Ancient Ancestry:
Your Place in Human History

Understanding one’s ancient ancestry is rarely the primary reason for DNA testing. Most of us test our DNA with more immediate goals in mind. Like confirming a close relationship. Or extending a family tree.

Unless you have a very rare set of markers, your least specific test comparisons will probably reveal many matches. And these people can’t all be close relatives. For example, on the first 12 markers of my Y-DNA test I match 66 men. In the HVR-1 region of my mtDNA test, I match more than 1,100 people.

While I must share a common ancestor with each of these genetic cousins, most of those common ancestors lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Geneticists and anthropologists use these same DNA markers to understand the origins of modern humans and trace their migrations. That means we can use our test results to find our personal ancient ancestry. And by adding our data to certain specific studies, we can help improve their accuracy.

The mtDNA that we all inherit from our mothers is particularly useful for discovering our ancient ancestry. It lets scientists identify and trace separate genetic lines within human populations. Furthermore, the mutation rate acts as an evolutionary clock over these long time periods.

The Seven Daughters of Eve

The pioneer in this field of study was Bryan Sykes, a Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University in England. He discovered that people tend to cluster into a relatively small number of groups, defined by the precise sequence of their mtDNA.

In Europe about 95% of the population falls into seven such groups, known as haplogroups, categorized by the letters U, X, H, V, T, K, and J.

That was the basis for Sykes’ book, The Seven Daughters of Eve . To emphasize that the first women in each haplogroup were real individuals, Sykes gave them all names, like Ursula, Xenia etc. Then, using archaeological and other evidence, he reconstructed fictional accounts of their lives.

A Global Concept

Obviously, these findings do not just apply to ancient ancestry in Europe. Among Native Americans there are four groups, among Japanese people there are nine, and so on. Sykes and others have defined about 40 of these clans worldwide.

Logically, each of these groups must trace back to just one woman, the common maternal ancestor of everyone in her group or clan. These women did not live in the same time and place. And there were other women around, of course. But these clan mothers are the only ones whose maternal lineage survives unbroken right through to the present day. All of the other lines terminated when a woman somewhere in the line did not have a daughter.

All of these major maternal lines go back further in time to “Mitochondrial Eve,” a woman who lived about 140,000 years ago in Africa. Like the other clan mothers, Eve was not alone. But the direct maternal lines of her contemporaries all terminated somewhere in human history.

Y-DNA Adam

Scientists are also studying DNA from the Y chromosome, which only passes from father to son. If you’re a man, your Y-DNA test results place you in one of about 20 main branches of the paternal tree.

To make things confusing, scientists also categorize these male haplogroups by letters of the alphabet. Naturally, there is some overlap between the letters of the Y-DNA (paternal line) and mtDNA (maternal line) haplogroups. So know which one you’re looking at.

Each of these major haplogroups, or clades, can have subgroups, or subclades. In my case I belong to haplogroups that are very common in Europe and North America. My mtDNA haplogroup is H and Bryan Sykes named my clan mother Helena. On the paternal side my Y-DNA haplogroup is R. The lab estimates my subgroup as R1b1b2. Additional tests are available to confirm that subgroup; but I have not taken them yet.

Following the same logic as the female line, we can all trace our paternal ancestry back to a single male (Y-DNA Adam) who lived around 60,000 to 90,000 years ago.

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