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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2007-01 > 1169703109


From: Jonathan Day <>
Subject: [DNA] Worth getting yet more extras?
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:31:49 -0800 (PST)


Hi,

I'm (slowly, but still much faster than I'd expected)
getting my results back from FTDNA. I'd tested for 12
markers under the Genography project some time back,
but with one weird marker and too few results to do
much, I went for the full 67-marker test by FTDNA.

I have 50 of those results back so far. The weird
marker is still being weird. The best match I can find
has a genetic distance of 7 at 49 markers - which is
rather further than I would like. (The closest at 50
markers is 12.) Some of the Y chromosome search
engines turn up absolutely zilch, so I guess the
distance of 7 isn't too bad.

MFTDNA offer additional stuff, like "deep SNP". Am I
going to find out anything useful by going for this
extra test? If, as I get the remaining results, the
matches worsen, does the extra information get me
anything?

Assuming further tests are not the way to go, what
additional resources would be worth investigating? The
papers I've seen deal a lot in fairly abstract, broad
population terms, whereas I seem to be a mutant I1a.
(I'm a distance of 1 from the closest of the subtypes
I could find described and have the markers to compare
against.) It's hard to draw conclusions from a profile
that doesn't exist, which means I don't know -when-
the change occurred and therefore I don't know what
part of the I1a story applies to me.

Another angle of attack is to try and back-trace
events. There are, as I've said, a few people at the
35 and 49 marker level who are dramatically closer
than everyone else (although still obscenely distant).
There is no way that I know of of inferring a most
recent common ancestor with distances so great, if I
were to compare against a single person. However, the
I1a group I'm closest to is associated strongly with
Norway and the Vikings, and the people who are
"closest fits" are from Norway, Scotland (a popular
place for Vikings to raid), Ireland (ditto) and
Iceland (which, IIRC, is connected to the Norse).

Is there any known method of using these "close fits"
to build an "artist's impression"/"identikit picture"
of who the common ancestor was and when they most
likely diverged from the other I1a's? I imagine the
knowledge exists for doing this, because it's how all
the deep ancestry stuff is done, but that doesn't mean
it would work on this scale, or that there's enough
data to apply existing techniques, or indeed that the
techniques can even be mastered by someone who is not
highly skilled in the subject.

Suggestions welcome, 'cos I'm out of ideas,

Jonathan




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