R-Z11 (Y-DNA)

Migrations of Your Paternal Line A
275,000 Years Ago F-M89 76,000 Years Ago K-M9 53,000 Years Ago R-M207 35,000 Years Ago R-M343 27,000 Years Ago Haplogroup A 275,000 Years Ago The stories of all of our paternal lines can be traced back over 275,000 years to just one man: the common ancestor of haplogroup A. Current evidence suggests he was one of thousands of men who lived in eastern Africa at the time. However, while his male-line descendants passed down their Y chromosomes generation after generation, the lineages from the other men died out. Over time his lineage alone gave rise to all other haplogroups that exist today.

R-M269 10,000 Years Ago Origin and Migrations of Haplogroup R-M269 Your paternal line stems from a branch of R-M343 called R-M269, one of the most prolific paternal lineages across western Eurasia. R-M269 arose roughly 10,000 years ago, as the people of the Fertile Crescent domesticated plants and animals for the first time. Around 8,000 years ago, the first farmers and herders began to push east into Central Asia and north into the Caucasus Mountains. Some of them eventually reached the steppes above the Black and Caspian Seas. There, they lived as pastoral nomads, herding cattle and sheep across the grasslands, while their neighbors to the south developed yet another crucial technology in human history: bronze smelting. As bronze tools and weaponry spread north, a new steppe culture called the Yamnaya was born.

Around 5,000 years ago, perhaps triggered by a cold spell that made it difficult to feed their herds, Yamnaya men spilled east across Siberia and down into Central Asia. To the west, they pushed down into the Balkans and to central Europe, where they sought new pastures for their herds and metal deposits to support burgeoning Bronze Age commerce. Over time, their descendants spread from central Europe to the Atlantic coast, establishing new trade routes and an unprecedented level of cultural contact and exchange in western Europe.

The men from the steppes also outcompeted the local men as they went; their success is demonstrated in the overwhelming dominance of the R-M269 lineage in Europe. Over 80% of men in Ireland and Wales carry the haplogroup, as do over 60% of men along the Atlantic Coast from Spain to France. The frequency of R-M269 gradually decreases to the east, falling to about 30% in Germany, 20% in Poland, and 10-15% in Greece and Turkey. The haplogroup connects all these men to still others in the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia, where between 5 and 10% of men also bear the lineage. R-Z11 < 10,000 Years Ago Your paternal haplogroup, R-Z11, traces back to a man who lived less than 10,000 years ago. That's nearly 400 generations ago! What happened between then and now? As researchers and citizen scientists discover more about your haplogroup, new details may be added to the story of your paternal line.

R-Z11 Today R-Z11 is relatively common among 23andMe customers. Today, you share your haplogroup with all the men who are paternal-line descendants of the common ancestor of R-Z11, including other 23andMe customers.

The Y Chromosome Most of the DNA in your body is packaged into 23 pairs of chromosomes. The first 22 pairs are matching, meaning that they contain roughly the same DNA inherited from both parents. The 23rd pair is different because in men, the pair does not match. The chromosomes in this pair are known as "sex" chromosomes and they have different names: X and Y. Typically, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y.

Your genetic sex is determined by which sex chromosome you inherited from your father. If you are genetically male, you received a copy of your father's Y chromosome along with a gene known as SRY (short for sex-determining region Y) that is important for male sexual development. If you are genetically female, you received a copy of the X chromosome from both of your parents.

Paternal Inheritance Each generation, fathers pass down copies of their Y chromosomes to their sons essentially unchanged. Between generations, the matching chromosomes in the other 22 pairs make contact and exchange segments of DNA. This process shuffles the genetic information that is passed down from parent to child, making it difficult to trace genealogy over many generations. Except for two tiny sections at the chromosome's tips, however, the Y skips this step. Instead, a nearly identical copy is handed down each time.

But, every so often, small changes to the DNA sequence do occur. These changes, called mutations, create new genetic variants on the Y chromosome. Because the Y does not recombine between generations, these variants collect in patterns that uniquely mark individual paternal lineages.

Paternal Haplogroup Tree To trace the genetic history of paternal lineages, researchers compare the variants found in Y-DNA sequences from around the world. The result is a tree of Y chromosomes that shows how all paternal lines are related.

A paternal haplogroup is a cluster of branches on the tree that stem from a common male ancestor and share a particular set of variants. To keep track of all the branches, the major sections of the tree are named with one or more capital letters. Each haplogroup name starts with the letter of the major branch from which it stems and ends with the name of a variant that identifies a particular subgroup.

Tracing Male Migrations Because closely related haplogroups tend to share geographic roots, researchers can use the modern distributions of haplogroups around the world to trace major migrations, from the voyage to Australia over 40,000 years ago to the peopling of North and South America in the last 19,000 years.