Within subtopics here, human footprints are traced through time via genetic clues.
There are several approaches to tracing peoples over time, including:
- genetic survey of current populations, whose genetic ‘hot spots’ suggest past population centers
- paleogenomics, to determine genetic traits at a place and time, from bone, teeth, and bio-waste in soils.
- statistical study of auDNA paleogenomes, to understand how various clades relate to one another at a place and time
- survey of physical artefacts to determine the culture of a place at a time
- survey of linguistic trees to determine where a language originates and how it spreads
The non-recombinant genetic pathways of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) enable us to trace population movement over time, with strong suggestion of who was where and when. Paleogenomics anchors such predicted DNA rate of change analyses via proximately datable DNA.
Articles under this menu will follow the Y-DNA to trace the travels of certain human male genetic groups from Africa to northwest Europe, a journey through 70 thousand years. There are various interpretations of the available data. This one is based on YFull databases, augmented by archaic genetic test results, all visually mapped in time via Phylogeographer.com.
Y-DNA haplogroup I2a2a (I-M223) and mtDNA haplogroup U5b1 are the focus of the author’s ancestral human odyssey. People with this genetic signature followed a trail directly to Europe from West Asia, arriving before 40 thousand years ago, likely comprising a majority of peoples once called Cro-Magnon and now called European Early Modern Human. Here is reported a brief summary of this expansion of modern humans in Europe.
Just as the Neolithic early European farmers would do tens of millennia later, these autochthonous European human populations likely came up the Danube and other major rivers into north and central Europe, and also west across Mediterranean shores of Italy and France before reaching all the way to Iberia. But they were not equipped to remain north of the Alps when the last glacial advances (LGM) turned Europe into an Arctic deep freeze. The LGM pushed them back south down the rivers to Mediterranean refugia 25kya.
Those having taken refuge in the Balkans spread around the Adriatic coasts of Dalmatia and Northern Italy, staying warm and well fed within a Mediterranean climate influence. Roughly 16kya, they were able to once again move north following the Danube back to its source north of the Alps, perhaps in the valley of the Neckar River.
A 2015 paleogenomic study sequenced the genome of a 13,000 year old Cro-Magnon from Switzerland. He belonged to Y-DNA Haplogroup I2a and mtDNA haplogroup U5b1h. He was a close match to the author’s maternal and paternal ancestors of the same antiquity.
Some of these people would only be able to spend a few generations there until the Younger Dryas cold spell pushed the author’s subclade of this population back down the Danube to the Iron Gates. They were soon spread from the northern Balkans to the Carpathian basin/plain, remaining for a couple of millennia before joining the neolithic migrants north to the area that is now Hungary/Czech Republic. (Another sister clade perhaps managed to wait out the Dryas cold in Germany and then followed the warming weather directly to Doggerland and northern England.)
By 8kya, the clade we are following were now in the main path of the Neolithic expansion across Europe from SE to NW. They likely lived among these Anatolian/Mediterranean peoples, but largely still remaining hunter-gatherers. It took them four millennia more to reach the mouth of the Rhine about 4.5kybp.
A second major European male genetic vector, the R1b paternal clades, are a relatively recent overlay (~2500BCE) of Western Europe, thought to be associated with the spread of the Indo-European languages from Anatolia, Caucasus, and Steppe regions surrounding the Black Sea. These are the Steppe pastoralists that would eventually become the major population component of modern Western Europe.
In Roman times, the latest northern subclades of I-M223, combined with migrating Steppe pastoralists, were called the Frisii and Chauci. They were later united by historians under the Saxon umbrella. This area, collectively called Frisia, is the genetic ‘hot spot’ for the author’s genetic I-M223 ‘tribe’ for last two millennia BCE.
Near the beginning of the Baltic Viking Age, the author’s terminal subclades of this population ventured across the Baltic and up the Gulf of Bothnia, joining earlier sister clades who had settled in northern Sweden. Our clade settled across the Bay, in Finland. A few of this population have since left Finland, and one male blacksmith among them likely migrated to the American Swedish Colony on the Delaware River around 1650.
On the maternal side, the genetics are much less focused, with clade U5b being ubiquitous from Iberia to the Urals in the Mesolithic. Further research has shown U5b1 to be more prevalent in Western Europe, while U5b2 is more present in Eastern Europe.
The R1 peoples who came to coexist with the I2 clades along the German Bight may have originated east of the Ural Mountains in central Asia. Although relative newcomers to Europe, they currently comprise the majority of Northern European males. Four thousand years ago, the R1b-U106 clade first reached the area of Frisia. The author’s maternal grandfather descends from these people via the L48 subclade.
One might think of these two grandfathers, I2 and R1b, as simply Europeans, with a similar background and ethnicity. But in reality, these two representatives of principal European male ‘tribes’ have not shared a common male ancestor in the last 50,000 years.
Genetics provides a unique window into the past to assist with interpretation of our present. While Caucasian is a term applied to all peoples with European ancestry, the male-specific genetics of Europe exemplifies the complexities of human population evolution, a reality at great odds with any such simplistic characterizations.
areas of interest 