Well several days ago I showed you a video about paternal Haplogroups and so
today it is all about maternal haplogroup.
Howdy I'm Andy Lee with
Family History Fanatics where we help you understand your DNA, climb your family
tree, and write the story of your ancestors along the way. We do this
through our youtube channel, through online education, and through books that
we write. So if you would like to check out more of some of the other options
you can look in the description below. Now the paternal Haplogroup was from
your father's father's father it is carried on the y chromosome. On the
mitochondrial DNA we actually get a maternal Haplogroup and this is from
our mother's mother's mother. Now one of the interesting things about this is
both men and women have a mitochondrial DNA from their mother and so they have
that maternal haplogroup from testing, only males can test to be able
to get a paternal haplogroup, so everyone can test for a maternal haplogroup only
males can test for a paternal haplogroup. Now because mitochondrial DNA is much
smaller than Y chromosome or any of your other DNA it was actually the first to
be studied and the first time that Haplogroups were named. Now the haplogroup
naming actually started with A B C and D it made perfect sense we're gonna start
with the first four letters of the alphabet and at that time what they were
researching is they were researching the native populations of the Americas and
so a B C and D represent Haplogroups that are found almost exclusively in the
Americas. There are some branches that they have
traced back into Siberia and northern Asia but for the most part all Native
Americans in North and South America are usually one of Haplogroups A B C or D
if their mother's mother's mother's mother was also in the Americas. Now as
this study of Haplogroups continued they just kept on adding on new letters
and so it wasn't in any kind of ordered fashion, if you remember the paternal
Haplogroup video it actually followed from A through
the end from Y chromosome Adam until the more recent ones. Mitochondrial DNA or
the maternal Haplogroups do not follow this process in fact there's no
relation between the letters of the mitochondrial maternal Haplogroups
and the YDNA paternal haplogroup. So just because you are one letter in what
maternal haplogroup does not mean that you're going to be anywhere close to
that letter or anything to do with that letter in the maternal haplogroup. Again
if we go over to Family Tree DNA we can see an interactive portion of this map
that we can use to trace our own ancestry. So we can see as far as myself
my mitochondrial DNA where it's happened. It started with Eve which is about a
hundred and twenty thousand years ago you'll notice that this is actually much
older than what Y chromosome Adam is. Adam and Eve when we're talking about
haplogroups and mitochondrial and Y chromosomes we're not living at the same
time. All these people represent is they represent the original person who is the
mother or father of that paternal and maternal line of everybody else. There
were lots of other people living at the time and you received DNA from those
other people as well but the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA
over time have only been received from these two people. So Eve is about a
hundred and twenty thousand years ago and that then became haplogroup l1. l1
split off into group l2 and parts of that group went to populate the rest of
Africa. Mine though went into l3 which started to go into northern Africa
almost into Egypt and eventually crossed the Red Sea into haplogroup N. And you
notice that these numberings are a little bit in order l and then we come
to n. Well then the next haplogroup we go to is R, we've jumped several letters,
and now R was a haplogroup in the Caucasus region and Northern Iran
Armenia that area of the Eurasian continent. Similar to the R that was the
Paternal Haplogroup but that is really just coincidence that these Rs happen to be
in the same place. After R that started migrating over into Europe as K and
that's where my Haplogroup k1 I believe it's k1 a. I can't remember
k1 a1 it went something like that. But that migrated into Europe and so we
can see that we went from L to M to R to K so the letters aren't following
along like they were following along with the paternal Haplogroups.
Likewise if we look at some of the others we see that M was a Haplogroup
that went and populated into Australia and into China. We see that haplogroup B
populated somewhat into China but also is one of the major ones that have
populated into the Americas. C populated up in northern Asia and the
Americas. We see that besides l1 going into the north western part of Africa. We
have l3 just going into the western part of Africa, l2 also going into the
southern part of Africa as well. There are many different groups all throughout
here that you can actually trace on and again the one thing with the lettering
in the maternal haplogroup is it starts with where they started their research
not with where the origin of mankind was. With Paternal Haplogroups they basically
followed the origin of mankind and followed the Haplogroups along with
maternal haplogroups they followed the research it was much easier to do the
research with the mitochondrial DNA and that's why you see this difference in
the Haplogroups. But remember your Haplogroup naming doesn't
have anything to do with your paternal haplogroup naming so don't get those two
confused they're not related. Now if you have any
questions about maternal Haplogroups put it in the comments below and I'll
try to answer it and I hope that you like this video and I hope that you've
liked this series of videos that we've done over the last month but be sure to
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