Wednesday, August 16, 2006

My deep ancestry

So we got my dad a National Geographic DNA testing kit for a Father's Day present. Apparently the results are in. My Dad writes:

Everyone that has my DNA belongs to Haplogroup R1b (M343). A haplogroup is a series of markers that defines the mutations in your DNA and is shared by your ancestors (the men in my case). According to the information I received, my earliest ancestor emerged in Africa about 50,000 years ago. About 5000 years later they moved to the Middle East. About 5000 years later they moved to Central Asia. They moved further into Asia during the next 5,000 years. This was during an ice age and survival was difficult so they moved to Northern Europe and later to Western Europe. This is where our ancestors got the M343 marker – the defining marker of our haplogroup. We are direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon man that did all the cave paintings in France.

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