I advocate getting your DNA analyzed. I think we are lucky to be alive at a time when what is inheritable from parents to children is being understood more completely all the time. Lynn and I have had our DNA analyzed four times, twice by the Genographic Project, now discontinued, and twice by 23andMe. Spencer Wells was the leader of the Genographic Project and he said that the idea of studying the physical distribution of human genetic material has been valuable but that modern methods of travel are so fast and popular that they are homogenizing the Earth's human population to the point that it is rapidly becoming impossible to find much correlation between location of people and their biological makeup.
One of the most striking results is the page in the books we bought from 23andMe that simply lists the groups that each of us can be traced to. Lynn has 11 identified sources. I have five.
I think the most gripping book I have read about ancestry and inheritance is "The 10000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.
I read that there are 21 branches of creatures much like us. The Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals are examples. The popular book Sapiens covers some of our recent history.
Personally, I am much more interested in large movements than in the individual, whether a single person is a king or an outlaw. Look into the identification of the group called Denisovans. I have some Neanderthal and some Denisovan in me. Maybe I owe my diminutive height to my Denisovan. Maybe it is from the Scottish "Small" group.
