More on Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)

In my previous Blog, I started to look at what FTDNA was doing with their new MitoTree and how that was changing my haplogroup. I had to trick out the query as my old Haplogroup of H5’36 is going away. I had to query H5 which was a popular haplogroup under H5’36. When I did that, I found our that the new Haplogroup above H5 will be called H5’248. Even though, my last Blog had Mitotree in the title, I never looked at the actual tree:

Here I shrunk down the H5’248 Time Tree to get it all in. Here is a larger view of the top of the tree:

There should be more branching under H5’248 once the FTDNA analysis is done (I hope). The above images are meant to show that the branching under H5’248 is small except for H5 which is large. I suppose that means that at some time in my maternal history before 4,000 BCE there were two sisters. One sister had a lot of descendants (including the H5 Haplogroup) and the other (my maternal ancestor) not so much. I suppose that problems in my maternal line could have been due to famine, plagues or wars.

If I go upstream one step, I see this:

I see someone from Hungary and someone with an unknown ancestry under H5’248^. From my last Blog, I learned this:

The ancient connections screen shows this:

Talk about a distant relative.

More from YFull

At some point, I uploaded my mtDNA results to YFull. YFull gives analysis of DNA that is independent of FTDNA.

Thanks to someone else who uploaded to YFull, I am in a new Haplogroup there called H5’36e. I am not sure how to read this screen. It gives a TMRCA of 1850. I assume that means 1850 years ago. If I understand this correctly, our common ancestor was in the year 150 approximately. Very interesting. At least this is much more recent than 4750 BCE. This screen confirms what I had thought:

I will next look at the first tab which is Known SNPs:

Again, not a lot of explanation here, but my assumption is that I share with one other tester two SNP:

• T310TC!!
• G4092A

Here is another rerport from YFull:

Again, I am flying in the dark a bit here. On the bottom line, this shows C456T after H5’36. Is that what gets me to H5’36e? But this seems to show that there is a match below H5’35e which are the two SNPs I mentioned above. Would these two SNPs form a new mtDNA Haplogroup under H5’35e? Another interpretation is that the two SNPs at the end of the last line are unmatched SNPs waiting to be matched with someone else. According to YFull:

On the “MTree matches” tab, all mutations are divided into groups. In particular, they include those that match other samples and those currently unique.

This does not help my understanding. Two screens ago, it appeared that the last two SNPs were part of H5’36e, so I will have to go with that.

YFull’s MTree

I touched on this in my previous Blog. Interestingly, I see this YFull view from a 2023 Blog tht I wrote:

At that time, the common ancestor was over 13,000 years ago. I also note that in 2023, I had the only id with a YF designation. I am not sure what thee other lettered prefixes mean. Compare that with my new Haplogroup:

I am at the bottom of a very long list. A green subclade or haplogroup with red around it means that it is new. This view seems to indicate that G4092A is the defining SNP for H5’36e, so I remain confused. Also the SNP is very old at over 12,000 years, but my common ancestor with this match is 1850 years before present or about 150 AD. So the new YF match has made a big difference in the TMRCA date.

I see a link at the bottom of the MTree:

This suggests that Ian is involved with the MTree and that they got some of their data for the tree from 23andMe. When I look at that 23andMe link, I see 7 samples listed as H5’36. I also see this:

I have since contacted my new match at YFull and he was not aware that YFull dealt with anything other than YDNA. So I am not sure how his information got on mtDNA got to YFull. Perhaps through 23andMe or another source.

My Match Steve

The person I wrote to who is in YFull is named Steve, from Canada.  He mentioned that he had no known ancestors from Sheffield where my mother’s mother’s mother’s family came from. However, if our common maternal ancestor is 1,000 or more years old, then it would not be likely that the common location would be Sheffield, England.

Here is a map with my matches at FTDNA:

I see I have a red flag near me which means and exact match. When I click on that flag:

 

Hey, it’s Steve, so I guess he did test his mtDNA at FTDNA. That is good news, because that means that hopefully we will also be in a new Haplogroup at FTDNA when they roll out the H line of mtDNA. Apparently, that is such a large line that they will do that after they finish the rest of the branches. I am hoping that in a month or so, we will see more results at FTDNA.

Summary and Conclusions

• It is interesting to compare what is happening at FTDNA in the area of mtDNA compared to what YFull is doing
• A match I had at YFull gave us a new Haplogroup there and a much more recent common ancestor.
• It turns out that Steve who is my new YFull match also tested at FTDNA and his stated ancestor is closest to me geographically. Leeds and Sheffield are relatively close to each other on the map.
• Based on the matches on the map, it would appear that my maternal line back in the British Isles going back to about the year 150 AD or earlier. There may be some testing bias in this if only people from that area tested. However, it still seems possible that this is true.