When starting any new course of study there are going to be
some terminology that you have to learn that you're going to
hear quite a bit. And one of those terms in genetic
genealogy is Haplogroup. You've probably heard this. You might
have tested and been told what a what your Haplogroup is. And
you may be wondering, "Okay. Well, it's these letters here but
what does that actually mean?" Today I'm going to go over what
a Haplogroup is and what those letters might actually mean for
you. So the first thing we can learn from this term Haplogroup is
group. It's a group! A bunch of people in this case. But what do
those people have in common? Well, we can look at some maps
here. And these maps show an origination point and different
letters going all over. In this case, this is the y-DNA map. And
you can see that it starts in Africa and spreads out from
there all around the world. There's also one for mitochondrial
DNA. And of course it starts in Africa as well and then spreads
out. One of the things that you notice just between these two
maps is in the y-DNA map, the map starts with the letter A and
branches off from there into the other letters. While with
the mitochondrial DNA map the map starts with the letter L
and then goes off and A is not until much later on. And this
actually has to do with how this research into these DNA
sets worked. Mitochondrial DNA was the first set of DNA to
actually be researched really because it's much smaller. And
it was researched in particular in relation to North American
natives. And so we see that A, B, C, and D, the first four
letters of the alphabet, are really the first four
Haplogroup that were found when they were researching this. And
from there, they started tracing back. And as they found
more, there was other letters added. We get to the
origination of all human life in Africa and we were at letter
L by that time already. So, that started because of a
specific research project in regards to North American
ancestry, which is why those happlogroup letters don't
necessarily make sense when we're talking about the origin
of the human species. On the other hand, y-DNA which is much
longer. We already had the information from mitochondrial
DNA. And so a much more logical approach was used. We started with the
letter A with the beginning of civilization there in Africa.
And that then spread out. Branching off each time. So, you
see that the Americas which are actually some of the last
places on earth to be populated we have Haplogroup that are a
Q. And then an early one, a C that actually made it over here
on the y-DNA side. And that shows the migration which is one of
the great thing with Haplogroup is by tracing where these
Haplogroup's originated by who has those Haplogroup today, we
can start to get an idea about certain migration patterns of
humans. This of course can be matched up with other records.
As far as sometimes written records for more recent history
but some archaeological evidence for ancient history to
see how humans have actually migrated around the world. But
that still doesn't tell us what these letters mean. So, in
essence, a Haplogroup denotes a common set of mutations. When
I'm talking about mutations, I'm talking about SNPs.
Specific places on our DNA that have had the letter change. So
if I go to 23andMe. And I pull up my Haplogroup report, it's
actually going to show me how that Haplogroup is migrated and
how it is changed over time. So, for instance, in this one
here, start with the human population for mitochondrial
DNA with L. Starts in Africa. There was a genetic mutation
that happened which created L3. Now, the person that
had that L3 had migrated. And then there was another
mutation- N. And that person had migrated to a different part
into the Arabian Peninsula looks like here. N then had
another mutation which created Haplogroup R. And that was still
in the same general area a little bit further north which
had another mutation which created U. U had another
mutation which created K. Now, by time we get to K, we can see
that we are into the Caucasus Region right between the
Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. so after K there was a mutation
that created K 1 it's not shown on here but then there
was another mutation that created K 1 A. And then another
mutation that created K 1 A 3 and finally another mutation
that created K 1 A 3 A. So, each one of these letters in this
path basically represent a mutation. Most of the time a
single mutation but in sometimes there's going to be
two or three mutations because they're trying to simplify this
now. And with mitochondrial DNA because it is so short there's
really a very limited number of mutations that create all the
haplogroups that we have for mitochondrial DNA. So, it's
really easy to actually see how they all lay out in this way.
With y-DNA because it's much longer, there can be a vastly
larger amount of those DNA mutations. And so that tree gets
much more complicated. But that is what is being shown on these
graphs. Every time you see from one letter a migration and a
letter change, that presents a mutation that has happened. The
migration of the same people may have happened to two
different areas. For instance, we can see that this D came out
of Africa and looks like over across the Indian subcontinent
in the Southeast Asia. And then up into the Korea, China area
but also into Japan. And so that's why we see those Ds. But
even within that group then, there's going to be some other
mutations that create subgroups. But the other thing that
we actually see from these charts is that the places that
have been populated for the longest have the most
interconnections between them as people have migrated back
and forth. Whereas the places that have had either the most
recent populations for instance the Americas or the most remote
in this case Australia. A lot of the movement to Australia
happened when there was more of a land bridge between a lot of
those islands. And so these isolated places or the more
recently populated places have fewer Haplogroups that are
represented within their populations. So, when you see
the phrase Haplogroup, be thinking of a group of people
that have a common set of mutations. And that's what binds
this group together is because they all shared these common
ancestors. In a lot of cases, these common ancestors were
thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. But it is a way of
grouping people based on where their maternal or their
paternal line came from. Now, if you like to know about how
some related people can have different Haplogroup then watch
this video up here. But if you are wanting to learn something
else about DNA then watch the video down below. And be sure to
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