Tracing Ancient Migratory Routes with DNA

What Do Migration Maps Tell Us?

When you take a Full Ancestry test with Living DNA, you receive your Motherline and Fatherline results which are based on your mitochondrial and Y-DNA. As part of these results, you will see your personal Migration Map.

This is a visual way to trace the paths your ancestors may have taken through deep time, showing how your lineage has moved and branched out across continents.

These maps are possible to create thanks to that mtDNA and Y-DNA contained in your cells. mtDNa is passed down from mothers to all of their children, and Y-DNA is passed down from fathers to sons. Both carry the genetic trace of previous generations going back tens of thousands of years.

The Story in Your Mitochondria

Inside almost every cell in your body, there are tiny structures called mitochondria. You may remember them from your school biology lessons as “the powerhouse of the cell”.

Maternal haplogroups (from the mother) are determined by assessing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Unlike other types of DNA, the mtDNA is found outside the cell nucleus and that means it does not mix with other types of DNA. This also means that you will have the same maternal haplogroup as everyone else in your direct maternal line: your mum, brother, sister, aunt, and grandmother on your mother’s side. In fact, you could have the same mitochondrial haplogroup as your 15th Great Grandmother - that’s quite an heirloom!

Occasionally as mtDNA is passed on from mother to child, tiny mutations will occur. These can be used almost like genetic timestamps, and can help geneticists to identify different maternal lineages (known as haplogroups) in both modern and ancient samples, tracking ancient migration paths through prehistory.

Geneticists have even been able to use these haplogroups to trace all living maternal lines back to one ancient ancestor, known as Mitochondrial Eve. While she wasn’t the first woman like her name implies, she was the only one of her contemporaries whose maternal line survived to the present day. We can follow the Motherline of every single living human today back to Mitochondrial Eve. Based on current evidence, it’s likely that she lived in Africa somewhere between 100,000 and 230,000 years ago. The area she’s likely to have lived is labelled “ROOT” on your Migration Map.

Your own maternal haplogroup is the label which describes your personal branch on the vast maternal tree. This label connects you with a group of people who share a common maternal ancestor who lived more recently than Mitochondrial Eve, in the last 10,000 years or so. Patterns in the populations where each one is found today, alongside similar patterns in ancient samples from archaeological sites, can offer insights into where your ancestors came from, the routes they have followed, and tell you where other people with the same genetic marker can be found today.

Following Our Fathers

The Y chromosome is one of a pair of chromosomes which differs between the sexes. Typically, but not in all cases, male individuals will have XY chromosomes, and female individuals will have XX. Whether you have an X or a Y in that pair is determined by your biological father, with either an X or a Y being passed on in his sperm.

Due to the way the Y Chromosome is passed down, from father to son, people who are genetically female do not carry a Y Chromosome and so cannot pass one on, or be tested for a Y Haplogroup.

Y chromosomes are inherited in a similar way to mtDNA, with occasional mutations leaving those tell tale markers that can be used as clues to help trace ancient migrations. This means that, just as all maternal haplogroups can be traced back to Mitochondrial Eve, all living paternal haplogroups lead back to Y-DNA Adam.

It’s worth remembering that, just like Mitochondrial Eve, this doesn’t mean Y-DNA Adam was the first human man, or even the only man alive in his lifetime. He might have had friends, neighbours, rivals, and he certainly had at least one son.. What it does mean is that his Y chromosome is the only one of his contemporaries’ to be passed down in an unbroken line of fathers to sons, through every one of thousands of generations, to survive in all living men today.

Although it’s hard to be certain, evidence suggests that Y-DNA Adam lived between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, again somewhere in East Africa.

Another important thing to remember is that Y-DNA Adam and Mitochondrial Eve aren’t likely to have met. Their descendants certainly have, and were very successful in creating new generations to pass along their DNA, but they are likely to have lived quite far apart in both time and physical location.

What Does It All Mean For You?

By studying patterns in mtDNA and Y-DNA haplogroups across the globe, we can piece together the more ancient history of human migration. The clues left by each haplogroup help researchers to reconstruct the complex journeys our ancient Homo Sapiens ancestors took as they left Africa, spread into Eurasia and into the Americas, and adapted to life on almost every continent on the planet.

Your mtDNA and Y-DNA are only very tiny pieces of DNA, and together are a tiny portion of your total ancestry, but they offer some hugely powerful insights into your most ancient roots. Understanding them, and where they have come from, can help you to connect your own modern life with those ancient ancestors, and their journeys across the world.