And, one of the best things to happen to this hobby was Ken Nordtvedt getting interested in it. Thanks for all you have done in days of Auld Lang Syne, Ken. Bob Arvin -----Original Message----- From: y-dna-haplogroup-i-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:y-dna-haplogroup-i-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Nordtvedt Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 4:39 PM To: y-dna-haplogroup-i@rootsweb.com; genealogy-dna@rootsweb.com Subject: [yDNAhgI] 2004-2012 I entered the hobby and bought my initial personal 37 marker haplotype 8 years ago. I soon expanded my interest to I1 haplogroup as a whole, and then y haplogroup I as a whole, and have made this my study since. Haplogroup I is overwhelmingly a European haplogroup, supplemented by a small clade from the eastern (Armenian) part of today’s Turkey. Perhaps the most interesting thing I have learned is how “recent” into the past is the collapse of the y tree to just a couple handfuls of branch lines. We now have approximately 10,000 haplogroup I haplotypes floating around in various public databases in the world. Based on that amount of data we find the y tree highly pruned to just a tiny number of limbs once one goes back further than 4, 5, or 6 thousand years. [[ To go off on a more technical tangent for a moment, there is something called N dimensional haplotype space in which N STR haplotypes of today can each be represented by a point (or vector position). Each STR repeat value becomes one of the vector’s coordinates in this abstract space. Over 20,000 years ago there was a single haplogroup I founder’s haplotype. Let’s make him the origin of our N-space. One might have expected today’s thousands of measured haplogroup I haplotypes to form a cloud in N-space today, fanning out in all N directions from the origin, with the fanning distance somewhat large for the fast STR coordinates and fanning distance small for the slow STR coordinates --- a shape something like a generalized N dimensional football --- with this cloud diffused out from the origin being the result of 20,000 years of slow STR mutations. That is NOT what we see. If all today’s known haplotypes of haplogroup I were plotted in this N-space we would ! see a few dozen islands of densely located haplotypes, some islands very tiny and some huge like I1. The larger islands on close inspection might be seen to be clusters of smaller islands, forming archipelagoes. These few dozen islands will be separated by utter voids in N-space containing not a solitary haplotype. Extinction in action!]] If we trace all of y haplogroup I back to the end of the Younger Dryas 11.5 thousand years ago (somewhat arbitrary point), there were just 11 branch lines then which are the founders or male line originators of today’s entire population numbering in the tens of millions (as sampled by our approximately 10,000 measured haplotypes) . See “Tree and Map for Haplogroup I” at http://knordtvedt.home.bresnan.net Those 11 branch lines from the end of Younger Dryas are all that survived from the single haplogroup I founder of slightly more than 20 thousand years ago. There was very close to zero population growth in Europe through the last glacial maximum, wiping out just about every y line except a couple handfuls which survived to latter prosper. Those 11 branch lines consist of: The Dinaric/Disles branch (L621+) The Isles branch (L161+) The NF branch (only two known members; L880+; discovered just this last year.) The I2a1*-F branch (P37xAll) The Western/Alpine branch (L624+/L233+) The M26+ branch The L38+ branch The M223+ branch The I2b* branch (L415+) The I2c* branch (L596+) The I1 branch (M253+) Of these eleven branches, six of them had been just formed from bifurcations from three 11.5 thousand years ago --- Dinaric/Disles and Isles had just parted ways, L38+ and M223+ had just parted, and I2b* and I2c* had just parted. This knowledge of y haplogroup I tree structure over the last 20,000 years is primarily achieved from the collective interests and actions of many hobbyists who have participated in hounding industry for and then testing for evermore snps. I seriously doubt that the academics would have ever pursued this y tree structure with such detail, or that industry would have expanded products to include so many more y snps without hobbyist clamorings. So Happy New Year to all the hobbyists who have played a role in these discoveries. Ken ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to Y-DNA-HAPLOGROUP-I-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message