The Resolution Gap

The Resolution Gap: Forensic Audit of the Genetic Ancestry Industry: Commercial, Academic, and Institutional Reference Panels Under a Single Unresolved Methodology Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies market two distinct products under a single label. The first — detection of recent shared ancestry through identity-by-descent (IBD) segment matching — is analytically valid and scientifically legitimate. The second — assignment of percentage “ethnicity” or “ancestry” composition to named historical populations — rests on reference panels the companies themselves acknowledge cannot represent those populations, on inclusion criteria gated on self-reported identity, and on synthetic reference individuals assembled from prior model output. This paper argues that the second product cannot be substantiated to the standard the U.S. Federal Trade Commission applies to accuracy claims about biometric technologies, using the industry’s own technical documentation as the primary evidence. The paper documents a specific, falsifiable internal contradiction not previously articulated in the literature: a single company, from a single genotype file, returns an ethnicity assignment of approximately 88% African ancestry while its own relatedness engine — built from detected DNA matches rather than modeled composition — places the same subject exclusively in U.S. communities of the Virginia–Carolinas–Georgia corridor, with no African or Caribbean match returned. This contradiction was formally put to the companies involved; each declined to substantiate, invoked proprietary protection, or closed correspondence under an entertainment disclaimer. The audit extends beyond commercial testing to the academic and institutional record underwriting it. It examines the founding mitochondrial DNA literature on African origin, the 1854 judicial opinion that established the legal basis for Native American racial classification using contemporary migration theory as corroboration, and the two Paleoamerican genomes (Kennewick Man, Anzick-1) most heavily relied upon since — showing that none of these instruments has ever tested the ancestral origin of the population classified as Black American as an open, non-circular question against independently constructed African and Indigenous American reference sets. A formal request to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, seeking disclosure of whether such a comparison has ever been attempted, was met with acknowledgment and no answer. The paper concludes with concrete remedies: separation of the two commercial products, disclosure of panel limitations and uncertainty at the point of claim, and a call for the non-circular comparative test — commercial, academic, and institutional — that has not yet been conducted by any actor examined.