Fascinating, especially since it corresponds also to red hair, Rh-negative blood, and haplogroup X. "A second major group of related R1 subclades known as R1a branched off from the main family between 10 and 13 thousand years ago. Haplogroup R1a and its associated subclades are indicative of the Indo-European speaking people who populated much of the Europe and the Near East during the Neolithic revolution. While R1 and R1a show a clear and documentable radial outward expansion from their place of origin, the 18,000 year old group of R1b subclades shows a much more erratic pattern of dispersal almost disappearing from its place of origin completely only to turn up in distant and exotic places around the ancient world. Some of these locations would become synonymous with curious megalithic structures constructed with precise engineering of massive blocks of stone. The R1b mutation is also closely associated with lighter skin and red hair, a result of mutation to the MC1R gene discussed earlier, and must have been dispersed by a people who could navigate the shores of the Mediterranean and the open seas of the North Atlantic. Perhaps a brief description of the pattern of distribution for R1b would help give an indication of how this yDNA haplogroup can provide important clues to the migratory pattern of people during the last ice age. Keep in mind that a density map of modern occurrences of red hair in Europe and that of R1b distribution are almost identical. Haplogroup R1b is present in 25% of the modern population along the northern coast of the Black sea. This area of Anatolia was known to be a refugia for anatomically modern humans and other hominids including Neanderthals during the ice age. It shows up at less than 15% in the rest of Anatolia and the Balkans and less than this in the Steppes of western Russia where it is thought to have originated. R1b has very low percentages in the Eastern Mediterranean but is significantly higher, close to 60% on the Islands of Sardinia, Malta and the Po Valley of Northern Italy. It occurs in the ancient Berber tribe of Algeria, a very light-skinned blue-eyed people of North Africa at 60% and the Basques, a people often associated with the very first Cro-Magnon people of Europe, carry haplogroup R1b at almost 95%. The Basque homeland around the Pyrenees Mountains was considered another of the great refugia for light-skinned people during the ice-age. The Cro-Magnon people who lived there originally were probably not R1b carriers. The rest of Spain and France are between 50 and 60 percent R1b, a little higher than the percentage for mainland Germany. Brittany on the far Atlantic coast of France is 80% R1b as are Wales and Cornwall on the Atlantic fringe of England. Western Ireland tests at near 80%. The male population of Iceland tests around 40% for R1b as does Scotland and the rest of England. The countries with the very highest percentages of males testing for R1b are also known for high populations of people with red hair."
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:55:08 +0000