Digging up Dalí
DNA disproves “daughter” claim
If life imitates art, for surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, death is not far behind. Last year, a paternity claim by 61-yearold tarot card reader María Pilar Abel Martínez resulted in the exhumation of the acclaimed artist. To the disbelief of many, a court in Madrid gave the go-ahead for the body to be exhumed and samples of hair, nail and bone to be taken. The resulting DNA tests showed Abel, who sought a share of the artist’s legacy, had no biological relationship to Dalí. According to an embalmer present at the exhumation, Dalí’s trademark moustache was still intact, 28 years after being buried. only one line of a person’s male ancestry, starting with a man’s father, his paternal grandfather, paternal great-grandfather and so on. Of a man’s 64 great-greatgreat-great-grandparents, a man shares his Y-chromosome with just one.
“If you break it down, you get 50% of your DNA from each of your parents,” says University of Otago biological anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith. “That’s 25% representing your grandparents, 12.5% representing your great-grandparents. Pretty quickly you get down to pretty minuscule amounts going back a few hundred years. By 600 years ago, everybody living today with western European ancestry would have shared ancestry somewhere there.”
A further drawback is the variation between the ethnic or bio-geographic labels companies use. Ethnicity estimates – and they are just estimates – work on a continental level, but they are not so good at identifying countries or regions. In some cases, seemingly very different ethnicities are genetically quite similar – Native Americans and people from India, for example, can trace their ancestry back to Central Asia, so they share ancestral genotypes, says Rawlence, which clouds the results. Sorting out the generations can also be tricky – those pie-chart percentages may refer to people high up in the leafy branches of the family tree or far down in the time-distant trunk.
And depending on what bits of DNA get tested and what genetic hand you have been dealt by your parents, the three times great-grandmother that you know was Southeast Asian may not have passed any of her genetic code on to you but may have passed some on to your sibling.
CHANCE DISCOVERIES
David Wilton, a sixth-generation New Zealander now based in Philadelphia, had a DNA test to find a connection with his great-grandfather. A photograph and a found marriage certificate hinted at the possibility of his being part-African. He was
“You could identify with Māori but have no Māori DNA. It is about cultural identity and connection beyond what is inside you genetically.”