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>If this is correct our dates in Neustrelitz and Mecklenburg go back to Niklot (1090-1160) ancestor of the Lords and Dukes of Mecklenburg, one of the oldest German ruling houses, and reputed to be of Slavic origin.

?>This would be very interesting. How far back are you able to confirm the line? If you can test a distant cousin of his and form a new haplogroup a few centuries back in the past, this could significantly improve the TMRCA estimate.

Hi Iain

This is iffy, of course, as we can only trace our immigrant Dettmann ancestor back to his baptismal record in the Castle Kirche of Neustrelitz in 1823, where his Dettmann father is described as a Lackey, and his mother is the daughter of the Duke's Coachmeister. The Castle Kirche belonged to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and was where the nobs were recorded. However the then Grand Duke Georg (1779-1860) was estranged from his wife at that period and was known to have had liaisons, and there is other weird family evidence that he might have been our ancestor. I have contacted the present head of the Mecklenburg family (who has served on the board of the Almanac de Gotha) to ask him to consider a Y-DNA test but without receiving a reply. I know that most royal lines are extremely reluctant to consider DNA tests, and the German ones do not acknowledge possible illegitimate cousins.?

Belinda

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Hi Belinda,

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>But I wondered if the Globetrekker date estimates might have any validity. I know these have wide ranges but do their values lie within your own estimates?

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Globetrekker takes its dates from the underlying Discover system. The Discover dates have their issues, but overall they should be fairly trustworthy.

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That doesn't mean that they are the best dates possible, however. One of the things that Discover doesn't deal with well (even though it actually could) is causality. For example, R-BY96243 has a very wide range of dates, but it can't be any older than its parent, R-FT243238. In fact, with three SNPs defining it, R-BY96243 is most likely about 90-727 years younger than R-FT243238, giving it a TMRCA between 12 BC and 1595 AD. If we then apply the existing younger limit of 1159 AD, then we can estimate that R-FT243238 very probably dates from some time during the first millennium AD.

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>If this is correct our dates in Neustrelitz and Mecklenburg go back to Niklot (1090-1160) ancestor of the Lords and Dukes of Mecklenburg, one of the oldest German ruling houses, and reputed to be of Slavic origin.

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This would be very interesting. How far back are you able to confirm the line? If you can test a distant cousin of his and form a new haplogroup a few centuries back in the past, this could significantly improve the TMRCA estimate.

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

Hi Belinda,

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Short answer to your second question: don't trust Globetrekker, particularly for R-U106. Family Tree DNA acknowledge that it's in "beta", but it's really not comparable with the standard of their other products. That's not really their fault, but I don't think that the severity of its inaccuracies is communicated loudly enough. You can see my previous estimates of the origins of haplogroups down to R-CTS10893 here:
/g/R1b-U106/message/5759

and you can see Section 1.3 here:

for more detail on existing phylogeographical tools. You may also be interested in Section 4 - the discussions we've had previously has led me to do a proper investigation of the accuracy of the country flags in Discover.

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Longer explanation regarding why: Globetrekker puts the origin of many R-U106 haplogroups in England when they shouldn't be. We don't exactly know how Globetrekker works, but we've got some reasonable idea from what's been said. The main problem is the bias towards testing in the UK and Ireland. About half of all testers on the haplotree with European origins are from the British Isles, and such testers are more likely to test all the way to Big Y.

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That means that haplogroups that are mostly continental can appear mostly or entirely British. A classic example of this is R-Y17443, which descends from the House of Wettin in the Harz mountains of Germany. R-Y17443 has a small continental branch containing the House of Wettin (R-FT173384), which gets put in the Netherlands, and a large British branch (R-FT114487), which gets put in northern England. The averaged position gets put in Yorkshire, whereas the real position is in Germany. Tracing up the tree, the average position flip-flops over the Channel, all the way back up to R-Z156. We know from ancient DNA that at least the earliest part of this sequence is in the Unetice culture of Bohemia, about 500 miles to the east.

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Similar things happen for many of the other groups within R-U106. At high levels like R-Z2, R-CTS10893, etc., these are all based in continental Europe. There are extremely few R-U106 haplogroups in the British Isles before about 400 AD (see Section 5.5.2 and Figure 2 of my Phylogeography work). So we can be very confident that almost all of the big, early R-U106 haplogroups that Globetrekker assigns to the British Isles are incorrectly placed.

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And now your main question: the distribution of R-CTS4099 is fairly typical for a haplogroup of its age. It's found a little bit more in Scandinavia and the British Isles than usual, but only about 20-30% more than average. It's found a little bit less than average in the rest of Europe. I have not recently looked at R-CTS4099 in detail. Depending on its age, it might be associated with the Urnfield culture, or the later pre-Germanic or pre-Celtic cultures in north-western Europe (I'm keeping my options open here for now!). That would mean that it has the opportunity to spread by any and all of the early Germanic/Celtic migrations, which essentially means it has had time to spread everywhere in Europe before about 500 AD.

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

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I¡¯m struggling with dating in the L2>Z7>Z31>DGC910>DFC904>CTS10893>CTS4099 line of R-U106. My brother is lower down this line at BY96243 (550CE) and he and another BY96243 tester descend from German ancestors dating in the 1700s. Globetrekker puts the line from Z2 to CTS4099 firmly in England, and this is supported to some extent by several Ancient burials in Kent and Cambridgeshire.? However there are also Ancient burials for CTS4099 in Hannover, Lower Saxony, and one for BY69849, lower down the line at Lubeck, Germany, supporting a German location for the line. All those Ancient Connection burials have fairly recent dates, from 400CE onwards.? However the dates given in the Globetrekker Ancestral Path are much older, with L2 dated there at 1850BCE, CTS10893 at 900BCE and CTS4099 at 850BCE. My main question is how the SNP CTS4099 came to be so widespread in recent times, with tests showing up in England and in Continental Europe. The second question is how much weight we can put on the Globetrekker Ancient Path dates. They look sensible to me but they do not align with the Ancient Connection results.

Belinda

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