Mexico and the Southwest USA - Native Y DNA- Background

Background

We are taught after the Spaniards arrived in Mexico that they took native women as their wives and virtually wiped out the native men. As the story goes, the offspring of these European men and Native American women went on to establish the Virreinato de Nueva Espana (the Viceroyalty of New Spain) or what would eventually become Mexico and the southwestern United States. While this is generally true (DNA testing of modern day Mexican and southwestern Hispanic populations does show a predominant pattern of European paternal lineage and Native American maternal lineage) this is not the entire story.

This project was established to examine the other side of the story: the story of the native paternal lineages that live on today, hidden in our Y-DNA. My own paternal lineage traces to the southwestern state of New Mexico and belongs to Y-DNA Haplogroup Q. Like myself, the majority of the project's members belong to subgroups of Haplogroup Q which are believed to be native to the Americas. Given the curiosity about my own native, paternal ancestry I established this project believing that others might also want to learn about their native ancestry with the aid of modern, genetic tools.

Links to Sources of Information Relating to the Project

- Settlement of the Americas (Wikipedia)

- Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Wikipedia)

- Genetic history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas (Wikipedia)

- Indigenous languages of the Americas (Wikipedia)

- Pre-Columbian Mexico (Wikipedia)

- Indigenous peoples of Mexico (Wikipedia)

- Pueblo peoples (Wikipedia)

- Ancient dwellings of Pueblo peoples (Wikipedia)