I participated in the Genographic project, a joint venture by IBM, National Geographic and the Waitt Family Foundation. By testing the DNA from your Y-chromosome (for men) and/or from your mitochondrial DNA, the migrations of your paternal and maternal ancestors can be tracked on a scale of some 10,000 years.

I've written extensively about this on my Dutch blog (1 2 3 4 5), but I will summarize my results here, concentrating on information useful for genealogists that have also tested their DNA and got some matches with my DNA.


Based on my Y-chromosomial DNA, transmitted by a father to his sons, I belong to haplogroup R1b, which is the most common one in Western Europe. You can see my complete results of 37 loci (12 standard through Genographic and 25 additional through FamilyTreeDNA) at Ysearch.org, and in this table:



This is what the Genographic project tells me about haplogroup R1b, which determines my paternal ancestry line:

Your Y chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1b, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M343. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168.

The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual-"Eurasian Adam." This African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity's home continent.

Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source.

Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave "Eurasian Adam's" descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages.

Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is defined by the marker M89.

M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of "Eurasian Adam," and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East.

Many people of this lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.

With much of Earth's water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era's vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe "superhighway" and eventually peopled much of the continent.

A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.

Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

Most residents of the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to this unique individual, and carry his defining marker. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians have the M9 marker, as do most Europeans and many Indians. The haplogroup defined by M9, K, is known as the Eurasian Clan.

This large lineage dispersed gradually. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along a vast belt of Eurasian steppe, until the massive mountain ranges of south central Asia blocked their path.

The Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya, even more formidable during the era's ice age, divided eastward migrations. These migrations through the "Pamir Knot" region would subsequently become defined by additional genetic markers.

The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans. This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.

The M45 lineage survived on these northern steppes even in the frigid Ice Age climate. While big game was plentiful, these resourceful hunters had to adapt their behavior to an increasingly hostile environment. They erected animal skin shelters and sewed weathertight clothing. They also refined the flint heads on their weapons to compensate for the scarcity of obsidian and other materials.

The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.

Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe's first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.

The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.

Soon after this lineage's arrival in Europe, the era of the Neanderthals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely outcompeted Neanderthals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.

The long journey of this lineage was further shaped by the preponderance of ice at this time. Humans were forced to southern refuges in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. Years later, as the ice retreated, they moved north out of these isolated refuges and left an enduring, concentrated trail of the M173 marker in their wake.

Today, for example, the marker's frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles-where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

Members of haplogroup R1b, defined by M343 are the direct descendents of Europe's first modern humans-known as the Cro Magnon people.

Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, during a time when Neanderthals still lived in the region. M343-carrying peoples made woven clothing and constructed huts to withstand the frigid climes of the Upper Paleolithic era. They used relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro Magnons' surprisingly advanced culture during the last glacial age.

When the ice retreated genetically homogenous groups recolonized the north, where they are still found in high frequencies. Some 70 percent of men in southern England are RIb. In parts of Spain and Ireland that number exceeds 90 percent.

There are many sublineages within R1b that are yet to be defined. The Genographic Project hopes to bring future clarity to the disparate parts of this distinctive European lineage.

Based on my mitochondrial DNA, I belong to haplogroup H, which is also the most common one in Europe. You can see the complete results of my HVR1 region at MitoSearch.org. Essentially, my HVR1 region shows only two mutations compared to the Cambridge Reference Set of mitochondrial DNA: 16294T and 16304C.



The mitochondrial DNA is transmitted by the mother to all her children, so essentially I inherited my mitochondrial DNA through my maternal ancestry line, the mother of the mother of the mother... of my mother.

Mitochondrial haplogroup H is a predominantly European haplogroup that participated in a population expansion beginning approximately 20,000 years ago. Today, about 30% of all mitochondrial lineages in Europe are classified as haplogroup H. It is rather uniformly distributed throughout Europe suggesting a major role in the peopling of Europe, and descendant lineages of the original haplogroup H appear in the Near East as a result of migration. Future work will better resolve the distribution and historical characteristics of this haplogroup. Bryan Sykes in his Seven Daughters of Eve book named this mtDNA haplogroup Helena.

WHAT ABOUT THE LAST FEW CENTURIES?
After reading the above, you understand that the haplogroups are telling us something about the migration of our ancestors (to be exact: only some of our ancestors - only those in the straight paternal and maternal lineage) in a timeframe from approximately 100,000 years ago till approximately 5,000 years ago.

But this DNA analysis can tell us more. By comparing the DNA of two individuals, one can predict the statistical probability that those two had a common ancestor in the last centuries.

Let's take an example. The websites of Family Tree DNA and Ysearch.org have databases of test results from people who have agreed to publication for genealogic purposes. The database contains their name, their e-mail address, their origin and their genetic markers. So, I can search the database for people that have exactly the same values for the 25-marker test of the Y-chromosome. And there are tools to compare near-matches. Here's an example:



I'm only showing the leftmost part of the table. The last names are relevant because normally, the last name is inherited together with the Y-chromosome: from father to sons. We see that mister German from Delaware and I are sharing almost exactly the same values on 25 loci, except for 2 loci: 385b and 458. What is this telling us about the possibility of a common ancestry? The Family Tree DNA website has a calculator for that, which gives us this result:



So, according to the table above, there is a chance of more than 90% that Mr. German and me have a common ancestor in direct paternal lineage within the last 24 generations, which is approximately 600 years. Mind you, "direct paternal lineage" means: the father of my father's father father ... and so on. Considering that I have traced back my direct paternal lineage until the early 1600's, and that these forefathers were all living in a small area in the western part of Belgium, I find this hard to believe. Especially because in this region, people have started using last names since the 11th or 12th century. If mister German would have a name that sounded like "Brackeley", I would be more inclined to believe this calculation.

But the calculator has some important small print:

The above numbers are based exclusively on the comparison of their Y-DNA results, which show 2 mismatches. However, these results can be refined if their paper trail indicates that no common ancestor between Mr. Luc Van Braekel and Mr. ... could have lived in a certain number of past generations.

So, because it is very unlikely that our common ancestor lived in the last 400 years (16 generations), we will refine the calculation.



So, with that additional information, there is now a 90% chance that we shared a common forefather in direct male line in the last 32 generations, or 800 years, or between the years 1200 and 1600. Which, again, I find amazing.

The database contains 5 other individuals that yield approximately the same probabilities. Of these five, three have last names that resemble the name of mister German: Jarman, Jarmon and German. Another is called Hancock, and another one Webb. This technique of calculating the probability of a common y-chromosome ancestor was established at the first International Conference on Genetic Genealogy on October 30, 2004. So it is fairly recent.

Oh, and for those of you who are contemplating the possibility that during one of both World Wars of the 20th century, some soldier from the German occupation army would have contributed to my current genetic configuration: there are too many striking physical and psychological similarities between me and my late grandfather who was born in 1894, so that we can safely eliminate this possibility.

How is it possible that I have a close genetic distance, based on the Y-chromosome, with people that have different surnames? This is the explanation:

Dr. Luigi Lucca Cavalli-Sforza, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, in his fascinating book: The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolutions says that the total population of Europe was 60,000 people at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Now Europe has a population of 300 million people. This increase is almost entirely due to a natural increase in population rather than immigration from other continents. Keeping this in mind it is reasonable that many people alive today in Europe will match with other Europeans from BEFORE the time that our ancestors began the adoption of surnames, and when you match someone who has a different surname your first thought should be that the ‘connection’ is distant rather then recent.

The same can be done for the mitochondrial DNA. I only tested the HVR1, which is a low resolution test. The Family Tree DNA database gives 10 exact matches for the HVR1 loci. Mitosearch.org only gives one exact match.

MY OWN GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH: THE PLACES
Because several people that are showing near or exact matches with my y-DNA or mitochondrial DNA have already contacted me to ask for possible common ancestors, I will now summarize my own genealogical research (performed in 1990 and 1991), without losing ourselves in unnecessary details.

I am a Dutch-speaking citizen of Belgium and I have traced both my paternal and maternal lineage back to the 17th century. All these ancestors lived in confined areas in the western part of Belgium, in the provinces of East and West Flanders. My mitochondrial ancestors lived in Roeselare from the end of the 17th century, my Y-chromosome ancestors lived in the region between Wortegem, Waregem, Harelbeke, Zwevegem and Sint-Denijs from around 1620 until now.






MY OWN GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH: THE NAMES AND THE DATES
My Y-chromosome lineage:
Luc Van Braekel (Aalst 1958 - )
Roger Van Braekel (Waregem 1930 - ) x Ingrid Vandenbroucke
Gerard Van Braekel (Waregem 1894 - Waregem 1975) x Maria Van Geluwe
Jules Van Braekel (Waregem 1861 - Waregem 1937) x Emma Desmet
Leo Van Braekel (Waregem 1823 - Waregem 1885) x Rosalia Kindts
Petrus Jacobus Van Braekel (Waregem 1770 - Waregem 1842) x Isabella Verschae
Jean Baptiste Van Braekel (Desselgem 1737 - Waregem 1812) x Maria Anna Laridon
Joannes Van Braekel (Wortegem 1704 - Waregem 1771) x Anne Marie Decraene
Jacobus Van Braekel (Wortegem 1668 - Wortegem 1725) x Jacoba De Waele
Joos Van Brakele (Zwevegem 1641 - Wortegem 1705) x Joanna De Smet
Jan Van Brakele (? - Wortegem 1665) x Catharina Struyve

My mitochondrial lineage:
Luc Van Braekel (Aalst 1958 - )
Ingrid Vandenbroucke (Roeselare 1929 - ) x Roger Van Braekel
Alice Ampe (Staden 1904 - Roeselare 1968) x Wilfried Vandenbroucke
Maria Devogel (Roeselare 1874 - Roeselare 1950) x Arsène Ampe
Coralie Raveschot (Roeselare 1848 - Roeselare 1925) x Charles-Louis Devogel
Barbara Demeester (Roeselare 1817 - Roeselare 1886) x Franciscus Raveschot
Florentina Ostyn (Roeselare 1784 - Roeselare 1825) x Petrus Demeester
Isabelle Biebuyck (Roeselare 1755 - Roeselare 1808) x Clement Ostyn
Anna Denys (Roeselare 1721 - Roeselare 1795) x Joseph Biebuyck
Joanna Bert (Roeselare 1697 - Roeselare 1781) x Willem De Nijs
Albertina Soenen (? - Roeselare 1710) x Ignatius Bert