remains from the New Kingdom period, complicated by hot, dry preservation conditions that make DNA recovery harder than in colder climates.
Each of these studies adds sampled individuals to the reference pool that consumer tools like Ancient Origins draw on, which is part of why ancient-origins percentages can shift slightly over time — the underlying science is still an active, fast-moving research field.
Who maintains this research
Ancient DNA sequencing is concentrated in a small number of specialized labs, including the Reich Lab at Harvard Medical School, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. Consumer-facing companies like MyHeritage don't sequence ancient remains themselves — they partner with specialists (in MyHeritage's case, Illustrative DNA) who build comparison algorithms on top of published academic datasets. For more on how this shows up in a mainstream product, see our overview of MyHeritage's DNA testing platform and where to find your ancient-origins results once you're logged in.