Who am I? Where did I come from?

These are questions many people are asking these days. And thanks to popular websites like Ancestry and 23andme, they are getting the answers.

In the TV ads for these services, a guy who thinks he’s mostly Italian learns that he’s really Eastern European. And another guy who believes his family ancestry is German, and therefore occasionally wears lederhosen and dances traditional Teutonic folk dances, discovers the truth that he’s really Scottish, so must switch his leisure activities to wearing a kilt.

I recently signed up for this program and received my DNA collection kit in the mail, which consisted of spitting in a tube and sending it back to the DNA testing lab. In less than a month, I got my results.

Like the actors in the TV ads, I was startled (in some ways) to learn that who I thought I was and who I really am are vastly different. Overall, I wasn’t surprised. I’m predominantly of British and Irish ancestry (Price is a Welsh name), with some Scandinavian and Iberian (Spain and Portugal) thrown in. I was intrigued to learn that my Neanderthal ancestry accounts for some 4 percent of my overall DNA. My wife thought the percentage would be higher. Much higher. Fortunately, there are no genetic markers for Troglodyte.

DNA testing is a great anecdote to family mythology. In my own family, there was talk of “Spanish royalty” in our bloodline. Maybe, but my genetic makeup is less than 3 percent Iberian.

If there were royalty in that sliver of Latin genes, it was a miracle. Of course, no one brags about a family history of German peasants or Roman slaves or Viking marauders. It’s always royalty or movie stars or titans of business. Yeah, right.

You do learn some other, somewhat odd information about yourself from this DNA test. I learned, for example, that I’m likely to have little or no upper back hair and small chance of sporting a unibrow. Dodged those genetic bullets. But, I am likely to have wet ear wax. Now that’s an interesting fact I can’t wait to share with friends and colleagues.

What test results did surprise me, however, were the cross-species percentages. Yes, I was surprised to learn that I am 7 percent Central American sloth. My wife, less surprised. Slow and lazy at first glance, I’m really just conserving energy. We needn’t get into my ability to host symbiotic algae on my “fur.”

It was also a revelation to discover I am 3.4 percent Asian stink bug, native to the Far East and considered to be an agricultural pest. It’s true, I go weeks without washing my workout clothes, and now that I’m retired I often go a couple of days wearing the same jeans and Henley shirt, but is laziness really a genetic trait? (See sloth above.) The good news, I guess, is that I’m not part dung beetle.

These are life-changing revelations. Man, maybe I shouldn’t have spat into that tube.