GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2003-02 > 1044488607


From: David Faux <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] mutations and paper trail
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 15:43:32 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <F135AMHnFrYXvF2UOfj000176fe@hotmail.com>


Dennis: The information you have outlined in relation to the proposed "Patriarch" for us HG1 types is very sobering. I went back to the numbers relating to my haplotype and discovered that I am only 5 one step mutations from the "most common value" reported with Family Tree DNA testing; and a mere 3 one step mutations using the 24 markers tested by Ancestry.com.
These findings suggest firstly that my haplotype is very likely to exactly match a very large number of unrelated individuals using the 10 or 12 marker testing (which is precisely what I have found - people with diverse surnames from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Sweden in the Family Tree DNA database alone). This underscores my belief that for some of us, using the 12 marker testing in one name studies is likely to result in a number of false positives just by chance. True, it probably means we are all descended from the "Patriarch", but us genealogy types are only concerned with the past few hundred years and so matches under these circumstances are entirely meaningless, or could lead to erroneous conclusions about recent kinship. The only hope is to bite the bullet and pay the extra fee for 25 marker testing - which is what I am doing in my Faux surname study.
I would like to underscore the conclusions of others - you really are not on firm ground saying much of anything if you chose to base any conclusions on 12 marker testing. In my opinion it is only really useful (and even this is debatable) as a screen with a very rough mesh. If you have two people who are two mutations apart it is highly unlikely they are related except perhaps in the "deep ancestral" sense.
David.
Dennis Garvey <> wrote:

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.



Dr. David K. Faux, 4028 Larwin Ave., Cypress, CA, 90630, USA





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