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European
99.8%British & Irish
Around 2450 BC people associated with the Bell Beaker culture arrived in Britain, and within a few centuries roughly 90% of the island’s gene pool had been replaced. The same culture spread into Iberia largely without the migration, which makes Britain the standout case of people moving rather than fashion moving.
English 31.5%
Ancient DNA from early medieval eastern England shows those individuals derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the continental North Sea zone — northern Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands — with substantial variation between sites and within them. Present-day English populations keep an estimated 25–47% of it, on a gradient that thins east to west.
World 1 in 139 58.6M live in EnglandUS 1 in 11 31.0M AmericansScottish 13.3%
Scotland splits into six genetic clusters whose boundaries track early medieval kingdoms — Gael, Pict, Briton, Norse. Norwegian-like ancestry runs highest in Shetland and Orkney, at roughly 20–25%. The authors are careful that ancient DNA is still needed to confirm the kingdom correlation.
World 1 in 1,468 5.5M live in ScotlandUS 1 in 52 6.6M Americans, plus 2.5M more as Scotch-IrishWelsh 6.3%
In the first fine-scale genetic map of Britain — 17 clusters found from genetics alone, with no geographic input — Wales forms a distinct genetic group, and then splits again into separate north and south Welsh clusters. The authors suggest those clusters may sit closest to the settlers who arrived after the last ice age.
World 1 in 2,555 3.2M live in WalesUS 1 in 222 1.5M AmericansIrish 3.3%
Ireland is the global hotspot for the haemochromatosis variant HFE C282Y — a 2026 study predicts roughly 1 in 75 people in Ireland carry two copies, against about 1 in 212 in southern England. Penetrance is variable and sex-dependent rather than absolute: the same study puts cumulative incidence by age 80 at about 56% in male homozygotes, higher than earlier estimates, and notes that treatment started early heads off most of the consequences.
World 1 in 1,112 7.3M live in Ireland and Northern IrelandUS 1 in 10 32.4M Americans — second only to German
Western European
These hyphenated names are reference-panel clusters, not nationalities. The label is just a list of where that cluster’s reference members were born.
Austrian & Southern German 13.4%
41 individuals from 5th- and 6th-century Bavaria included women buried with artificially elongated skulls, whose ancestry pointed to southeastern Europe. The men were consistently northern and central European; the women as a group were strikingly heterogeneous, ranging as far as East Asia. One of the clearest ancient-DNA cases of strongly sex-biased migration — and the study found little sign the Huns had much to do with the skull-shaping.
World 1 in 88 92.7M live in Germany and AustriaUS 1 in 8 40.8M Americans — the largest ancestry in the countryFrench 3.1%
Across 243 ancient genomes spanning 7,000 years, steppe-related ancestry shows up in France from about 2500 BC. Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b goes from absent to 11 of 13 sampled Bronze Age males — the male lineage that dominates western Europe today arrived, and largely replaced what was there, inside a few centuries.
World 1 in 119 68.6M live in FranceUS 1 in 55 6.1M Americans, with French Canadian counted separatelyBelgian, Rhinelander & Southern Dutch 2.0%
Dutch genetic variation is structured mainly north-to-south, and HERC2 — the main eye-colour locus — carries the strongest signal of diversifying selection between the two ends. Whether that has much to do with a label also covering Belgium and the Rhineland is a question the study does not answer.
World 1 in 684 11.9M live in BelgiumUS 1 in 1,088 312,593 Americans claim Belgian ancestryCounted on Belgium alone — the Rhineland and the southern Netherlands have no line of their own.
Swiss, Southwestern German & Western Austrian 0.5%
At Niederstotzingen in Baden-Württemberg, around 580–630 AD, thirteen people were buried together in Alemannic style with grave goods of Frankish, Lombard and Byzantine origin. Five were direct relatives and three were unrelated, and the origin of the grave goods tracked neither ancestry nor family — the authors read it as kinship and fellowship being held in roughly equal regard.
World 1 in 905 9.0M live in SwitzerlandUS 1 in 395 861,324 Americans claim Swiss ancestry
Nordic
A useful corrective to the popular picture: a 2020 study of Viking-Age remains found many Vikings had brown rather than blond hair, and two men in Orkney buried in Viking graves with Viking swords share ancestry with present-day Irish and Scottish people. Viking was partly a job description.
Norwegian 14.3%
Across 6,369 Norwegians, Norway shows the widest internal spread of any nation in the region: mean pairwise F(ST) between counties is 0.0012 and reaches 0.0073 between Rogaland and Finnmark, against 0.0002 across the whole of Denmark. Fjords and valleys shaped the gene pool, and four centuries of political union with Denmark barely registered in it.
World 1 in 1,461 5.6M live in NorwayUS 1 in 88 3.9M Americans — a diaspora 70% the size of NorwayDanish 2.0%
A hundred ancient genomes from Denmark record two near-complete population turnovers in about a thousand years: Anatolian-derived farmers replacing hunter-gatherers ~5,900 years ago, then steppe-derived Single Grave people — carrying 60–85% steppe ancestry — replacing those farmers ~4,800 years ago. Genes, diet and appearance all turned over twice.
World 1 in 1,361 6.0M live in DenmarkUS 1 in 306 1.1M AmericansFinnish 1.2%
Finland is the textbook European founder population. Settled by a small number of founding groups, it carries 39 recognised “Finnish Disease Heritage” disorders that are rare or absent elsewhere — the main aspartylglucosaminuria variant is roughly 50× more common in Finns than in other Europeans. 23andMe scores Finland separately from the rest of the Nordic tier for exactly that reason.
World 1 in 1,449 5.6M live in FinlandUS 1 in 556 612,181 Americans
Ashkenazi Jewish
Unusual among these labels in being a real endogamous population with a documented demographic history rather than a convenient bucket. Whole-genome sequencing points to a severe bottleneck of roughly 350 effective founders about 25–32 generations ago, followed by rapid growth. That founder effect is also why ancestry-based carrier screening exists: about 1 in 40 people of Ashkenazi descent carry one of three BRCA1/BRCA2 founder variants, roughly ten times the general-population rate of about 1 in 400.
No demographer publishes an Ashkenazi-only head-count, so both figures cover every Jewish tradition together. Pew finds about two thirds of American Jews identify as Ashkenazi.
Spanish & Portuguese
A fine-scale map built from 1,413 Spanish individuals found Iberia’s main axis of genetic differentiation runs east–west, with remarkable similarity north-to-south — the opposite of what most people assume. Northwest African ancestry varies regionally from 0% to 11%, but patchily, in a way that does not track how long a region was under Muslim rule.
The census ancestry question has no Spanish line — Spain is routed through the Hispanic-origin question instead, which is a different question and not comparable.
Andalusian, Asturian & Castilian 1.8%
A direct consequence of the finding above: Iberia is genetically homogeneous north-to-south, so Andalusia, Asturias and Castile — far apart on a map — do not separate cleanly and land in one bucket.
World 1 in 167 48.8M live in SpainUS — not counted separatelyBasque 0.3%
Basque is the only language isolate in Europe, unrelated to any other known language. Basques also carry the highest known frequency of the Rh-negative variant — about 47% of gene copies, which works out to roughly 22% of people being Rh-negative against about 15% of Europeans generally. That is one allele, and it is not evidence of ancient isolation: ancient genomes from Atapuerca link Basques to Neolithic farmers who mixed with local hunter-gatherers, not to a Palaeolithic remnant. The popular “30–50% of Basques are Rh-negative” comes from misreading a gene frequency as a headcount.
World 1 in 2,500 3.3M live in the three Basque territoriesUS 1 in 5,437 62,551 Americans — the rarest line on this page
Central & Eastern European
A 2025 study of 555 ancient genomes found that migration out of eastern Europe in the 6th–8th centuries replaced most of the existing gene pool across the region — 93% in Poland and northwestern Ukraine, 83% in eastern Germany. The category also contains Hungarian and Estonian, neither of them Slavic languages.
The census ancestry question has no Belarusian line at all, so a third of this label is uncounted.
Belarusian, Polish & Ukrainian 1.2%
Any two Europeans almost certainly share genealogical ancestors within the last thousand years, though only a handful of those ancestors left detectable DNA behind. Eastern Europe shows it especially strongly: people from distant eastern European countries share about as many recent common ancestors as two random Irish people do.
Trace Ancestry
0.2%Indigenous American
Anzick-1 — a male infant buried with Clovis tools in western Montana around 12,600 years ago, and the only Clovis burial ever found — answered two questions at once. He is more closely related to every indigenous American population than to any other group, which leaves nowhere for the Solutrean hypothesis that Clovis toolmakers had crossed from southwestern Europe. And he already carries the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta ancestry that living Native Americans carry, which dates that gene flow to before he was buried. The same genome shows a deep divergence among Native American populations that is older still.
The World Bank's figure is Latin America at the 2010 census round and stops at its northern border; no comparable count exists for the hemisphere the reference panel actually spans. There is no American star because the census ancestry question has no American Indian line — it is asked as race instead, which is a different question with a different universe.