Monday, September 10, 2007

Subgroup U5 is restricted to Finland and it's populations.

Haplogroup U is a group of people who descend from a woman who lived around 50,000 years ago in the Haplogroup R branch of the Genographic tree. Her descendants gave birth to several subgroups, some of which exhibit specific geographic homelands. For example a subgroup U5 is restricted to Finland and it's populations. This is likely the result of geographical, linguistic and cultural isolation of the Finnish populations that has kept it fairly isolated genetically. Haplogroup U5 that first evolved in Europe is a group of people who descend from a woman who lived around 15,000 years ago. U5 is found also in small frequencies and at much lower diversity in The Near East suggesting back-migration of people from northern Europe to south.

1 comment:

Laura said...

John,

The specific U5 haplotype we're seeing in the Finland Project that -- at least so far -- is found only among those with Finnish maternal line origins is U5a1, with 16114A, 16192T, 16256T, 16270T, 16271C, 16294T and 16526A in HVR1. That's out of FTDNA's current database of over 54,000 mtDNA results; I'm curious to see what happens as more people test with maternal origins in NW Russia, and particularly Estonia and Latvia.

Laura