Justin

Comment Threads

• Trottelreiner commented on It could be worse
  I wouldn't interpret too much into Cheddar Man, AFAIK the research actually was only with the mtDNA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man which is only maternally transmitted, so if we assume migrations are not sexually uniform, that makes limited predictions for the whole genome. And the line in question, U5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_%28mtDNA%29#Haplogroup_U5 is much more common in e.g. Estonians, Finnish and Saami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtDna_haplogroups_by_populations than English or Germans. And the frequency is about the same in Germany and England, so with this limited information we can't exclude an female Frisian ancestor. Or some troll daughter, err Norse woman with Saami ancestry, for that matter. Actually, AFAIK...
• Greg. Tingey commented on It could be worse
  Yes, but .... Studies have moved on since then, & we can now trace both "maternal" & "paternal" dna traces in the ancestry, can't we?...
• Trottelreiner commented on It could be worse
  We could do it already then, problem is DNA is far from indestructable, and you have a few orders of magnitude more mtDNA (for maternal lines) than chromosomal DNA (of which Y chromosomes for paternal lines are a subset). Which is why it's much easier to get mtDNA than Y chromosomal DNA. Also note both have a lower population size than other genes, so they coalesce rather quickly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescence_%28genetics%29 e.g. there is quite some risk of lineages disappearing. And last but not least if we go back to your great grandparents, mtDNA and Y chromosomes give us only 1/8 of...
• Hank Roberts commented on It could be worse
  This may help, somehow: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/29/40/26/29402607972aa0bb32b94729296eaf6b.jpg...
• Martin commented on It could be worse
  Or get a copy of G Macdonald Fraser's wonderful history of the borderlands: "The Steel Bonnets" Apocryphal note - it's dedicated with the real names of those of his section who died in and around Meiktila, as described in "Quartered Safe Out Here"....