And segments that match those from various geographies… Very interesting that I show more Finnish ancestry than Estonian, with both countries visible to each other across the Baltic Sea and with languages as similar as Spanish and Portugese.
(Perhaps I should not be surprised that Estonia keeps winning the Finnish Wife Carry competitions, since “deep within Finnish tradition… It was apparently common practice for men to steal women from local villages.” BBC =)
From a earlier analysis of just my Y-chromosome (which can only be passed down from a father to a son, and thus can be analyzed without any mixing over the generations), I learned a phenomenal amount about my distant history, back from the second exodus from Africa 50,000 years ago, through Samoyed breeding, to the modern day region of Estonia. (In both cases, they just had my DNA and no other information about me.)
All of my known relatives are Estonian.
23andMe looks for a larger number of point mutations (SNPs for short) across all of my chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA (which passes down exclusively through the maternal line). Here is what they found on the paternal line:
Haplogroup: N1c1, a subgroup of N1
Highlight: N1c spread from Central Asia to Europe at the end of the Ice Age.
Populations: Saami, Indigenous Siberians, Finns, Estonians
I always wondered why I tend to seem to be tanned even when I have spent very little time in the sun:
“Haplogroup N originated in southeastern Asia, probably in or around modern-day southern China, 20,000 years ago. Later, as the Ice Age wound down about 12,000 years ago and glaciers retreated from northern Eurasia, men carried this haplogroup north toward the Altai Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. After a pause, the haplogroup began expanding about 5,000 years ago into present-day Russia, where it became very common among speakers of the Uralic languages that were developing in the Ural Mountains and Volga River drainage. After another millennium men carried haplogroup N even farther north and west into eastern Europe and Scandinavia.”
“In some of the farthest reaches of northern Eurasia, haplogroup N1c is represented exclusively by the N1c1 branch. N1c1 appears to be relatively young – no more than 5,000 years old. It is most common in the isolated tribes of northern Siberia, such as the Yakut and Buryats, where N1c1 reaches levels of 85-95%. But N1c1 is also present at high levels farther west, where it’s found in up to 60% of Saami and 30% of Estonians. In total, about a quarter of Siberian men have Y chromosomes belonging to N1c1. That prevalence, and the concentration of N1c1 among speakers of Altaic tongues like Mongolian, suggests that the paternal ancestry of many present-day Siberian men may trace to northern China or the Altay Mountains of Central Asia.”
And this makes me wonder about the basis of attraction:
“Although Viking raiders carried many Scandinavian haplogroups to Britain during the first millennium AD, N1c was not among them.
Because women in Scandinavia do not show as much Asian heritage as men, the migration traced by haplogroup N1c may have been almost exclusively male. Alternatively, male migrants from Asia may have preferentially married local women, which would have erased any genetic record of female Asian migrants.”
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