About DNA:
The spiritual dimension

About our Haplogroup:

A bit of history

According to a 2000 study on
" European Founder Lineages"
by leading scientists such as Martin Richards,
Vincent Macaulay, Brian Sykes, and many others,
the mutations that
define the I haplogroup
are thought to have arisen
between 32,300 and 58,400 years ago.

So our Foremother,
"Iris,"
could have lived, say, 43,000 years ago. 

The question of where she lived is still an unsettled one.  
There seems to be a strong chance,
if we study where descendents are found,
that it was in the Northern Middle East.

Some of the earliest, Paleolithic settlers of Europe
- the Y DNA R1b haplogroup for example - came out of Central Asia,
but there are many tell-tale traces of their path from there.
Not so with Iris;
Only a few of her descendents have ever been found in Central Asia.

Stephen Oppenheimer's book, The Real Eve,
argues for an origin of many early European settlers
in southern and eastern Iran, and in Pakistan.
He doesn't speak much of our haplogroup,
but from his maps, he seems to see
Iran as the most likely place
for the origin of Iris.

Wherever Iris originally lived, only a few others
-- belonging to haplogroups U5 and HV --
had blazed the trail
when her descendents decided to brave the unknown lands
to the northwest  of their early home.

When Iris' descendents first came to Europe,
it was probably between
23,500 and 28,000 years ago.
We can guess, then, that they
must have been participants in the Gravettian culture
of that period, known for their reindeer and mammoth hunting,
and their female figurines of clay, stone, and ivory,
like the ones shown below.

The Ice Age
still had a fierce grip on Europe,
with great glaciers
stretching over its northern and mountain regions.

But the climate created ideal conditions
for vast herds of animals to live
on the steppe-tundra
just south of the glaciers.

In fact, it was probably
about the same period
described by Jean Auel
in her 'Clan of the Cave Bear' books.

(Needless to say, her imaginative version of events
shouldn't be taken as gospel!
Especially Ayla's domestication of the horse,
which probably came much later.)

It's fun, though, to imagine that our people
very likely traversed the same lands,
the mountains and valleys that she describes.

It wasn't 'til much later,
when the climate started to warm a bit
after 18,000 years ago
that most of Europe's other peoples
began to arrive.

The majority of European "founders"
probably arrived between
18,000 and 10,000 years ago.

And after them followed
the Neolithic farmers,
the migrations of the Bronze Age,
and the Iron Age and later
nomadic peoples on horseback.

Today we make up a small proportion
of the population of European descent.

Descendents of Iris appear to make up
4% or less of the population
in practically every country where we are found.

And where are we found?
All over Europe and in North America,
though the data is still too sparse
to know for sure.

First we became aware of some pockets of
relatively higher concentrations -- still a small minority --
in areas of the British Isles,
especially in the west, for example in
the Hebrides and Cornwall,
and in Finland and Iceland.

Now we are learning of other areas where there are more of us:
in Italy and Greece, and among the Kurds.

More thorough studies are needed
in southern and eastern lands, but so far,
people who belong to Haplogroup I
have been found in Italy, Greece, Albania, Turkey, Armenia,
the Caucasus, Iran, Iraq, India, and Egypt.

The higher concentration among the Kurds is very interesting,
since they are considered to be an ancient, autocthonous population
-- that is, they have been there since the earliest times.

The mtDNA of that whole area needs further study.

Where do we fit into the big picture?

Once upon a time,
on a lovely, small and fertile planet we call Earth,
life appeared,
and after quite a while,
an extraordinary new creature
known as Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.

Oh - you already knew that?

Well, it's hard to know
where to begin the story
and how much to include,
but among the members
of the first human communities,
just one woman
had children whose descendents have survived
the nearly 140,000 years since then.
We call her "Mitochondrial Eve."

Over many thousands of years,
Eve's progeny managed to hang on
in those days when human survival was uncertain
and among them a few mutations occurred
in the mitochondrial DNA.

Thus we ended up with several African branches
of the original mtDNA,
which were named L0, L1, L2, and L3.

While L0, L1 and L2 remained
in the Motherland of humanity,
something drew some of L3's descendents
beyond her bounds
around 65,000 years ago,
and they became the first
Homo sapiens sapiens
to emigrate from Africa.
From that small group arose
all the peoples of the rest of the world.

At some point during or soon after that journey,
two different mtDNA mutations arose, so that from L3,
two daughter macrohaplogroups formed: M and N.

It was the first great genealogical division
outside of Africa.

M is found only in people from Asia,
but haplogroups descended from N
are found all across Eurasia and through the Americas.

M is a major haplogroup in India and other Asian regions.
C and D (which span Asia and the Americas) E, Q, and Z,
and other haplogroups, are derived from M.

N gave rise to a great diversity of haplogroups.
  One of the earliest clusters, N1, was ours,  
shared with N1a (our closest sister clade),
N1b, N1c, and N1d.

Our next nearest neighbors are the small W haplogroup
and X, famous as the only haplogroup to occur
among both Europeans and Native Americans.

  Another related haplogroup is A,
found today in Asia
and among indigenous Americans.

Then, there was an important mtDNA mutation,
which set our early cluster
apart from all the haplogroups that followed.

With the 16223 T to C mutation,
another macrohaplogroup, R, was formed.
In R, there are several main clusters:

One includes the many clades of U, one of which is K.

The next includes haplogroups J and T.

And another large cluster is made up of
Europe's largest haplogroup, H, and
its small daughter haplogroup, V.

The mostly Asian haplogroups
B, F, and P also belong to R.

A gigantic new tree diagram of all the human mtDNA haplogroups can be seen here:

http://www.mitomap.org/mitomap-phylogeny.pdf

It's a pdf file which you will have to zoom in on a lot to read. 
Be aware that it doesn't include HVR1 and 2 mutations, only those from the Coding Region.
Still, you can see how the haplogroups are related.

Mitomap is a great resource for learning about mtDNA, which I highly recommend.

Bonnie Schrack

Bonnie@ancientrootsresearch.com

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