Harnaaz Sandhu
Birth Name: Harnaaz Kaur Sandhu
Place of Birth: Guru Har Sahai, Firozpur District, Punjab, India
Date of Birth: 3 March, 2000
Ethnicity: Punjabi Jat Indian
Harnaaz Sandhu is an Indian model. She was crowned Miss Universe 2021. She is the third Miss Universe from India.
Harnaaz was born in the village of Kohali, Punjab, to a Jat Sikh family. The Jat are an ethnic group from Northern India and Pakistan. Her father, Pritampal Singh Sandhu, is a realtor, and her mother, Rabinder “Ruby” Kaur Sandhu, is a gynaecologist. She grew up in England and in Chandigarh, India. Her family originated from Kohali, Batala, Gurdaspur District, Punjab.
Haarnaz’s paternal grandfather was named Darshan Singh Sandhu.
A MyHeritage DNA test whose results Harnaaz displayed on YouTube stated that her genetic ancestry is:
*64.4% South Asian
*21% West Asian
*9.5% Scandinavian
*3.7% Central Asian
*1.4% Mesoamerican and Andean
Sources: https://www.hindustantimes.com
https://jsnewstimes.com
https://www.tribuneindia.com
MyHeritage can very shoddy at times. I highly doubt she has any roots from the western hemisphere. Plus in those reveal videos they always look at the initial results, it takes several weeks to maybe even months for the results to be recalibrated properly.
Whoops meant that as a reply to Akwaba’s post.
Is she really part Scandinavian? In Punjab? Weird.
Or maybe a family secret..
MyHeritage probably just messed up, but you never can tell.
There’s a bad thing DNA testing companies though. The companies have and use sample sets submitted by field researchers, that tested people that claim they totally knew their ethnic background. That’s a lot of people, and human error is unavoidable.
A family line and whole communities can be in a region for centuries and they can have a foreign origin and the individuals that submit their samples may not report their heritage accurately. The samples are cross referenced against what researchers believe to be typical results of a region/people, and the results are averaged out. So if there’s large divergences between results, they’re usually pretty easy to catch.
But if it’s sample sets from two communities that have remained in close proximity to one another for a long time the results get hazy. Like Danes/Swedes or Koreans/Chinese, French/German, just an example of some nationalities with close proximity and some shared gene flow near their borders, not claiming I know of confirmed conflation. So that’s one flaw, possibly inaccuracy in the sample sets to begin with.
But that’s not all they use. They take into account self reports of national origin of customers and adjust the ranges of designations for everyone else. Take for instance 23andme has over 400k participants in genetic research that they use to phase against you and the original 14k in their sample sets.
If you get a bunch of individuals from families that have immigrant roots that date back a few centuries, and they have not propagated with people from outside their communities/gene pools, they can mess up overall results when they self report as being one nationality, when their roots really lie elsewhere.
In this way traditional genealogy can out perform dna tests. Because the autosomal admixture test results may be bogged down by the user base’ inability to report heritage properly.
Of course most of these factors do not come into play with Harnaaz’s profile. I’m not saying there’s a group of Scandinavian immigrants in India screwing up results for that region because they’re inaccurately reporting and researchers are messing up and not doing their due diligence. I’m just saying autosomal admixture testing isn’t perfect and does have to be taken with grains of salt.
France/Germany category in 23andMe is funny stuff. Neither look-alike.
Also Italy/Greece is a joke. How is average person from Po Valley comparable to one from Aegean Islands?
Genetic expression/phenotype can be wonky. You can cluster together genetic on a scatter plot and still not have strong similarities aesthetically. That can happen in families when siblings don’t even look related. Nature and our methods of categorization and explanations of nature are not as exact as we’d like, they are ever improving however.
Highly unlikely that she has Scandinavian origins. If she has any European ancestry, it would seem more likely to be maybe English/British Isles. The South Asian and West Asian DNA obviously make sense; but the Scandinavian and Amerindian DNA seem dubious/questionable.
DNA tests are not always 100% accurate, and there are tons of people who’ve had their DNA estimates change when switching companies or even re-taking DNA tests.
Yeah, I would take some of the results with a grain of salt. In Harnaaz case, the South Asian and West Asian DNA are expected (I remembered a genealogy study saying that many Indians have some degree of West Asian DNA, obviously given the regions proximity and cultural contact), but the Scandinavian and Amerindian results seem dubious.
Maybe Harnaaz’s small amount of European ancestry is actually English/British Isles? Or maybe it is an error.
She posted a video of her Myheritage DNA results (with Andrea Meza’s), she is :
64.4% South Asian
21 % West Asian
9.5 % Scandinavian
3.7 % Central Asian
1.4 % Mesoamerican and Andean
https://youtu.be/kLKQpcY6c5A