GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2003-02 > 1044480990


From: "Dennis Garvey" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] mutations and paper trail
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2003 13:36:30 -0800


Normally using the word "haplogroup" on this list brings about a large split
in interest level between those interested in "deep ancestry" vs
"genealogically useful".

I want to get across a point that is important to everybody - so I'm going
to try to avoid using the "H" word...

Here's my point:

Through some accident of history, about half the men in Europe seem to be
the direct paternal descendant of one man who lived about 15,000 years ago.
Let's call that man "the Patriarch". That means that half the men in Europe
have Y-chromosome results that look alot like the Y-chromosome results of
the Patriarch - and like each other. The haplotype of the Patriarch probably
looked like the set of Most Common Values for HG1 given on the webpage in my
signature line.

15,000 years is long enough that most of us have had a few (or many)
mutations accumulate in our haplotypes that allow us to differentiate our
line from the lines of all the other descendants of the Patriarch.
Genealogically meaningful matches can be identified by finding other men who
have the same differences from the Patriarch's haplotype.

Of course, for 25 marker results we normally consider differences at one or
two markers to still indicate a relationship recent enough to be
genealogically significant (or a one marker difference for 12 marker
results). But a problem arises for those who only differ from the Patriarch
at one or two markers. That makes it difficult to sort out our recent
relations from "Patriarchal cousins" who also just happen to have ended up
with only one or two marker differences from the Patriarch.

This is a "timely topic" in that a couple of people have mentioned finding
evidence of a large number of mutations ("large" meaning more than one or
two mutations) happening in their lines in recent history.

Maybe.

But something to pay attention to is that the lines in question are among
those that differ at only a few markers from the Patriarch.

Dennis
___________________________________________________________
Y-Chromosome Haplogroup Website

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~dgarvey/DNA/markers.htm
___________________________________________________________




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