Yesterday we received a L277+ result for someone in I-M26 "Sardinian" (currently called I2a1 at FTDNA, it may be called something else by other people). This result was expected based on results from 23andMe. But since last May at least, FTDNA has been unable to reliably do the L277 test. FTDNA does its SNP tests by sequencing the Y chromosome for around a couple hundred base pairs around the SNP location, and the sequencing worked for people expected to be L277- and they were in fact L277- according to FTDNA. But for people expected to be L277+ no sequence could be obtained by FTDNA. I hope FTDNA has worked out the problems with L277. For a long time, all known I-M26 people had the very distinctive marker value YCAIIa,b=11,21 or something very close to that, or they might have had 11, 11 or 21,21 but were very close at other markers to people with 11,21. But a couple years ago we noticed a new group within I-M26 which usually has YCAIIa,b=18,21 and other distinctive marker values and 23andMe testing of these people showed that they fall into two groups: one is L277+ and L247+ and has about 5 known members, all with Mexican paternal ancestry the other is L277+ and L247- and has about 3 known members, all with "German" paternal ancestry (from the Rhineland, Switzerland. and the German speaking Sudentenland in modern Czech Republic). >From WTY testing, another SNP was discovered which distinguishes the YCAa,b=11,21 people from the L277+ people with YCAIIa,b=18.21: the 11,21 people are all L672+ and the L277+ people are all L672- You can see a tree I drew up here, http://cullengene.blogspot.com/2011/10/l672-placed-in-i-m26-tree.html the ages are based on Ken Nordtvedt's tree: http://knordtvedt.home.bresnan.net/Tree%20and%20Map%20for%20Hg%20I.pdf Bernie Cullen one of the volunteer administrators, I2a Project at Family Tree DNA and dna.ancestry.com