Deep Ancestry

Deep Ancestry                                                                                                              13 March 2019

              About 10 or 12 years ago, before Ancestry.com and 23 and Me were doing DNA testing, I sent my DNA and my daughters’ to the National Geographic Society’s Genographic project.  This is a look into deep ancestry, 30 to 200 thousand years ago.

              Aside from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, DNA that divides and combines with other DNA to create a new being and give that being a specific genome, there is also DNA in the mitochondria.  That DNA replicates itself but does not combine with the paternal DNA.  It is passed on in the mitochondria from mother to child.  This DNA has mutated over time and mutational changes over the generations can be followed to link us to our ancestry in the maternal line.  The DNA of the Y chromosome in men behaves similarly to link them in their paternal line (men have mitochondrial DNA too, so in testing can look at their maternal or paternal ancestry.  Since women don’t have a Y chromosome, they can only trace their maternal line and need a brother or father to trace paternal ancestry.  Since I had neither, I didn’t test Y chromosome DNA). 

              I sent off my saliva and my two daughters’ to look at mitochondrial DNA.  I was curious how far back we would have to go to be related, to have a common ancestor.  My maternal line is directly from Rosa Haaga to Minnie Kintz to Eleanor Rainey to me.  The daughters of the daughters of Rosa Haaga’s daughters have the same mitochondrial DNA.  That would include Karen and her siblings, Phyllis and her children (but not Bruce’s daughters; they have their mother’s mitochondrial DNA), Jerry, but not his children, since they would have Mary’s DNA, and any daughters of the daughters of Anne, Carrie, and Gussie.   Our mitochondrial DNA is haplogroup K.

              The people who study mitochondrial DNA can trace it back to a common ancestor, which they call “Mitochondrial Eve”.  Mitochondrial Eve represents the earliest female root of the human family tree, some 200,000 years ago (the late Stone Age), in the Rift Valley in east Africa.  Her descendants split into two groups, L0 and L1, the first mitochondrial DNA mutation.  My younger daughter, Nerissa, is African American via Panama, and has an L1 haplogroup, meaning I have to go almost back to Eve in order to have a common ancestor with her.  The L1 haplogroup did not leave Africa until the slave trade.

              The next divisions were named L2 (a mutation from L1) and L3 (a mutation from L2).  The L3 haplogroup were the first modern humans to have left Africa, about 60,000 years ago.. Haplogroup M is descended from L3, and M1 is a mutation from M.  Diane is an M1, which is actually confusing.  The M group left Africa across the horn of Africa and migrated along the coast eastward, across the Middle East and southern Eurasia, eventually going as far as Australia and Polynesia. This haplogroup makes up about 15% of the people on the Arabian Peninsula and 30 to 50 % of the population in Pakistan and northwest India, which is where Diane is from. 

              M1, however, did not continue eastward.  They stopped in Arabia and turned back to Africa.  This haplogroup is uncommon among Indian and East Asian populations.  However Diane also did the 23 and Me DNA, which said she was 99% Asian Indian.  So some female ancestor of hers did go on to India. 

              For Diane and I to have a common ancestor, we would have to go back to the L3 haplogroup, 60,000 years ago.  L3 gave rise to the M and M1 lines, but also to one called N (I don’t know how they decided on the order of the labels.  It’s certainly not alphabetical!)  N developed in the second great wave of L3 individuals to leave Africa.  They headed north across the Sinai Peninsula.  This group lived in the Near East for thousands of years, and their descendants still live in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. 

              The R group descended from a woman in the N family tree. Her descendants arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago.  Today 75% of the genetic lineages of Europe are descended from the R haplogroup.

              Finally we get to K, which is our haplogroup, that of Rosa Haaga and her mother and all the women before them.  K individuals are descendants of a woman in the R branch of the tree.  There is great genetic diversity in the K group, suggesting that the mutation occurred in a woman living about 50,000 years ago.  These women migrated north with the R group 35000 years ago, working their way over the Caucasus mountains and into central Europe (after living for thousands of years in the near east first).  Interestingly, the K haplogroup and subgroups represent 3 of the 4 major Ashkenazic Jewish founding lineages.  Half of all Ashkenazic European Jews trace their lineage back to one of 4 women, and the K haplogroup gave rise to 3 of them.  This lineage is currently shared by more than 3 million people but is rare among the non-Jewish European population.    

              The above explanations are taken from Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project: the landmark DNA quest to decipher our distant past, by Spencer Wells.  Trouble is, there’s a whole lot of time between 50,000 years ago and the earliest relative I can identify in 1742.  But it is another way to look at our ancestry.  When I got the results, one of the websites I was referred to had people looking for relatives by last name.  Everyone looking for the name Haaga was Jewish.  I wonder if this is why she worked for a Jewish family in Alsace, if there was a family contact to get her the job.  Rosa was Catholic and had her children baptized Catholic (though somewhat late in the case of my grandmother, who remembers a neighbor taking her to church to be baptized because her mother never had time), but there are records of a lot of Lutheran baptisms in the Haaga family as well.