Welcome to the H4 mtDNA Full Genomic Sequence (mtGenome) Project.

To join you should:

   Have Results from the mtDNA Full Genomic Sequence test at Family Tree DNA to get the most from the project

   Have your HVR1, HVR2, and Coding Region (CR) results turned on.

   Allow this project's admins to see your CR data.

You can join with HVR1 and HVR2 results only, but you will not be put into thecorrect sub-clade. It may be enough to help your genealogy however, because H4is not common in all European populations.

This project is only for the maternal line, mother’s mother’s mother etc as far back as you can go in time, but not male ancestors. If you want to know more these are good web sites in addition to the FTDNA information.

https://dna-explained.com/2015/03/31/finding-your-american-indian-tribe-using-dna/ 

https://www.geni.com/blog/dna-testing-for-genealogy-getting-started-part-two-376163.html

http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2015/07/30/a-mtdna-journey-discovering-my-mtdna-in-a-research-paper/

The most valuable input every member makes in this project is to enter the most distant ancestor in their maternal line with name, place and date. Please do not enter a man’s name!:) Even though (sadly) some birth and baptism records do not give the name of the mother of the child, please at least call her Mrs Unknown then married surname. Even if your furthest maternal line is not in your ancestral country, (such as Europe yet, if you are of European origins) then it is worth putting your data point into your personal details, since someone elsewho has got further back may recognise that their family tree ran through that location.

But your knowledge, understanding and skills help others too. Are you enthusiastic about social, political, cultural historyand pre-written history, languages and linguistics, archaeology, art and graphic design?

If you allow the administrators to have access to the FGS (Coding Region)results of all tests you will be assigned to the correct sub-clade. No other members will have access to the FGS/CR results, and they will not be displayed on the public results page.

To do this after joining the project, pleasenote that you must go to your User Preferences and allow administrators tosee the Coding Region results of the FGS.

By joining this project, you reaffirm the Terms and Conditions of the Family Tree DNA Website, in particular those pertaining to participation in Projects, which describe the possible public display by some Projects Managers of member results, and your right to opt out of certain display settings, which may be found on the Family Tree DNAWebsite here.

The full mtDNA sequence test contains some genes inthe coding region (cr). By default these results are unavailable to the Project Administrators. You may choose to allow your Project Administrators to view your coding region results (most people do) by selecting Yes or No in the Results Display Settings section of your Account Settings page.

 

 

 

H4 is among the oldest H clades, with about 20 differences from the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence being pretty typical. (A few testees have differences in the mid- to  high-20s.) That is 60 maximum mutations (so far) from the original maternal genetic ancestor “Eve” of us all proposed by Behar (see below) and called the RSRS the Reconstructed Sapiens Reference System. This could be derived for the whole human race once the Neanderthal mtDNA sequence was known.

Times of each sub-clade

Using the supplementary data on page 91 from the published work of Behar gives the following table of the last mutation, for the H4 haplogroup. SD is the normal way of expressing the uncertainty in a measurement and it stands for standard deviation.

 

	Median no. of years ago 50% chance	Uncertainty Standard deviation SD
H4	10617	1471
H4a	9277	1559
H4a1	8637	1559
H4a1a	7835	1647
H4a1a1	6600	2088
H4a1a1a	5891	1798
H4a1a1a1	2656	1880
H4a1a1a1a1	704	1302
H4a1a1a3	3360	2320
H4a1a1a4	1596	2113
H4a1a2	2992	1937
H4a1a2a1	2051	1779
H4a1a3	4597	2622
H4a1a3a	2371	2408
H4a1a4	5545	2264
H4a1a4a	2688	2603
H4a1a4b	3483	1635
H4a1a4b1	2769	1591
H4a1a4b2	1201	1566
H4a1c	4818	2773
H4a1c1	1448	1924
H4a1d	4529	3263
H4b	7503	4320
H4b1	2091	2848
H4c	2588	5697

So if you are lucky enough to be H4a1a1a1a1 then your last mutation has a 66% chance of being after 0 AD and now, with a median time (i.e. a 50% chance) of the mutation predicted to be 1300 years ago. But if you are a pure H4 with no extra mutations then the last common ancestor could be 12,000 years ago (or more). But nearly everyone has extra mutations.

 

Geographical distribution of H4 in modern countries

Women from the H parent clade of H4 sheltered in the warmer refuge area from the Black Sea to Levant south of modern day Turkey during the glacial maximum period of time ~22,000C to 19,000years ago and the final mutation which then defines H4 was about 10,000 years ago. The women were still in this general area when the sub-clades of H4a mutated from the H4 parent 9000 years ago and then later H4b mutated 7500 years ago from a different H4 female line, not necessarily in the same local population. This then aligns H4a in Europe (where Europe means everywhere west of the Urals) and with the H4b in the Arabian countries. Other H haplogroup women could be elsewhere when the other subclades mutated from their parent.

Some large surveys of haplogroups only break down to the major groups, of say H and then go on to do detail work on another clade. So it is strangely difficult to get a breakdown in some countries. H4 is not a common haplogroup typically 1% so sample sizes have to be reasonably large to find H4, so if a sample is only of 50 people then it is not surprising if it is not found. Only when samples are above 1000 people can you say that it is probably not present. Most of the surveys do not do a detailed enough analysis to find the H4 subclades.

Region	Country	HG	Density %	Source and comment
"White"	USA	H4	0.5	European especially British Isles
Western Atlantic coast	UK	H4	1.4	Pereira, sample size 561
	Ireland	H4	3	Pereira  & 23&me
	Spain	H4a & 6 subclades	0.4	Barral-Arca 2016. But 0.9% in Cantabria on the North coast. Total sample size 7633
	Pasiegos Spain	H4	5	Maca-Meyer 2003 An isolated valley in the north east, also with R1a men
	Basque	H4	1.5	Pereira
	France+Italy	H4	1.6	Helgason sample size 248
	Portugal	H4	1	Pereira
	Iceland	H4	9.64	Helgason sample size 487
Caucusus	Armenia x	H4 & H4b	2.8 & 1.7	Roostalu 2007 http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/2/436.full from on-line supplement The sample sizes were moderate, typically 174-500 people
	Georgia x	H4	0.5
	Dagestan x	H4 & H4b	0.7 & 0.7%
	Ossetia x	H4	1%
Near East	Syria	H4 & H4b	0.6 & 0.6
	Lebanon	H4 & H4b	0.6 & 0.6
	Jordan	H4 & H4b	0.6 & 0.6
	Turkey	H4 & H4b	1.4 & 0.8
	Arabia	H4 & H4b	1 &1
	Turkey	H4	4	Loogväli sample size 50
	Palestine	H4	1.4
	Bulgaria/Turkey	H4	4	Helgason sample size 102
North Africa	Moroccan Berber tribes	H4	8	Ennafaa 2007
	Morocco	H4	0
	Tunisian Berber tribes	H4	3
	Tunisia	H4	1
	Egypt
Jewish Diaspora	Ashkenazy		0.7	Sample size 565
Middle East	Kurds	H4	1.3
	Gulf states	H4	1.3
	Saudi Arabia
	Iran	H4b		EUpedia
Scandinavia	Norway
	Sweden		0	See below for number of samples
	Denmark
	Finland		0	Loogväli sample size 31
	Finland+Estonia	H4	1.5	Helgason 2001 sample size 202
Baltic states	Estonia	H4	0	Loogväli sample size 114
	Lithuania	H4	3.9	Kasperavieiute 2004
	Latvia	H4	0.7	Pliss from Malyarchuk sample size 299
Central Europe	Germany	H4	1.52	Helgason sample size 527
	Austria, Innsbruck	H4, H4a, H4a1, H4a1a	1%	Brandsetter sample size 2487
	Switzerland +Austria	H4	1.6%	Helgason sample size 187
	Belgium
	Netherlands
	Italy +France	1.6	1.6	As above Helgason
	Italy Sardinia	H4	2.6	Isolated cluster of 23 villages
Eastern Europe	Poland	H4	5	Pereira  & 23&me (sample size only 38)
	Poland	H4	2.5	Milennik-Sikorska sample size 404 Better value
	Slovakia	H4	1.7	Loogväli sample size 119
	Russia
	Volga Urals	H4	1.6	Loogväli Finno Ugric speakers in Volga Urals, sample size 125
	Volga Ural tartars	H4a1a	4	mtDNA was European not east Asian, sample size 197
	Belarus	H4	0.4	Kushniarevich sample size 267 in the north near Latvia
	Czech	H4	2.5	Milennik-Sikorska sample size 85
	Czech	H4	0.5	Malyarchuk sample size 179
	Ukraine	H4	2	Milennik-Sikorska sample size 157
	Bulgaria	H4	1
	Rumania	H4a	0.3	In a known Avar immigrant area. Brandstetter sample size 360
	Hungary	H4a1a	2	Brandstetter sample size 173
Balkans	together		0	Loogväli sample size 111
	Macedonia	H4, H4a, H4a1a	2.5	Branstetter sample size 200

Note x the Caucasus cannot be lumped together since the small countries and populations are divided by significant mountain ranges. Some of the Caucasian countries have no H4 people.

If you have the computer tools and skills to plot these figures on a map like the Eupedia figures than that would be a wonderful contribution to this project.

The H4 populations are clearly very scattered into clusters where reasonable sample sizes by two authors in the same country give quite different results. But you can see that we are all over Europe and the Middle East.

The Moroccan Berber tribes are an interesting case. The Berbers used to be called Barbary and it is tempting to think of the Barbary pirates and their raiding for slaves all around Europe. But 8% of their population is a large proportion for captured slave women. If it is a true H4 island then that may be the best explanation, since two other authors explain slave trading over the last 2500years as the cause of African MtDNA at levels of 10-30% in the Arabian Peninsula, (without any corresponding YDNA). However genetic drift in a small isolated population could also be the cause. The survey author Ennafaa says in general that the Moroccan Berber mtDNA are a subset of the near east which is itself a subset of the Arabian Peninsula. It is not clear whether this also applies to the H4 women.

The Moroccan Jews (non Ashkenazy) have 3 types of H4a1a  [Behar 2008] and one of these was founded in the last 2000 years and so would match with leaving Isreal, and the other two variants are older than that. The total H4 population density in the sub-population is 12%.

The Volga Ural region is also interesting since this is the area which is potentially the source population of both the Steppe warriors and herders for Proto-Indo-European languages and the Proto-Uralic language. Although the largest sample was from the Tartars, where male DNA is from East Asia from the Mongol invasions, the female side was predominantly European.

The countries which have no (or very low) present day populations of H4 are also useful, since that would imply that the female migrations either did not go through there or did not stop there. The following countries had no H4 in the data found. The lower figures are the sample size, since with an uncommon Haplogroup it would be missed in a small sample.

France	Finland	Italy	Bulgaria		Germany	Norway	Sweden
0/72	0/480	0/60	0/855		0/100	0/18	0/296	0/307	0/1600
	Finnalia 2001	Bodner 2014	Karachanak 2011		Brandstatter 2008		Tillmar 2010	Lappalainen 2008	Lappalainen 2008

It has been difficult to get a sensible set of figures with large enough samples in both primary sources (the technical literature) and the web in general so as a result the sampling methods may not be the same. If you know of other data please let the admins know.

Summary 

Most of Europe and the Near East have low levels (<1%) of H4, but isolated areas can have much higher levels. In some places such as Iceland the higher density has to be due to genetic drift with a low number of initial settlers. In other places the population may be a relic of earlier settlers such as early farmers or even earlier hunter-gatherers. Our large numbers of H4a1a1a could mean that this sub clade corresponded to a growth in population such as establishing farming in the source area.

Main references for the distribution figures

Barral-Arca R, Pischedda S, Gómez-Carballa A, Pastoriza A, Mosquera-Miguel A, López-Soto M, et al. (2016) Meta-Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA Variation in the Iberian Peninsula. PLoS ONE 11(7):e0159735. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159735

Roostalu et al. (2007)."Origin and Expansion of Haplogroup H, the Dominant Human Mitochondrial DNA Lineage in West Eurasia: The Near Eastern and Caucasian Perspective." Mol Biol Evol 24(2):436–448.

Behar (2008) " Counting the founders" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0002062

Loogväli et al. (2004)."Disuniting uniformity: a pied cladistic canvas of mtDNA haplogroup H in Eurasia." Mol Biol Evol 21(11):2012-21.

MartaMielnik-Sikorska.  The History of Slavs Inferred from Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequences

PLoSOne. 2013; 8(1): e54360.Published online 2013 Jan 14. doi:  10.1371/journal.pone.0054360

PMCID:PMC3544712

Agnar Helgason “mtDNA and the islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating the proportion of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry http://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(07)63111-5.pdf

Hajer Ennafaa et al, “Mitochondrial DNA haplogroup H structure in North Africa”

http://bmcgenet.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2156-10-8

Maca-Meyer 2003 Y Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Characterization of Pasiegos, a Human Isolate from Cantabria (Spain) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1469-1809.2003.00045.x/pdf

Comment from Eupedia “What's interesting is that the Pasiegos have 18% of R1a1. That's huge for Spain. The mtDNA data show that Cantabrians have a fairly unique incidence of hg I, U2, U3 and U4, which are usually found among Pontic steppe people and areas with a lot of R1a. The Pasiegos obviously have steppe ancestors, who mixed with Palaeolithic people from the Maghreb (E-M81 combined with U6, L2 and M1). A very unique blend indeed.”

FTDNA results from other projects

In the country groups of FTDNA there are these numbers

Country	No of H4	Sample size	%	Comments
Finland	1	2272	0.05
Germany	9	918	1
British Isles	Asked question of admin	1446	?	All 4 countries, but sorted by county at present
Iberia	2	940	0.2
Polish	4	2513	0.75
Ireland	22	2124	1.02
Ukraine	0	466 or 138
Sweden
Norway	27	1158	2.3	No H4, H4a, H4a1, H4a1a, only the more derived sub-clades

These results are clearly only an indication, because people may or may not choose to join any project according to how they perceive their ethnicity

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/european_mtdna_haplogroups_frequency.shtml these maps show the distribution for the other H clades which are more common

Migration Map

The key rivers are shown on the map of Europe which reaches across to Asia at the Ural Mountains and are labelled in blue. The key tribal cultural identities are shown in black. Present day political borders are shown faintly in pink and the people and language migrations are shown in red. The highest mountain ranges which restrict movement and later trade are shown roughly. If any reader of this map has graphics tools and skills please offer to make a tidier copy. It can not be included in this script (software limitation) and so is in the activity log and photos.

The map in the photos section shows the spread of the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Celtic languages and archaeology, in the Bronze age leading to the iron age.

Ideas generated by the project which could describe our distribution

We do not know which of these ideas below are the most likely but step one is to capture them all, starting with the furthest back in time and going down to the modern history. Many of the pre-history ideas build on the books of Blood of the Celts and Ancestral Journeys by Jean Manco which pull together the fields of history, linguistics, and archaeology with the modern genetics discoveries to generate a pattern of migration. These books includes the results from Ancient DNA since only they allow the historical movements to be seen and it gives a different interpretation of modern populations.

All of the project’s ideas could have contributed to some extent to our present distribution. In each option there are clear suggestions of what the distribution of our clade would be in both our results and modern populations, if this was the dominant mechanism of migration. Since H4a1a1a is our largest sub-clade by number of members that is used as the example occasionally below since we may have enough data points.

Hunter gatherers (mesolithic)

If the first early farmers in Spain (below) took wives from the local hunter gatherers then the H4a1a women may have already been present in Spain. This idea is best described by this post in Eupedia, where there is also a map of our present day distribution.

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/33432-Where-did-mt-haplogroup-H4-originate. Or the huntergather population may have been in the Balkans  and joined the Cardial ware early famers as they passed through.

Spread of Farming into Europe (Neolithic)

Farming of grains and goat and sheep husbandry for meat was developed in the fertile-crescent, over 10,000 years ago. This area was on the south of present day Turkey and north of the Levant and present day Iran and Iraq. That region had a suitable climate and a choice of wild grass seeds to harvest. Hunter-gatherers who visited the areas when the grasses ripened became sedentary and started to deliberately cultivate the grasses. The separate small tribes mixed over time and then spread out into Europe and the Middle East.

H4 did reach Spain in this early farmer era since ancient DNA has been found there, and the woman was H4a1a and lived 7400 years ago. The culture was called Cardial Ware because by then pottery had been invented and the patterns are distinctive and tribes are more easily distinguishable. H4 has not yet been found that early in the Central Europe plains where much of the ancient DNA work has focused. But H4a1 was present in Germany 4000 years ago. So the easiest way from Spain to Germany is across France and if that was the case then maybe southern France will have significant H4 in the present population (not yet known). But if the ancient German H4a1 came from Eastern Europe such as Ukraine then it should not surprise us that we have a broad range of extra mutations in the present day in the same sub-clades.

Olade “Common genetic origin for Early farmers…” 2015 http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/23/molbev.msv181.full

http://www.medicaldaily.com/europes-genetic-ancestry-researchers-sequence-first-genome-iberian-peninsula-farmer-351120 a journalist write up

Copper-Bronze Age migrations

Yamnaya migration from the Steppe in the Copper Age is now believed to be how Indo-European languages arrived in Europe. In about 3500BC an early version called Proto-Indo-European (PIE) by linguists was spoken in the area from north of the Black Sea to north of the Caspian Sea.  The migrants were pastoral herders who had tamed horses, drank milk and drove war chariots, and the population who migrated were mostly male. This predominately male migration is a recent paper from September 2016  and the ratio of males to females who migrated was 5:1 to 14:1. It was a continuous wave of mostly male migrants and descendants of these migrants dominated reproduction (despite the existing male population they were 50% of the fathers) for the next few centuries. It seems that H4 may have been one of the few women who migrated from the Steppe.

The migrations are continuous and onward throughout the copper and bronze ages. The (missing) map above shows successive waves from the linguistics and the archaeology, which you will get from both of Jean Manco’s books and many others (she has a very long list of other items to read if you wish). The British Isles had a very short copper age because by the time that the people and techniques of metal working had moved across Europe to reach the islands then the Bronze Age was near. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. From the archaeology (chapters 4 and 5) it took just over a thousand of years for metal working to move from the east to the far west in Ireland by 2400BC. It was an imported, fully formed metallurgy by then. The peoples moving through Europe were the Bell Beaker Culture (BBC) named after their pottery. Although they are named after their pottery shape, because it is distinctive, their key feature was that in most countries they were the first people who worked metal. They were highly mobile across Europe because analysis of their teeth shape and isotope content shows that people born in Spain were buried in Switzerland and people born in Switzerland were buried in Hungary.  Bronze is a much harder metal and makes better tools and weapons and is made by mixing tin in with the copper. Cornwall in South West England and Ireland have significant tin deposits as well as copper and so Britain and Ireland became a central to the Bronze Age .

If a few H4 women came west with the Yamnaya herders then the diversity of the modern population would be widest in present day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. H4a1a1a would have more sub-clades in this region too since it has been there the longest.

If male Yamnaya herders and warriors collected women from the earliest areas that they moved into then the present day countries with the highest numbers and diversities of H4 would be Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. We would also have more places of origins in our sub-clades from these areas. Poland and Germany would be the source population of H4a1a1a if the later Bell-Beaker men picked up women as they followed the Rhine and Oder rivers north to the North Sea coast.

For any of the source population countries speculated above then a genetic effect called surfing would ensure that the most western country also had a high percentage.Surfing is when a mutation is carried by the leading edge of a wave of migration with an expanding population. The equivalent in Y-DNA is the concentration of the R1b mutation, which is at its’ highest percentage of the population at the western coast of the migration where people can go no further west and settle there.

Finnish women could get their fairly rare H4 (for Finland) from the women which came with the R1a men who migrated north from the Steppe. Or from contact between the BBC and a Baltic culture who made Corded ware (again a style of pottery), whilst both cultures were in Northern Germany and Poland, depending on the time of arrival into Finland. A even later time of arrival could imply the women were the victims of slave trading by the Vikings or the Vandals.

To quickly learn more Google Olivier Lemercier (the author) Bell-Beaker (the subject) and Harvard (place of talk) to find a good introduction to the Bell-Beaker people.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34832781for an introduction to the Yamnaya

Iron Age migrations the Celts

The Celts did not have a written history though left their marks over time across the whole of Europe. Place names last longest as a record of language and places with an Celtic language origin stretch from Ireland in the west to above the Black Sea and in Turkey in the east, and down into Spain.

The Celts are generally associated with archaeological cultures of La Tene and Hallstatt in the Iron Age. Nowadays the Celtic language is limited to Eire, Scotland, Brittany, and Galicia (northern Spain). The art known as Celtic is from La Tene, with the local development of interlace patterns in Britain and Ireland giving names such as the Celtic knot.

Like the Bell-Beakers before them the Celts are a well disputed over people or culture, since they left no writing of their own.

http://www.historytoday.com/rachel-pope/celts-blood-iron-and-sacrifice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts

Population movements after the collapse of the Roman Empire in West Europe and North Africa

After the Roman Empire collapsed, particularly in the west then the Eastern tribes migrated across Europe. The Vandals and Goths sacked Rome in 410. The Huns displaced the Goths and Vandals from their then homeland near the Black Sea in 375AD and Hungary was the only part of the Eastern Roman empire to fall to the‘barbarians’. A mixed group of tribes crossed the Rhine into the western part of the Roman Empire in 406AD.  The original Germani homeland was Jutland in Denmark before 500BC and they expanded out and south west to the Rhine and the Danube by 1AD. All of these tribes moved south and west. In Northern France they were known as Franks.

The north German tribes of Angles Saxons and Jutes migrated west to Roman Britain into what became their namesake England.

Vandals, Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths had original homelands in the Steppe and forests of Ukraine and western Russia, but exactly where is not known.

During this period there were also waves of poor harvests and plague which may have killed up to half of the population, so land once taken was held. (chapter 14 of Ancestral Journeys)

 

Slavic migrations

Today 270 million people speak Slavic languages in Russia, Belarus, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and some Baltic States and many of these countries compete for the claim of the Slavic homeland. In Roman times these present day Slavic countries were non-Slavic,and hence migration would be in the early medieval period. The oldest place names in the Slavic language are in the area just west of the Dnieper River and Kiev in present day Ukraine. They invaded the Balkans and Greece several times around 600AD.

If the source population for H4 was one of the eastern Slavic states then this would be a good possibility for the spread of the H4, but it does not explain the Irish density, unless the Irish H4s were already in Ireland. The Tartars, part of the Slavic expansion were also well-practiced at slavery.

https://mikedashhistory.com/2015/01/15/blonde-cargoes-finnish-children-in-the-slave-markets-of-medieval-crimea/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Early_Slavic_states

Jewish diaspora

The wiki link below describes the community of Ashkenazi Jews well, and better than this short paragraph can, but there are two broad theories about the mtDNA of Ashkenazi Jews, one is that they are Israelite, like the men, and the other is that the male (traders?) took local wives who converted to Judaism. Reality may be some of each, and the questions remain for the science, of how to predict which proportion.

The Ashkenazi community settled mainly in Central Europe and were above 10% of the population in Poland, Western Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech republic and Western Ukraine, making up 13 to 18% of the population in Belarus, Eastern Poland and western-most Russia.

From this newspaper article there is not complete agreement yet. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/ashkenazi-origins-may-be-with-european-women-study-finds.html?_r=0 on the mtDNA sources of the community, whether from the original Israel region or central Europe where they settled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

http://www.jgsgp.org/Documents/Dr%20Schurr-DNA-%2012-04-2011.pdf

The article above by Schurr has some very good migration paths for the non-Askenazi Jewish community.

In Behar 2008 he investigated the mtDNA of communities in present day Israel and found that 12%of Moroccan Jews were H4a1a and this could be from Spain or from the Levant.The Spanish H4 could also be from the Levant 2000 years ago or from the ancient early farmers. There were 3 different types of H4a1a, but no further analysis was done on them, only one of these 3 types (with 6% of the population) had a founding date in the past 2000 years and would reflect the expulsion from Israel, which was his interest.

Viking slave trade

Younger sons of Scandinavian farmers went off exploring for land, trade, women, and in general to make their way in the world. The activity was known as Viking, hence the name. The source populations were in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and in some places the Vikings settled as families but mostly it was a purely male movement. For example the Norsemen settled in northern France, took French wives, and settled starting in ~880AD. Their wives spoke French and hence two hundred years later when they left Normandy they were the French speaking Normans who invaded England in 1066.

Similarly Iceland is primarily Celtic/Gaelic on the maternal line and Norse on the male line.

The Viking slave trade could easily have scrambled any underlying patterns, and created some of their own. They sold many 10s of 1000s of slaves. From the concentration of Byzantium silver coins found there the centre of the trade could have been Gotland the island in the centre of the Baltic.

The name for slave in the English language is derived from the Slav people, since it is so frequently the source population. If the Vikings were then main mode of the H4 distribution then the source population could be in one of the Slavic countries, or alongside one of the long east European rivers. But the Vikings preyed on all of Europe.

For a good,  subtle map which distinguishes between Norway, Sweden and Denmark as the Viking source populations then please see http://denstoredanske.dk/@api/deki/files/29821/=508872.601.png

and https://snl.no/vikingtiden

The Scandinavians went in search of land and plunder and sold the captured slaves wherever there was a market, one of the largest was Byzantium, (also known as Constantinople and now Istanbul).

 

Barbary pirates

17% of 50 tested people in the Berber population were H4

The last documented raids of the pirates capturing slaves from Cornwall England was in the 1700s.

This may explain the Canaries data point, and so could Viking slave trading followed by later settlement in the Canaries. Or settlement from indigenous H4 women from Spain or Morocco. The non Ashkennazy jewish community also had high H4 density so the indigenous (non Arab poulation) may have been simillar.

Scot-Irish men were used as mercenaries in Finland in 1600s

See Facebook group page for H4a1a1a for more details. http://www.mesterton.net/briefscetch.pdf The soldiers took their wives with them (normal in those times) when they were hired as mercenaries by Sweden, whose part Finland was at that time.

We will be able to distinguish between all these alternative processes which have led to the modern distribution of our H4 by the spread of the data points of OUR furthest back maternal ancestors, the largest number will help us know where the population was highest. The edges of Europe such as Finland or Ireland are unlikely to be the source populations and this should show in which location has the most variety in the mutations.

Useful resources

Books

Ancestral Journeys by Jean Manco

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancestral-Journeys-Peopling-Venturers-Vikings/dp/0500292078

http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/ the associated web site

It very much focuses on the new discoveries in DNA of ancient bodies and blends this with the archaeology and linguistic evidence of when and how far people moved around Europe. It is not a heavy read but it is incredibly informative and I really enjoyed it. Buy the paperback or kindle it is more up-to-date

 

Blood of the Celts by Jean Manco

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Celts-New-Ancestral-Story/dp/0500051836this book focuses on the Celts and who the people were and where they may have come from.

 

Finland and Vikings, in particular,

 https://www.academia.edu/10125680/Fibula_Fabula_Fact_The_Viking_Age_in_Finland_ed._Joonas_Ahola_and_Frog_with_Clive_Tolley_

 

 

Web links

 

http://www.anthrogenica.com/forum.php

 

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_H_mtDNA.shtml

 

 

 

How to jump the Atlantic

 

We all want to go back as far as we can in our trees and in a country with an immigrant population knowing which countries that your ancestors came from is an objective for many. Surnames may make it fairly obvious and the area your ancestors settled may be known as Italian or German. For a British heritage self-identification is usually to one of the individual counties Irish, Scottish, and Welsh and within England it may be specific to the county, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Norfolk etc.  But many people are much more mixed and have no family stories or Bibles to give hints.

People have advised me that a lot of work is involved with google, ship’s manifests and in libraries to find out how your family crossed the Atlantic. You may be lucky if the records of their church were particularly good for example the Quakers because civil records maybe poor or non-existent.

Particularly focused resources are available together with general advice and this list is far from complete (please send in more suggestions).

 

 

https://www.geni.com/projects/The-Palatine-Families-Project/735

http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2014/10/27/7-genealogical-lessons-for-researching-your-palatine-ancestors/

Hank Jones is H4a1a1a and his most distant maternal ancestor came from Denmark in the Vejle area, where they were for 2 centuries or more.

His focused project is on families from the Palatinate area of Germany and he has written a number of books on the subject and is a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists.

His advice on the blog above would actually be useful for all genealogists not just people seeking their Palatine roots

 

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/cumberlandgap-mtdna/about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumberland_Gap

There are 24 different H4 women in this geographical project of 4800 members which was on the westward pioneering route in USA. The area is a mountain pass through the Appalachians into Tennessee but many members have been able to jump the Atlantic from there. So the H4 representation is at its typical USA level of 0.5% from the project members by then. Many families were Irish or Scot-Irish and that could mean higher levels of H4.