Los Angeles Celebrated it's 230th Birthday today! My family was invited by Mayor Villaraigosa since

[sce56]

we are descendants of the original founders back in 1781.














My two youngest with his honor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. How very cool!

That is something to be proud of, to know your ancestry back that far!

GREAT pics too...

Is that you???

Congrats to you and your family!

:toast:

[sce56]

2. Yes and thanks now we have to get the Mayor to help us get their bones back where they belong since

Gloria Molina's project to renovate the plaza in honor of the founders dug up their graves last year!

Mishandling of buried remains mars Molina's dream museum
April 01, 2011|HECTOR TOBAR

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina dreamed for years of putting a cultural center and museum on the historic old plaza near Olvera Street downtown. If only she and the rest of the project's planners had taken as long to research the site.

Last year, as the work got under way, a crew disturbed the eternal sleep of those buried in L.A.'s first Roman Catholic cemetery.

For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, April 02, 2011 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 1 inches; 64 words Type of Material: Correction
La Plaza de Cultura y Artes: In the April 1 Section A, Hector Tobar's column about the unearthing of remains at the site of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina's role in promoting the project, misspelled the name of the Sanberg Group, the firm contracted by Los Angeles County to excavate the site, as the Sandberg Group.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, April 05, 2011 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 2 inches; 107 words Type of Material: Correction
La Plaza de Cultura y Artes: In the April 1 Section A, Hector Tobar's column about the unearthing of remains at the site of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina's role in promoting the project, quoted Molina as saying, "Had they done better work, we wouldn't be in this situation." Her comment referred to Sapphos Environmental Inc., which prepared an environmental impact report for the site, not the Sanberg Group Inc. The Sanberg Group was not contracted to excavate the site, as the column said, but was retained by La Plaza de Cultura y Artes Foundation to monitor the excavation.

In all, some 118 remains were dug up and carted away before community protests brought the digging to a halt in January. Many of those whose bones were unearthed were Native Americans who worked with and lived alongside L.A.'s first European settlers.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. I read about that!

I hope things can be made right...

[blm]

20. and...if you don't mind me saying... your kids are gorgeous, sce56

k&r

[FrenchieCat]

4. Very nice!

Looks like it was a gorgeous day as well! :)

[sce56]

5. Yes it was and the smog was not that bad but as we went home the heat out in the valley was real hot

90F+ glad to be home on the coast where it was just 70 Deg.

[gateley]

6. That is so cool! Thanks for this! nt

[sce56]

8. Almost as cool as the night we went to the Emmy's 2 years ago!

With my oldest a nominee


Recognize those guys?



Did not get one of those at the table well maybe next time.

I guess I had too much Merlot tonight just opening up a little more than I should have I guess!

[gateley]

14. Actually AT the Emmys! With a nominated son!

You must be so proud of your family - and they are all so striking! Obviously VERY good parenting! :headbang:

[NBachers]

7. Ever get mistaken for this guy?

[sce56]

9. No but my younguns recently told me I looked like the guy in this movie!

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5MjM3MTc1OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNzc3NjY3._V1._CR86,0,312,312_SS99_.jpg

[Raine]

10. Very Cool! THANKS so much for posting this

I'm a native Angeleno too and so are both my parents and grandparents but of course not going back as far as your family. I really love this city! :bounce: :thumbsup:

[aquart]

11. Root envy.

My whole family only showed up in the 1900s. All newbies. If I want to find out our past, I have to learn a dozen different languages. My brother-in-law's family is like yours, here for centuries. He can find all his records in the language he actually speaks.

[sce56]

12. It took my sister 15 years to piece together the puzzle since she had to go to the various churches,

county hall of records and even went to Mexico to where the Pobladores first started their trip to Alta California which at that time was New Spain. It was a very pleasant surprise to find we were descendents of the Pobladores. One of her surprises along the way was to find one of the great great great grandmothers shared her birthday! There are still records she could not find birth and death certificates. Just last year we did the National Geographic Genographic project which showed my Grandmothers maternal gene was of Native American descent having crossed over during the ice age and my fathers Paternal gene was of Spanish origin.I also have to say we found our mothers gene was Scandinavian in nature but as they say according to the science we all came from Africa!


On edit as Mayor Villaraigosa said the original indigenous inhabitants had been here for at least 7,000 years! Can't explain that can you Saraha Failing, Glen Beck and the rest of the religious nuts!

[aquart]

15. Kicky!

My envy is now in overdrive.

[a la izquierda]

17. Hell, native peoples have been here longer than that

:) Probably in the ballpark of 13000, based on archaeological sites in Mexico and Chile.

By the way, I love your daughter's dress. Way cool, to this Mexican historian.

[sce56]

18. That dress was purchased at Olvera St. The history for the LA area goes back at least 7K years

Where The Historical Lands Are Located:
Gabrielino -Tongva Tribal History in Los Angeles County And Orange County

The Tribe has been indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin for 7,000 years. This history is well- documented through 2,800 archaeological sites, in State historical records and federal archives, and Catholic church records at San Gabriel Mission and San Fernando Mission.

A State historical site preserves the holy springs where the Portola Expedition, which founded the City of Los Angeles in the late 1700s, replenished their water. The Expedition encountered the Tongva, who guided them to their holy springs, at what is now University High School in West Los Angeles. The springs provide water to visitors today and are being restored with a $1 million state history grant.
<SNIP>
The Tongva were enslaved to build the San Gabriel Mission in the City of San Gabriel and the San Fernando Mission in the City of Los Angeles. Other Gabrielino village sites were discovered at Cal State Long Beach, the Sheldon Reservoir in Pasadena and in Los Encinos State Historical Park in Encino.

Archaeology delineating the historical lands of the Tongva was substantially complete by 1930, when over 100 sites had been excavated. The number of archaeological sites has grown to 2,800 locations. The new locations largely confirm the work done by 1930, long before Indian gaming made such information economically important.

The Tongva occupied villages to the north up to Topanga Canyon in Malibu (where they ran into the Chumash, sometimes violently). Tongva villages extended south to Laguna Beach (though the Juanenos claim the Tongva never settled beyond the estuary at Newport Beach). Tongva village sites extend inland to the San Bernardino Mountains. There the younger, independent Cahuilla culture was derived from roots in the religion, language and trading culture of the Tongva (Morongo and Agua Caliente bands are Cahuilla).


From the Genographic project

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/report.htm
You will not have access to that report since is DNA specific here is some of the report for my Grandmothers Maternal line.






Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2 > L3 > N > B

YOUR GENETIC HISTORY




Your Branch on the Human Family Tree

Your DNA results identify you as belonging to a specific branch of the human family tree called haplogroup B.

The map above shows the direction that your maternal ancestors took as they set out from their original homeland in East Africa. While humans did travel many different paths during a journey that took tens of thousands of years, the lines above represent the dominant trends in this migration.

Over time, the descendants of your ancestors spread throughout East Asia, with some groups making it as far as Polynesia and the Americas. But before we can take you back in time and tell their stories, we must first understand how modern science makes this analysis possible.

How DNA Can Help

(To follow along, click See Your DNA Analysis above to view the data produced from your cheek scraping.)

The string of 569 letters shown above is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides—the chemical building blocks of life—that make up your DNA. The numbers at the top of the page refer to the positions in your sequence where informative mutations have occurred in your ancestors, and tell us a great deal about the history of your genetic lineage.

Here's how it works. Every once in a while a mutation—a random, natural (and usually harmless) change—occurs in the sequence of your mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.

(Explore the Genetics Overview to learn more about population genetics.)

After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)

Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As you can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors.

By looking at the mutations that you carry, we can trace your lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa. Our story begins with your earliest ancestor. Who was she, where did she live, and what is her story?

(Click Explore Your Route Map on the right side of the page to return to the map showing your haplogroup's ancestral journey.)

Your Ancestral Journey: What We Know Now

We will now take you back through the stories of your distant ancestors and show how the movements of their descendants gave rise to your mitochondrial lineage.

Each segment on the map above represents the migratory path of successive groups that eventually coalesced to form your branch of the tree. We start with your oldest ancestor, "Eve," and walk forward to more recent times, showing at each step the line of your ancestors who lived up to that point.

Mitochondrial Eve: The Mother of Us All

Ancestral Line: "Mitochondrial Eve"

Our story begins in Africa sometime between 150,000 and 170,000 years ago, with a woman whom anthropologists have nicknamed "Mitochondrial Eve."

She was awarded this mythic epithet in 1987 when population geneticists discovered that all people alive on the planet today can trace their maternal lineage back to her.

But Mitochondrial Eve was not the first female human. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and the first hominids—characterized by their unique bipedal stature—appeared nearly two million years before that. Though Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years, about 150,000 to 170,000 years ago, a woman was born from whom we are all descended. This happened 30,000 years after Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.

Eventually, for any number of reasons, all of the other lineages of people went extinct, and "Mitochondrial Eve" as we call her, was the only female who had descendants that are now living in the present day. We can all be traced back to that one woman, who lived about 170,000 years ago.

Which begs the question, "So why Eve?"

Simply put, Eve was a survivor. A maternal line can become extinct for a number of reasons. A woman may not have children, or she may bear only sons (who do not pass her mtDNA to the next generation). She may fall victim to a catastrophic event such as a volcanic eruption, flood, or famine, all of which have plagued humans since the dawn of our species.

None of these extinction events happened to Eve's line. It may have been simple luck, or it may have been something much more. It was around this same time that modern humans' intellectual capacity underwent what author Jared Diamond coined the Great Leap Forward. Many anthropologists believe that the emergence of language gave us a huge advantage over other early human species. Improved tools and weapons, the ability to plan ahead and cooperate with one another, and an increased capacity to exploit resources in ways we hadn't been able to earlier, all allowed modern humans to rapidly migrate to new territories, exploit new resources, and outcompete and replace other hominids, such as the Neandertals.

It is difficult to pinpoint the chain of events that led to Eve's unique success, but we can say with certainty that all of us trace our maternal lineage back to this one woman.

The L Haplogroups: The Deepest Branches

Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0

Mitochondrial Eve represents the root of the human family tree. Her descendents, moving around within Africa, eventually split into two distinct groups, characterized by a different set of mutations their members carry.

These groups are referred to as L0 and L1, and these individuals have the most divergent genetic sequences of anybody alive today, meaning they represent the deepest branches of the mitochondrial tree. Importantly, current genetic data indicates that indigenous people belonging to these groups are found exclusively in Africa. This means that, because all humans have a common female ancestor, "Eve," and because the genetic data shows that Africans are the oldest groups on the planet, we know our species originated there.

Haplogroups L1 and L0 likely originated in East Africa and then spread throughout the rest of the continent. Today, these lineages are found at highest frequencies in Africa's indigenous populations, the hunter-gatherer groups who have maintained their ancestors' culture, language, and customs for thousands of years.

At some point, after these two groups had coexisted in Africa for a few thousand years, something important happened. The mitochondrial sequence of a woman in one of these groups, L1, mutated. A letter in her DNA changed, and because many of her descendants have survived to the present, this change has become a window into the past. The descendants of this woman, characterized by this signpost mutation, went on to form their own group, called L2. Because the ancestor of L2 was herself a member of L1, we can say something about the emergence of these important groups: Eve begat L1, and L1 begat L2. Now we're starting to move down your ancestral line.

Haplogroup L2: West Africa

Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2

L2 individuals are found in sub-Saharan Africa, and like their L1 predecessors, they also live in Central Africa and as far south as South Africa. But whereas L1/L0 individuals remained predominantly in eastern and southern Africa, your ancestors broke off into a different direction, which you can follow on the map above.

L2 individuals are most predominant in West Africa, where they constitute the majority of female lineages. And because L2 individuals are found at high frequencies and widely distributed along western Africa, they represent one of the predominant lineages in African-Americans. Unfortunately, it is difficult to pinpoint where a specific L2 lineage might have arisen. For an African-American who is L2—the likely result of West Africans being brought to America during the slave trade—it is difficult to say with certainty exactly where in Africa that lineage arose.

Fortunately, collaborative sampling with indigenous groups is currently underway to help learn more about these types of questions and to possibly bridge the gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.

Haplogroup L3: Out of Africa

Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2 > L3

Your next signpost ancestor is the woman whose birth around 80,000 years ago began haplogroup L3. It is a similar story: an individual in L2 underwent a mutation to her mitochondrial DNA, which was passed onto her children. The children were successful, and their descendants ultimately broke away from the L2 clan, eventually separating into a new group called L3. You can see above that this has revealed another step in your ancestral line.

While L3 individuals are found all over Africa, including the southern reaches of sub-Sahara, L3 is important for its movements north. You can follow this movement of the map above, seeing first the expansions of L1/L0, then L2, and followed by the northward migration of L3.

Your L3 ancestors were significant because they are the first modern humans to have left Africa, representing the deepest branches of the tree found outside of that continent.

Why would humans have first ventured out of the familiar African hunting grounds and into unexplored lands? It is likely that a fluctuation in climate may have provided the impetus for your ancestors' exodus out of Africa.

The African Ice Age was characterized by drought rather than by cold. Around 50,000 years ago the ice sheets of northern Europe began to melt, introducing a period of warmer temperatures and moister climate in Africa. Parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to savanna, the animals your ancestors hunted expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Your nomadic ancestors followed the good weather and plentiful game northward across this Saharan Gateway, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined.

Today, L3 individuals are found at high frequencies in populations across North Africa. From there, members of this group went in a few different directions. Some lineages within L3 testify to a distinct expansion event in the mid-Holocene that headed south, and are predominant in many Bantu groups found all over Africa. One group of individuals headed west and is primarily restricted to Atlantic western Africa, including the islands of Cabo Verde.

Other L3 individuals, your ancestors, kept moving northward, eventually leaving the African continent completely. These people currently make up around ten percent of the Middle Eastern population, and gave rise to two important haplogroups that went on to populate the rest of the world.

Haplogroup N: The Incubation Period

Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2 > L3 > N

Your next signpost ancestor is the woman whose descendants formed haplogroup N. Haplogroup N comprises one of two groups that were created by the descendants of L3.

The first of these groups, M, was the result of the first great wave of migration of modern humans to leave Africa. These people likely left the continent across the Horn of Africa near Ethiopia, and their descendants followed a coastal route eastward, eventually making it all the way to Australia and Polynesia.

The second great wave, also of L3 individuals, moved north rather than east and left the African continent across the Sinai Peninsula, in present-day Egypt. Also faced with the harsh desert conditions of the Sahara, these people likely followed the Nile basin, which would have proved a reliable water and food supply in spite of the surrounding desert and its frequent sandstorms.

Descendants of these migrants eventually formed haplogroup N. Early members of this group lived in the eastern Mediterranean region and western Asia, where they likely coexisted for a time with other hominids such as Neandertals. Excavations in Israel's Kebara Cave (Mount Carmel) have unearthed Neandertal skeletons as recent as 60,000 years old, indicating that there was both geographic and temporal overlap of these two hominids.

Some members bearing mutations specific to haplogroup N formed many groups of their own which went on to populate much of the rest of the globe. These descendants are found throughout Asia, Europe, India, and the Americas. However, because almost all of the mitochondrial lineages found in the Near East and Europe descend from N, it is considered a western Eurasian haplogroup.

After several thousand years in the Near East, members of your group began moving into unexplored nearby territories, following large herds of migrating game across vast plains. These groups broke into several directions and made their way into territories surrounding the Near East. Today, haplogroup N individuals who headed west are prevalent in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean, they are found further east in parts of Central Asia and the Indus Valley of Pakistan and India. Descendants of these people eventually went on to populate the rest of Europe, and today comprise the most frequent mitochondrial lineages found there.

Haplogroup B: Your Branch on the Tree

Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2 > L3 > N > B

One group of these early N individuals broke away in the Central Asian steppes and set out on their own journey following herds of game across vast expanses. Around 50,000 years ago, the first members of your haplogroup B began moving into East Asia, the beginnings of a journey that would not stop until finally reaching both continents of the Americas and much of Polynesia.

Your haplogroup likely arose on the high plains of Central Asia between the Caspian Sea and Lake Baikal. It is one of the founding East Asian lineages and, along with haplogroups F and M, comprises around three quarters of all mitochondrial lineages found there today.

Radiating out from the Central Asian homeland, haplogroup B-bearing individuals, your own distant ancestors, began migrating into the surrounding areas and quickly headed south, making their way throughout East Asia. Today haplogroup B makes up around 17 percent of people from Southeast Asia, and around 20 percent of the entire Chinese gene pool. It exhibits a very wide distribution along the Pacific coast, from Vietnam to Japan, as well as at lower frequencies (about three percent) among native Siberians. Because of its old age and high frequency throughout east Eurasia, it is widely accepted that this lineage was carried by the first humans to settle the region.

In northern Eurasia and Siberia, haplogroup B individuals with experience surviving the harsh Central and East Asian winters would have been ideally suited for the arduous crossing of the recently formed Bering land bridge. During the last glacial maximum, 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, colder temperatures and a drier global climate locked much of the world's fresh water at the polar ice caps, making living conditions near impossible for much of the northern hemisphere. But an important result of this glaciation was that eastern Siberia and northwestern Alaska became temporarily connected by a vast ice sheet. Haplogroup B-bearing individuals, fishing along the coastline, followed it.

Today, haplogroup B is one of five mitochondrial lineages found in aboriginal Americans, and is found in both North and South America. While haplogroup B is very old (around 50,000 years), the reduced genetic diversity found in the Americas indicates that those lineages arrived only within the last 15,000 to 20,000 years and quickly spread once there. Better understanding exactly how many waves of humans crossed into the Americas, and where they migrated to once there, remains the focus of much interest and is central to Genographic's ongoing research in the Americas.

Recent population expansions appear to have brought a subgroup of haplogroup B lineages from Southeast Asia into Polynesia. This lineage is referred to as B4 (meaning the fourth subgroup within B) and is characterized by a set of mutations that took a significant amount of time to accumulate on the Eurasian continent. This closely related subset of lineages likely spread from Southeast Asia into Polynesia within the last 5,000 years, and is seen extensively throughout the islands at high frequency.

Intermediate lineages—those containing some, but not all, of the B4 mutations—are found in Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Bornean populations, further supporting the likelihood that the Polynesian lineages originated in these parts of Southeast Asia.

Anthropology vs. Genealogy

DNA markers require a long time to become informative. While mutations occur in every generation, it requires at least hundreds—normally thousands—of years for these markers to become windows back into the past, signposts on the human tree.

Still, our own genetic sequences often reveal that we fall within a particular sub-branch, a smaller, more recent branch on the tree.

While it may be difficult to say anything about the history of these sub-groups, they do reveal other people who are more closely related to us. It is a useful way to help bridge the anthropology of population genetics with the genealogy to which we are all accustomed.

One of the ways you can bridge this gap is to compare your own genetic lineage to those of people living all over the world. Mitosearch.org is a database that allows you to compare both your genetic sequence as well as your surname to those of thousands of people who have already joined the database. This type of search is a valuable way of inferring population events that have occurred in more recent times (i.e., the past few hundred years).

Looking Forward (Into the Past): Where Do We Go From Here?

Although the arrow of your haplogroup currently ends in the Americas, this isn't the end of the journey for haplogroup B. This is where the genetic clues get murky and your DNA trail goes cold. Your initial results shown here are based upon the best information available today—but this is just the beginning.

A fundamental goal of the Genographic Project is to extend these arrows further toward the present day. To do this, Genographic has brought together ten renowned scientists and their teams from all over the world to study questions vital to our understanding of human history. By working together with indigenous peoples around the globe, we are learning more about these ancient migrations.

Help Us Find More Clues!

But there is another way that we will learn more about the past. By contributing your own results to the project, you will be allowed to participate anonymously in this ongoing research effort. This is important because it may contribute a great deal to our understanding of more recent human migrations. Click the yellow button below in the "Help Us Tell the Story" section of your results profile to learn more about this. It's quick, easy, and anonymous, but will help us further refine our analys

[sce56]

19. My Spanish line the Male chromosone

How to Interpret Your Results
Above are results from the laboratory analysis of your Y-chromosome. Your DNA was analyzed for Short Tandem Repeats (STRs), which are repeating segments of your genome that have a high mutation rate. The location on the Y chromosome of each of these markers is depicted in the image, with the number of repeats for each of your STRs presented to the right of the marker. For example, DYS19 is a repeat of TAGA, so if your DNA repeated that sequence 12 times at that location, it would appear: DYS19 12. Studying the combination of these STR lengths in your Y Chromosome allows researchers to place you in a haplogroup, which reveals the complex migratory journeys of your ancestors. Y-SNP: In the event that the analysis of your STRs was inconclusive, your Y chromosome was also tested for the presence of an informative Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). These are mutational changes in a single nucleotide base, and allow researchers to definitively place you in a genetic haplogroup.

*NB: If your results indicate "null," this is a situation in which the lab was unable to obtain a result for this marker (aka location) in your DNA. Possible causes include a deletion in your DNA sequence that removed the entire marker, or a mutation near the marker that causes the test to be unable to "find" the marker in order to test it. While uncommon, this does occur occasionally.

Y-Chromosome Diagram




YOUR GENETIC HISTORY




Your Y-chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1b, M343 (Subclade R1b1a2, M269).

The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men, M168, and follow your lineage to present day ending with M343, the defining marker of Haplogroup R1b.

If you look at the map highlighting your ancestors' route, you will see that members of haplogroup R1b carry the following Y-chromosome markers:

M168 > P143 > M89 > L15 > M9 > M45 > M207 > M173 > M343

(Less is known about some markers than others. What is known about your journey is reflected below.)

Today, roughly 70 percent of the men in southern England belong to haplogroup R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland, that number exceeds 90 percent.

What's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y chromosome in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker?

Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation.

Unchanged, that is unless a mutation—a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change—occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years.

In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. This means that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others.

When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.

A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path your ancestors took as they moved out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't have enough data yet.

One of the goals of the five-year Genographic Project is to build a large enough database of anthropological genetic data to answer some of these questions. To achieve this, project team members are traveling to all corners of the world to collect more than 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous populations. In addition, we encourage you to contribute your anonymous results to the project database, helping our geneticists reveal more of the answers to our ancient past.

Keep checking these pages; as more information is received, more may be learned about your own genetic history.

Your Ancestral Journey: What We Know Now

M168: Your Earliest Ancestor

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Roughly 50,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Africa

Climate: Temporary retreat of Ice Age; Africa moves from drought to warmer temperatures and moister conditions

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 10,000

Tools and Skills: Stone tools; earliest evidence of art and advanced conceptual skills

Skeletal and archaeological evidence suggest that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and began moving out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

But why would man have first ventured out of the familiar African hunting grounds and into unexplored lands? It is likely that a fluctuation in climate may have provided the impetus for your ancestors' exodus out of Africa.

The African ice age was characterized by drought rather than by cold. It was around 50,000 years ago that the ice sheets of northern Europe began to melt, introducing a period of warmer temperatures and moister climate in Africa. Parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to a savanna, the animals hunted by your ancestors expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Your nomadic ancestors followed the good weather and the animals they hunted, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined.

In addition to a favorable change in climate, around this same time there was a great leap forward in modern humans' intellectual capacity. Many scientists believe that the emergence of language gave us a huge advantage over other early human species. Improved tools and weapons, the ability to plan ahead and cooperate with one another, and an increased capacity to exploit resources in ways we hadn't been able to earlier, all allowed modern humans to rapidly migrate to new territories, exploit new resources, and replace other hominids.

M89: Moving Through the Middle East

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 45,000 years ago

Place: Northern Africa or the Middle East

Climate: Middle East: Semiarid grass plains

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Tens of thousands

Tools and Skills: Stone, ivory, wood tools

The next male ancestor in your ancestral lineage is the man who gave rise to M89, a marker found in 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans. This man was born around 45,000 years ago in northern Africa or the Middle East.

The first people to leave Africa likely followed a coastal route that eventually ended in Australia. Your ancestors followed the expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East and beyond, and were part of the second great wave of migration out of Africa.

Beginning about 40,000 years ago, the climate shifted once again and became colder and more arid. Drought hit Africa and the grasslands reverted to desert, and for the next 20,000 years, the Saharan Gateway was effectively closed. With the desert impassable, your ancestors had two options: remain in the Middle East, or move on. Retreat back to the home continent was not an option.

While many of the descendants of M89 remained in the Middle East, others continued to follow the great herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game through what is now modern-day Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia.

These semiarid grass-covered plains formed an ancient "superhighway" stretching from eastern France to Korea. Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

M9: The Eurasian Clan Spreads Wide and Far

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 40,000 years ago

Place: Iran or southern Central Asia

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Tens of thousands

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

Your next ancestor, a man born around 40,000 years ago in Iran or southern Central Asia, gave rise to a genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. His descendants, of which you are one, spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

This large lineage, known as the Eurasian Clan, dispersed gradually over thousands of years. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along the vast super highway of Eurasian steppe. Eventually their path was blocked by the massive mountain ranges of south Central Asia—the Hindu Kush, the Tian Shan, and the Himalayas.

The three mountain ranges meet in a region known as the "Pamir Knot," located in present-day Tajikistan. Here the tribes of hunters split into two groups. Some moved north into Central Asia, others moved south into what is now Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent.

These different migration routes through the Pamir Knot region gave rise to separate lineages.

Most people native to the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to the Eurasian Clan. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians are descended from the man described above, as are most Europeans and many Indians.

M45: The Journey Through Central Asia

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 35,000

Place of Origin: Central Asia

Climate: Glaciers expanding over much of Europe

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

The next marker of your genetic heritage, M45, arose around 35,000 years ago, in a man born in Central Asia. He was part of the M9 Eurasian Clan that had moved to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of present-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.

Although big game was plentiful, the environment on the Eurasian steppes became increasing hostile as the glaciers of the Ice Age began to expand once again. The reduction in rainfall may have induced desertlike conditions on the southern steppes, forcing your ancestors to follow the herds of game north.

To exist in such harsh conditions, they learned to build portable animal-skin shelters and to create weaponry and hunting techniques that would prove successful against the much larger animals they encountered in the colder climates. They compensated for the lack of stone they traditionally used to make weapons by developing smaller points and blades—microliths—that could be mounted to bone or wood handles and used effectively. Their tool kit also included bone needles for sewing animal-skin clothing that would both keep them warm and allow them the range of movement needed to hunt the reindeer and mammoth that kept them fed.

Your ancestors' resourcefulness and ability to adapt was critical to survival during the last ice age in Siberia, a region where no other hominid species is known to have lived.

The M45 Central Asian Clan gave rise to many more; the man who was its source is the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native American men.

M207: Leaving Central Asia

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 30,000

Place of Origin: Central Asia

Climate: Glaciers expanding over much of Europe and western Eurasia

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

After spending considerable time in Central Asia, refining skills to survive in harsh new conditions and exploit new resources, a group from the Central Asian Clan began to head west towards the European subcontinent.

An individual in this clan carried the new M207 mutation on his Y chromosome. His descendants ultimately split into two distinct groups, with one continuing onto the European subcontinent, and the other group turning south and eventually making it as far as India.

Your lineage falls within the first group, M173, and gave rise to the first modern humans to move into Europe and eventually colonize the continent.

M173: Colonizing Europe—The First Modern Europeans

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Around 30,000 years ago

Place: Central Asia

Climate: Ice Age

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

As your ancestors continued to move west, a man born around 30,000 years ago in Central Asia gave rise to a lineage defined by the genetic marker M173. His descendants were part of the first large wave of humans to reach Europe.

During this period, the Eurasian steppelands extended from present-day Germany, and possibly France, to Korea and China. The climate fostered a land rich in resources and opened a window into Europe.

Your ancestors' arrival in Europe heralded the end of the era of the Neandertals, a hominid species that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia from about 29,000 to 230,000 years ago. Better communication skills, weapons, and resourcefulness probably enabled your ancestors to outcompete Neandertals for scarce resources.

This wave of migration into Western Europe marked the appearance and spread of what archaeologists call the Aurignacian culture. The culture is distinguished by significant innovations in methods of manufacturing tools, more standardization of tools, and a broader set of tool types, such as end-scrapers for preparing animal skins and tools for woodworking.

In addition to stone, the first modern humans to reach Europe used bone, ivory, antler, and shells as part of their tool kit. Bracelets and pendants made of shells, teeth, ivory, and carved bone appear at many sites. Jewelry, often an indication of status, suggests a more complex social organization was beginning to develop.

The large number of archaeological sites found in Europe from around 30,000 years ago indicates that there was an increase in population size.

Around 20,000 years ago, the climate window shut again, and expanding ice sheets forced your ancestors to move south to Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. As the ice retreated and temperatures became warmer, beginning about 12,000 years ago, many descendants of M173 moved north again to repopulate places that had become inhospitable during the Ice Age.

Not surprisingly, today the number of descendants of the man who gave rise to marker M173 remains very high in Western Europe. It is particularly concentrated in northern France and the British Isles where it was carried by ancestors who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

M343: Direct Descendants of Cro-Magnon

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Around 30,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Western Europe

Climate: Ice sheets continuing to creep down Northern Europe

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens:

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

Around 30,000 years ago, a descendant of the clan making its way into Europe gave rise to marker M343, the defining marker of your haplogroup. You are a direct descendent of the people who dominated the human expansion into Europe, the Cro-Magnon.

The Cro-Magnon are responsible for the famous cave paintings found in southern France. These spectacular paintings provide archaeological evidence that there was a sudden blossoming of artistic skills as your ancestors moved into Europe. Prior to this, artistic endeavors were mostly comprised of jewelry made of shell, bone, and ivory; primitive musical instruments; and stone carvings.

The cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon depict animals like bison, deer, rhinoceroses, and horses, and natural events important to Paleolithic life such as spring molting, hunting, and pregnancy. The paintings are far more intricate, detailed, and colorful than anything seen prior to this period.

Your ancestors knew how to make woven clothing using the natural fibers of plants, and had relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Their jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro-Magnons' advanced culture during the last glacial age.

This is where your genetic trail, as we know it today, ends. However, be sure to revisit these pages. As additional data are collected and analyzed, more will be learned about your place in the history of the men and women who first populated the Earth. We will be updating these stories throughout the life of the project.

[a la izquierda]

21. Thanks for all that information.

I want to do my genome. Those studies are so fascinating!

[sce56]

22. Here is the location. You can do both your mother and fathers if you are Male female only one!

Join a real-time, landmark research project! Learn something about your deep ancestry while contributing to the overall success of the Project.

The Genographic Project is a global research partnership of National Geographic and IBM. With support for field research from the Waitt Family Foundation, Dr. Spencer Wells and a group of the world's leading scientists will attempt to collect and analyze more than 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous people all over the world. The goal of the Genographic Project is to learn about the migratory paths our ancestors took and how humankind populated the planet. Find more detailed information on the Genographic Project, at www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

The general public can actually take an active part in this remarkable effort by purchasing a Genographic Project Public Participation Kit and by submitting an anonymous sample of their DNA using an easy and painless cheek swab. By participating, you will not only contribute to this great endeavor, but you may discover something fascinating about your own genetic past as well. Furthermore, the proceeds from the sales of the Kits will be channeled back into the Project to support additional research and to fund education, cultural conservation, and language revitalization efforts for indigenous and traditional communities around the world.


Genographic Project Participation Kit for U.S. and Canada
Price:$99.95
that is one kit per line took two to do my fathers line and one for my mother. Thankfully we did my Uncles two years ago and he passed on this past winter, that is where we got my grandmothers B Haplogroup Genome. If we did not do that then we would have lost the window with his death since he was the last in my fathers generation.

[madokie]

13. Cool

OT. Your daughter is prettier than miss California. Your son is a good looking kid too. That old fart in the blue shirt I'm not so sure about though. :-) :hi:

ETA: assuming the old fart in the blue shirt is you, just being silly here, no harm done. I hope.

[pinboy3niner]

16. Don't worry--I think he's quit stalking people who offend him

I thiiiink. Oh, wait...that was somebody else. Nevermind! :evilgrin:

:hi: