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From: Bonnie Schrack <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Haplogroup J2 frequency
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 19:32:18 -0400


Ken asked

> I wonder if the J2 falls off in Italy as you move both north or south
> from "north central"? "North Central" Italy is old Etruscan regions.

And Jackson said

> I am not enitely sure but I am pretty sure that Southern Italy has the
> highest percentages of haplogroup J2 in Italy. My own direct paternal
> line is from Calabria.

Yes, the percentage of J2 (and even J1) in the population increases as
you go south in Italy, reaching its highest percentage in Sicily, from
what I have seen. At the same time, the percentage of R1b rises as you
go north toward the Alps.

There is a good paper called "Clinal patterns of human Y chromosomal
diversity in continental Italy and Greece are dominated by drift and
founder effects," DiGiacomo et al, 2003,
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/italy.pdf
which despite the title, has a very nice map in Fig. 1 on the fourth
page, showing the clines of how R1b increases as you go north. Of
course they didn't test enough SNPs (only 7!), so they call it "P*(xR1a)."

The other haplogroups they have in their data are R1a, DE (YAP+), G2,
I-M170, A, and everything else lumped together as Y*. No STR data is
included. YCAII was tested but is just barely mentioned. The highest
percentages of I-M170 were Serrai, Greece with 36%, and Agrinion, Greece
with 23.8%. In Italy the highest percentages of I were Foggia with
18.5% and Brindisi with 13.2%.

The point they are trying to make is a good one: that the percentages of
different haplogroups in Greece and Italy vary enormously from one
little locality to another.

They sampled 17 locales in Italy, 7 in mainland Greece, 4 on Crete and 2
in the Aegean islands. There were two locations, Foggia in Italy and
Khania on Crete, where over 44% of the population was J2. In a few
places, it was very low, such as in Genoa, only 6.9%. Generally J2a1
[J2-(DYS413<=18)] was much more common than J2b [J2*-(xDYS413<=18)],
with the highest amount of J2b being 14.3% in Agrinion, Greece. I
recommend this article to all those in the J haplogroup who are curious
to learn more about the distribution of J in these two countries.

Bonnie



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