There are several very old Z18 individuals in this paper, with five of them dated to roughly 2000 BCE.? Once the raw data becomes available, these individuals bear a closer look, to see whether they may break up the Z18 clade, which currently consists of 9 equivalent SNPs. As Iain states, these old DNA results are more likely to belong to what are today smaller (or extinct) clades.

Hi folks,

There are some interesting results here for us. Whether fortunate or not, there's nothing immediately ground-breaking that leaps out at me - that's good, because it means the new results basically confirm the ideas we already had (see /g/R1b-U106/message/5759 ).

We expect a lot of R-U106 to be involved in the Nordic Bronze Age, and R-Z18 in particular is likely to have migrated furthest north among the early R-U106 haplogroups. So the large number of R-Z18 found within this culture firmly establishes this link between culture and haplogroup. The lack of other R-U106 haplogroups (apart from RISE98's) among the ancient samples from this culture is more surprising. They may well be there, but perhaps they were less important or later arrivals.

The presence of R-Z156 within the La Tene culture equally isn't that surprising. R-Z156 is one of the haplogroups I have long excepted to be more dominant within the core Celtic groups.

Later samples from this paper are from periods where haplogroups are already well mixed, and we're not really at the stage of being able to deal with many of these haplogroups in that much detail.

What will really help is when someone with the necessary time and technical skills can go through the raw data for these tests and see if more accurate haplogroups can be defined.

Cheers,

Iain.