Phylogeography update: now including R-DF98!

Hi folks,

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I've finally found a quiet weekend in which to update my phylogeography document to include R-DF98:

This is my own haplogroup, so I'm very pleased to get it done, as it is the most significant update in understanding I've managed to make in almost a decade.

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When we first discovered the Kings' Cluster back in the early 2010s, I posited its origin to be in the middle Rhine valley during the Celtic era. Better TMRCAs from BigY testing and ancient DNA from Prague then suggested an origin in Bohemia during the Unetice Culture. With this update, that Unetice Culture origin doesn't change, but I can't find a migration pattern that agrees with an origin in Bohemia: even correcting for our horrendous testing bias, we clearly have a source and distribution for R-DF98 that is to the west of Bohemia. So I've speculated and put the obligatory pin in the map somewhere in central Germany, somewhere in the west of the Unetice Culture's distribution. That isn't a precise position, but I've had to choose somewhere to make a map!

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From there, we see a lot of migration into the middle Rhine valley. This means that there aren't the same post-Roman migration patterns in R-DF98 that we see in the R-U106 haplogroups I've covered previously. While we have our ancient DNA samples from Driffield Terrace showing that some R-DF98 branches made it to the British Isles during the Roman period, most(!) of the migration out of Germany, France and the Rhine Valley between them seems to happen at a later stage. In the British Isles in particular, a lot of it appears Norman in origin.

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You can see from the above the scale of the potential changes to this model that can yet happen as we dig into R-DF98's history in the future. However, for now I'm comfortable that this is a significant step in our understanding of this haplogroup.

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

#8704

Thanks, Iain, for this update. There are two branches now below R-L127, R-BY117638, which has only been found in Finland so far and R-FGC13355, which so far has been found in the USA descending from a common Johnson ancestor in Virginia around 1647.

On Sunday, May 25, 2025 at 05:25:21 AM CDT, Iain via groups.io <gubbins@...> wrote:

Hi folks,

?

I've finally found a quiet weekend in which to update my phylogeography document to include R-DF98:

This is my own haplogroup, so I'm very pleased to get it done, as it is the most significant update in understanding I've managed to make in almost a decade.

?

When we first discovered the Kings' Cluster back in the early 2010s, I posited its origin to be in the middle Rhine valley during the Celtic era. Better TMRCAs from BigY testing and ancient DNA from Prague then suggested an origin in Bohemia during the Unetice Culture. With this update, that Unetice Culture origin doesn't change, but I can't find a migration pattern that agrees with an origin in Bohemia: even correcting for our horrendous testing bias, we clearly have a source and distribution for R-DF98 that is to the west of Bohemia. So I've speculated and put the obligatory pin in the map somewhere in central Germany, somewhere in the west of the Unetice Culture's distribution. That isn't a precise position, but I've had to choose somewhere to make a map!

?

From there, we see a lot of migration into the middle Rhine valley. This means that there aren't the same post-Roman migration patterns in R-DF98 that we see in the R-U106 haplogroups I've covered previously. While we have our ancient DNA samples from Driffield Terrace showing that some R-DF98 branches made it to the British Isles during the Roman period, most(!) of the migration out of Germany, France and the Rhine Valley between them seems to happen at a later stage. In the British Isles in particular, a lot of it appears Norman in origin.

?

You can see from the above the scale of the potential changes to this model that can yet happen as we dig into R-DF98's history in the future. However, for now I'm comfortable that this is a significant step in our understanding of this haplogroup.

?

Best wishes,

?

Iain.

#8705

Iain. What I find very interesting about your phylogeography document is, if my read of it is correect, the distinction between those haplogroups that migrated to Scandinavia in the early period of R-U106 and those that did not venture so far north. The former groups became part the the early Germanic tribes that ventured at a later stage south into Germania. The latter groups were assimilated in the Celtic culture only to be later subsumed within new Germanic tribes east of the Rhine and remain Celtic or Gauls west of the Rhine.

--

Kevin Terry

#8706

I got real excited for a sec until I realized DF-98 wasn’t DF-96. ??

Jim “Griz” Adams
(701)566-0826

#8717

Hi Kevin, Ernest,

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I thought I'd replied to you both, but apparently I didn't.

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Ernest - thanks, I've seen this. Interesting developments have indeed been afoot, including those upstream. I've mainly concentrated on the larger scale in the Phylogeography document (going into every single family would be prohibitive!). However, I'd like to have another look at your family's Y-STR matches at some point and see if we can tease out the order of any other relationships and try to put these on a more detailed tree.

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Kevin - yes, we do seem to see an early split between northern and southern haplogroups within northern Europe. However, this split appears to have happened at multiple times in multiple groups. There appears to have been a move of mostly R-Z156 into (perhaps) southern Germany at some point (maybe) around the Corded Ware Culture - Unetice culture transition, while most of the rest of the haplogroup went further north. Equally, I'm seeing differences between R-DF98 and R-DF96 that suggest R-DF98 ended up mostly in the central Rhine while R-DF96 ended up mostly in the northern Rhine, as a result of migrations that might have occurred during the Middle Bronze Age, around the foundation of the Tumulus Culture. Lots of things to unpick here - and no doubt I won't manage to unpick them all or, worse, get some of them wrong!

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Cheers,

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Iain.

#8718
Edited

It might be useful for your phylogeography to note that both well-studied branches below ZZ11, DF27 and U152, were detected some years ago in Middle Bronze Age (very early Bell Beaker) burials in an older (early Corded Ware) site in Quedlinburg -- actually on an Elbe River tributary, but if it had been broadly considered as Rhine, it would have been "northern," i.e. Lower, Rhine.? Those haplogroups, especially U152, were detected later in Bohemia; and some 2019 posts by Davidski/Generalissimo of Eurogenes (but on the forum then called Anthrogenica) contended on autosomal grounds that those Bohemian samples had migrated into Bohemia from the north (via the Elbe), not the southeast (via the Danube).? This was presumed significant, when "Yamnaya" was presumed not to have a presence on the Volga, or the forest steppe where its headwaters flow.? And that interested a few people in Poland, as well as me (at the time, an admin of the R1b-DF27 haplogroup project at FTDNA).

Anyway, if it interests you (@Iain), the DF27 aDNA sample from Quedlinburg was I0806, and the U152 one nearby was I0805 --? I think.? This was at least six years ago, probably several more, and I'm old -- so it may just be approximately correct.

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#8720

Thanks Richard,

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Yes, I remember seeing those comments about Quedlinburg at the time. Throughout all of this, I've been treating R-P312 and R-U106 as two entirely separate populations that avoided each other, since they have such different geographical distributions from the Bell Beaker period onwards. However, they do share the same root, and I would expect that some R-U106 branches were intermingled within the R-P312 migrations, and vice versa.

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I'm afraid, however, that I am hampered by only having a surface-level knowledge of the R-P312 migrations and how they have led to the major R-L21 / R-DF27 / R-U152 triad that we see today. There are a small handful of places where I do think we see overlap but, with the exception of Germany and the occasional small branch, it seems to me that the R-P312 and R-U106 populations really did manage to stay fairly well separated from each other. I suspect that the migration history of R-U106 has more in common with R-S1194 than it does with R-P312. Nevertheless, I think potential connections between these haplogroups should be explored further, perhaps by someone with a better overarching understanding of them all!

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Best wishes,

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Iain.

#8727

Hello Iain! Great to see you got to DF98! It's 6 Driffield Terrace Skeleton 3 that's the outlier with the Scando ancestry??

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"Twigstats substantially improves models of admixture between ancestries from Iron Age Britain and northern Europe in early medieval England, halving standard errors from 9% with SNPs to 4% when using time stratification (point estimates 80% and 79% Iron Age Britain-related ancestry, respectively). We used this improved resolution to demonstrate that an earlier Roman individual (6DT3) dating to approximately second to fourth century?ce?from the purported gladiator or military cemetery at Driffield Terrace in York (Roman?Eboracum), England, who was previously identified as an ancestry outlier^,, specifically carried approximately 25% EIA Scandinavian Peninsula-related ancestry (Fig.?). This documents that people with Scandinavian-related ancestry already were in Britain before the fifth century?ce, after which there was a substantial influx associated with Anglo-Saxon migrations. Although it is uncertain whether this individual was a gladiator or soldier, individuals and groups from northern Europe are indeed recorded in Roman sources both as soldiers and as enslaved gladiators^,."

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You know of course I have an interest in 6drif3 and also 3drif16. I have read a thesis paper that interprets some of the burials as possible horse soldiers particularly at 6 Driffield Terrace. That thesis here: https://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk/entities/publication/e21b0f9e-5a05-4e74-b4b1-012943409aa9

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Thanks for all your work on u106 and especially our group DF98!! Cheers!?

Charlie

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Phylogeography update: now including R-DF98!