Speculation on Possible New R-ZP121 Anglo-Saxon Burials

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fenland with old windmill. credit alamy

Genetic results from a new paper, Continental Connections Transformed the Genetics and Appearance of Early Medieval England, were released before publication. Here is a link to the genomic data and an abstract from the paper at ENA.

Nicely, a person posting at Genarchivist ran the data through DNA analysis software and posted the Y DNA results they got. Scrolling through their post, a couple of R-ZP121 results popped into view.

The code that was posted contained sample names:

  • 603.merged.hg19.sort.rmdup.RG R-ZP121
  • 641.merged.hg19.sort.rmdup.RG R-ZP121

Cross referencing with a TSV file from the project at ENA gave me some searchable sample names:

  • 641 SAMEA120509669 Barrington, Cambridgeshire, England
  • 603 SAMEA120509637 Barrington, Cambridgeshire, England 

There are two grave sites in Barrington, A and B, I couldn’t tell which site the samples came from but then a helpful person at the U106 group pointed out that the samples were titled with a probable clue to location.

  • 641 has a sample title of utigEDI102
  • 603 has a sample title of utigEDI062

Edix Hill

The EDI portion probably stands for Edix Hill, which is Barrington site A near Orwell. The Orwell Parish Council has a nice page devoted to the burials.

Orwell, Cambridgeshire pinpoint on the map showing the location of Edix Hill roughly at the edge of east anglia.

I’m adding my guess that EDI102 refers to grave 102 and EDI062 refers to grave 62 at Edix Hill. Both samples were collected in 2019. These samples are interesting because several had Y pestis (plague) DNA mixed with their own, showing the plague in Britain before it was thought to have arrived.

There are a lot of graves at Edix Hill and I couldn’t immediately find a map listing the graves I was looking for. I looked through a few papers from various digs and either missed them or I’ve got the identifying grave numbers wrong. The different articles I looked through described Edix Hill as a grave site at the shifting border between the East Anglia and Mercia.

I found the maps interesting from this 1991 PDF from an interim report. There is a lot of information to parse through but I found this blurb from page 45 helpful in summarizing things at Edix Hill, at least as they stood in the 1990s:

It has been noted that the assemblage from Edix Hill shows types of artifact distinctly Anglian in character (small-long and cruciform brooches) as well as types that have clear affinities with the Midlands and Thames Valley areas (applied saucer brooches). Wider Kentish and continental contacts have been suggested (Malim 1990,, 1992a), and both Barrington cemeteries are considered as a select group with Haslingfield by Fox (Chapel Hill group; Fox 1923) because of the mixture of traditions to be seen from the grave-goods. Although no specific settlement sites have been identified for this group, and the only definite contemporary settlement in the area was found at Appesford, at the crossing of the Hoffer Brook, Harston (Malim 1992b), locations of pagan burials appear to correlate reasonably closely with later villages suggesting continuity of occupation from pagan times through a shifting of settlement within specific areas.

R-ZP121 in Ancient DNA

In a previous post about CTS12023 in Anglo-Saxon England, I mentioned Hatherdene 5, who was identified as R-ZP121. Hatherdene 5 was found in Hatherdene Close, maybe 11-ish miles to the northeast of Edix Hill.

The other ancient R-ZP121 sample we currently have marked out by Family Tree DNA is Tjaerby 750, a medieval Dane from Tjaerby, Randers, Denmark.

I don’t know the ages of these two new samples, although I suspect they are close to the age of Hatherdene 5. I’ll be on the edge of my seat to see what Family Tree DNA makes of them.

FTDNA estimates that Mr. ZP121, our direct ancestor, was alive around 200 CE. These Anglo Saxon men and our Danish cousin were alive hundreds of years after that. They most likely have SNPs below R-ZP121 but degraded samples may make it hard to discover exactly where on the tree they fall.

Mr. ZP121 has modern descendants from Belgium, Estonia, England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Poland, Finland, France, Russia, Scotland and Sweden. He also currently has 11 descendant lineages that these modern testers fall under. The story for R-ZP121 is clearly larger and more diverse than one migration can encompass.

Unfortunately, we must wait for the results of these studies to be revealed, and it can take years.

What could Go Wrong?

A bunch of things. I could be wrong. The software could be wrong. There are a lot of places to fall down. The bright light is that volunteers are doing amazing work in genetics forums, and I’m glad for their efforts. I hope to see their good work independently verified by a company that is still interested in Y DNA.

Big Y Completionism and the Svenssons

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Katherine Mills Embly Sutherland and baby Ronald Sutherland

Last year, in a post, I processed some autosomal and Y DNA points of interest in my wife’s family. A total lack of thruline ancestor matches with her paternal surname family, strong matches with more distant cousins on a maternal branch of that family, and previous Y DNA testing on her paternal line made me wonder about intra-family adoptions and non-paternal events.

The long story short is that my spouse and her brother seemed genetically overrelated to a great-grandmother whose family came to the U.S. from Sweden and Norway, and not at all related to a great-grandfather whose family has been in the U.S. for 300 years. That and Y DNA matches to a small group of Swedes had me following up on Y DNA from great-grandmother’s family to see if my wife’s dad and grandfather were Mills/Svenssons rather than Sutherlands.

What’s in a Name?

I’m going to use these names a lot Mills, Svensson, and maybe even Svensen or Svendsen. Here’s what you need to know, Nordic surnames weren’t standardized until really recently. In Sweden this happened in 1901. So it’s not like English families that standardized hundreds of years ago.

So for example, in 1850’s Sweden, I would be Mike Thomasson, and my father would be Thomas Karlsson, and his father would be Karl Raimundersson. So we’ve got that going on, but my wife’s family also moved between Sweden and Norway, and so their Svenssons became Svendsens and Svensens in official documents.

When they got off the boat here, it probably would have standardized to Svensen or Svenson, but a lot of immigrant families picked English style names for their new life here, and it’s not like their previous surnames were very identifying for them, they changed every generation. My wife’s family picked Mills.

Johan Svendsen from Sweden became John Mills, “regular American”, in 1880.

DNA Testing Completionism

If you look at that older post, you’ll see that I was lucky enough to have a willing family member provide their DNA for comparison, and I had a Y-111 match with my brother-in-law for the first time since I ordered his tests years ago. That left me with 99% certainty that we had some sort of crossover event that led to my spouse and kids having no genetic links to their Sutherland forebears.

When I talk about worrying, I have a problem: it is the problem of wanting to chase these things down when they neither put food on the table nor a roof over my head, but hobbies are hobbies. It could have been model trains, but eh..here we are.

This year, completionism kicked in, and I decided to upgrade that Y test to Big Y to confirm the match. Today, I got the initial results back, and they are only a few Big Y SNPs apart. The two of them should now form their own documented Y DNA branch under I-BY389.

Their last common ancestor with other matches is around 200 CE, so this new shared branch of SNPs will be a huge time jump to 1849 CE for their new last common male line ancestor Johan Mills. Right now, I don’t know what FTDNA will name this 1600-year-long Y DNA branch. I’m assuming they will pick one SNP to represent the line.

Relationships

Here is the family tree between my wife and her Mills cousin. As far as Y DNA is concerned, Ronald Sutherland is effectively Ronald Mills. Since Katherine Mills has no other children, I don’t have anyone to check against to say how closely related Ronald was to his mother Katherine.

What I’m saying there is that I can’t tell whether Katherine was actually Ron’s mother or his sister. She has no other children to compare with. I do know that Ron is a male line Mills.

the Generations between 3rd cousins 1x removed shown as two lines of a tree branching down to the genetic matches.

The other thing that I noticed, outside of there being no Sutherland side relatives through Ron, is that the Mills matches seemed large. Not monstrous, but like my wife was maybe one generation closer than she expected to be. Here is an example:

It’s not that those 2nd cousin 1x removed and 3rd cousin matches couldn’t be that large, it’s just that they are at the top end of matches at that distance. They seem large to me.

I would have said that we are just seeing an NPE on the Sutherland side of her family with Ron Sutherland, except that no other family is mysteriously showing up in her matches to replace the Sutherlands genetically. He’s just a Mills, related to his grandparents, John Mills and Lula Yates, and that seems to be it.

Speculation

a photo of John Mills and Lula Yates along with their children

Lula Yates, Ron’s grandmother, John Mills’ wife, is 43 when she has her last son Robert in 1925. She had a child every few years since she was 24 years old. Without any information about relatedness to Katherine and with no other family filling a gap, it seems possible that Lula is Ron’s mother and that Ron was adopted by Embly Sutherland and Katherine because Embly and Katherine were unable to have children. That’s my best guess given what I have.

It’s also possible I’m just missing some other family. It seems less likely to me right now, but Ron could be the son of one of Katherine’s brothers, then adopted by Katherine. That’s not uncommon. I just don’t have a family yet to fill in that gap of who would be Ron’s biological mother.

Intra-family adoptions have happened in my own close family, with my male line Thompson cousins being adopted by our aunt Cheryl Clark. A few generations from now, the Clark children and grandchildren might have a small genetic mystery to uncover.

It’s also possible, without any evidence, that Ron’s tree goes straight up and he’s double related to the Mills family as a product of two siblings or a lopsided pairing with a parent and child.

Without testing Ron, I’m not sure how to see if his parents were related or how closely they were related. Testing Ron we’d look for matching segments on both sides of his chromosomes (from both mother and father), but a generation later, I think that direct comparison is gone.

Right now, that lopsided parent-and-child pairing seems unlikely to me because I don’t have any reason to think that Ron was more related to the Yates than to the Mills, or more related to the Mills than to the Yates. My wife’s matches within the Mills/Yates couple’s descendants seem large on balance, but again, I can’t say that she looks more related to Mills or Yates. That could be a lack of skill on my part or the lack of Yates matches one generation farther back.

She has many matches descended from Lula Yates, but only one descended from Lula’s parents, and that one looks normal. Meanwhile, she has many Mills relatives that are not descended from John, and those all seem normal, too.

At the moment, I wouldn’t be able to tell Ron from any of John Mills and Lula Yates other children.

So Now What?

I like to present genetically accurate trees on Ancestry if I can. I think it makes it easier for people to make sense of their DNA matches if they can put my family in context. Where the paper trail diverges from the genetic trail, I do my best to mark that out too. Ancestry makes it easier now, with multiple relationship types.

The most accurate thing I could present is that Ron seems to be his mother’s sibling. Human nature leads us to look for the most dramatic reason because keeping it in the family, like the Habsburgs, makes for a better story. I just don’t have a better story.

Right now, my temptation is to show Ron Sutherland as a biological son of John Mills and Lula Yates, with Embly Sutherland and Katherine Mills as adoptive parents and the official parents in the tree. It’s a total best guess, but it would make sense genetically for other people who have less information and are trying to map out matches with my wife.

Without Fear

I’ve always said that Sutherland was named Sutherland because it was south of Norway. The Jarls of Orkney, who ruled Sutherland, were under the Norwegian crown. You’d expect to find some Norse-leaning Y DNA groups there. My wife’s family fit that expectation for me, and so I took a long time to look at their Y results and Autosomal DNA results any deeper.

Sutherland is a place and a clan. Scottish clans certainly contain related families, but they also include unrelated families. A clan is a group you belong to. In the past it may have been assigned or chosen based on allegiance and alliances. There are shared experiences in the memories of clans. In the modern age, it’s a thing you can be born into. but also a thing you join.

The clan motto is “Without Fear”. I always thought that was pretty damn cool. There’s no way we’ll be giving that up.

My family is new to the area where we live, but my wife’s family, the Sutherlands and Mills, Crawfords and Bronsons, are part of the local fabric. They’re embedded in the landscape as founders of several towns and cities. There are shared memories here and allegiances and alliances that permeate the history of our home. This is also a place with clans you belong to and can join.

Year End 2025

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This year marks 100 years of being Thompsons for my branch of the family. It’s 15 years of keeping this online diary. My son who was just three years old when I started this, is eighteen now. Many of the people who got me started down this path, or gave me reasons to continue, are only present now in those of us they left behind.

As I’m writing this it is 13 minutes into December 26th. This morning, I made Christmas breakfast using Uncle Wayne’s secret recipe for biscuits and sausage gravy. The inside joke is that I know uncle Wayne’s secret recipe for biscuits and sausage gravy because his wife flat out told me what it was right in front of Uncle Wayne.

We were visiting Wayne in Georgia, enjoying his delicious buscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast made from a secret recipe he had learned while he was a cook in the Georgia prison system. Secret knowledge that only Georgia prison system cooks know. Wayne was telling us what a big deal that was in the solemn tones of a learned man of wisdom when she just blurted out the secret. Wayne wasn’t at all pleased about being undercut like that, but the cat was out of the bag.

My wife and I laugh every time I gather the secret ingredients and perform the sacred rites to make this highest form of sausage gravy.

My wife spent a good part of the day copying recipes out of her mom’s cookbook, preparing to send it off to live with her little sister. She talked about how it had way too many recipes that were made with canned ham, or hot dogs, and we compared it to my grandmother’s cookbook that seemingly made everything from lard.

The weather was unseasonably warm here, so we had a nice fire outside. I burned a bunch of junk ends and pieces of cut pine boards, old pizza boxes, and the remnants of a broken dresser. We talked about my dad’s incessant burning near the end of his life. He had this tiny efficiency firepit. It looked like a large metal drinking cup that he would jam any wood or old coal bits into and then sit back and watch it burn over and over again.

My 24 year-old son and I solved the world’s problems while we watched our fire turn to coals and the coals become ash. The consensus view at the end was that we would do what we could to bring people in rather than pushing them away, work towards understanding, and then hope for the best.

If there were things I could give everyone right now, I think they would be a warm place to be, food to eat, people to talk with, and a life full of things worth remembering.

Now and Not Now

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Ed Elmer's name on the obelisk at Hartford Connecticut.

Old Norse Specialist Jackson Crawford

I’ve listened to a lot of Jackson Crawford videos over the past several years. If you’re interested in the sagas and the eddas, or the differences between old Norse and other Germanic languages, you should check him out. He has a lot of different content. For Halloween, this video of him talking about the undead popped up in my feed. The most striking thing for me was the idea of now and not now and how the nearly dead or just dead, are treated. It struck a chord.

I’ll explain but first here is the content for reference. If you want the whole story with all the nuance and information, have a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA5lQ49VcAs

manuscript art of medieval dead person sitting up and interacting.

The Undead

Dr. Crawford, roughly half way in, breaks down a sort of, ancient sense of time, with examples from English and other Germanic languages. Instead of past, present and future. They/we have present and not present. Not present is broken up into past and future. Present is real and true and not present is part of a dream state. Not completely untrue necessarily but also not real like the present.

How he presents that in language is to have someone say something that is untrue in the present moment. So on a sunny day, your friend says it is raining and you might say “if it were raining, we would be wet”. You’re talking about now, but because it is untrue the words you use are in the past tense; “if it were” or “if it was”.

Living people are in the now, but dying people, or mostly dead people (thanks Princess Bride), are in the not now, and you can ask them questions about it. If they are all dead, they can be awoken (not raised) and questioned about the things they know in the not now. You wake the dead to get access to both the past and the future at the same time. The undead are not quite alive, but still active and accessible. You just want to keep them from walking around.

wooden statue of a viking at salme

Un-Now

At one point Dr. Crawford breaks down the root of Draugr. A Draugr is a revenant or a ghost. In the sagas ghosts are pretty solid. They aren’t whispy spirits, but definitely have bodies. They’re somewhere between a classic ghost and a zombie. Dr. Crawford notes that draugr and dream have the same indo-european root. They are related words. You have a corporeal body, alive or unalive, in the dream state.

I remember reading one of the sagas and a guy dies and is buried but then appears, unburied, and talks to his family at night. It’s so frightening and irritating that his family reburies him elsewhere. It gave me the impression that a draugr was kind of a pain in the ass that made it hard to sleep.

The sagas always read that way to me. These things were just possible things that happen like anything else. If a person is a werewolf, it’s just stated as another fact. Like they had dark hair, brown eyes, balding, werewolf, one leg shorter than the other, tall…

So a draugr is presented as another, possibly irritating state of being that is a hassle for your loved ones. A problem to be dealt with, like a leaky roof.

three crows

I’ve Seen this Before

As I was watching the video, I realized that I’ve seen this before. I think a lot of us have.

When my grandmother was actively dying, she would tell us who had visited her. People long dead, entire groups like her church choir, and people who were physically there in the facility, freely mingled in her day-to-day. At one point, she was talking to my dad, myself and my son and she alluded to me as my dad, to my dad as my dad, and to my son as me. It bothered her not at all that my dad was physically there in the same room twice, represented at different times in his life.

I called it, “time traveling” or “fluid reality” as she was breaking the walls of space and time at the end of her life. I think she had a good trip. It wasn’t terrifying. She wasn’t panicked. These things were just happening. As they do.

If I was a Norse person, without any context for end of life dementia, how would I understand these interactions? When someone is peeking into the Not-Now right before they die?

If I had asked my grandmother a bunch of questions, would I have gotten words about the future and past from a person who was clearly hopping timestreams right in front of me?

Are the Norse, in some way, describing the unfettered mind at end of life and assuming it could continue after death?

Seelye family WWII. My grandmother in uniform, sitting next to her mother. Bottom row third from the left.

Ethnicity Estimates, Ancestry Origins 2025

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fenland with old windmill. credit alamy

Ancestry has updated origins with more defined regions, so this is a good time to look at the new outcomes.

For reference: My 2011 Genome Analysis was described as English or British with significant input from the continent. My dad came back as “basically British”.

Roughly 10 years later, updates from Ancestry DNA, Family Tree DNA and 23 and Me shows the progression of ancestry estimate results from 2015 up through 2020. The expansion of the data sets these companies have to reference is pretty clear.

It is good to keep in mind that it is not my ancestry or ethnicity that is changing, but their interpretation of the comparison of my genome with reference populations. In my mind, no particular interpretation is right or wrong, but any one could be misinformed by gaps in the data set a particular company is using.

I have found these ethnicity estimates most helpful when something looks considerably large and out of place. I don’t think my results or my dad’s results are particularly surprising, but my aunt Cheryl’s high amount of Irish ancestry and my wife’s large Scandinavian component have raised flags for me. In each of those cases, there were other factors that were flags too. The ethnicity estimates coincide with and seem to support other evidence of something unexpected.

Analysis of a European American Toe

Ancestry comparison of July 2024 results and October 2025 results along with a percentage of change. This graphic shows the splitting up of England and Northwestern Europe into sub categories.

I must have missed an opportunity to pontificate on the 2024 update, or titled it so poorly that I could not find it. The picture above shows part of the “What Changed” section of DNA origins. What used to be “England and Northwestern Europe” at 46% of my genome, now also contains some sub regions for me . There is a new conglomerate called “Southeastern England and Northwestern Europe” which is 48% of my genome. They also added new regions in Britain, basically adding more Britain to the existing Britain. I end up with West Midlands: 16%, Northern Wales and Northwest England: 11%, North East England: 6%, Devon and Somerset 2% and East Midlands 2%. In total, I think that is 85% of my genome.

On the map below you can see the overlapping blobs. Southeast England, Benelux, and Normandy in grass green there are 48%. The next biggest blob is West Midlands (16%), blue there with the Eng. abbreviation in it, overlapping with some Northern Wales and Northwest England (11%) and East Midlands. You can see these sorts of spheres of influence.

Anestry Origins heat map showing all the regions in different colored blobs.

Moving along to other regions in the 2024 to 2025 comparison:

Ancestry origins comparison between July 2024 and October 2025 part two highlighting changes in what was Germanic Europe, Scotland and Ireland and Portugal.

Two large changes jumped out to me. First, Germanic Europe (36%) has mostly disappeared, broken down to one region (for me) Northwestern Germany at 3%. Second, Central Scotland and Ireland is only 2%, dropping 15 points.

I gained Southern Wales, The Netherlands (as separate from Benelux) and Denmark. I also switched Portugal out for Western Ukraine. In the past I’ve assumed this 1% is the mystery quotient. I have no known genealogical roots in Western Ukraine.

New Categories

overview of ancestry with some newer major groups, England, Celtic and Gaelic, Western Europe, Nordic and Central and Eastern Europe.

Looking at the overview, They’ve Broken up Britain and Northern Ireland into two overarching groups, England and Celtic and Gaelic. In this context, England contains a chunk of the coastal continent that is closely related through centuries of immigration and trade. If my math is correct, “Basically British Isles” is about 90% of me with the rest divided up between Western Europe (Northwestern Germany and Netherlands) and Nordic (Denmark) with the remainder mystery 1% that I think every company struggles with in Central and Eastern Europe.

By Parent

I really like this feature of Ancestry DNA. It would be best to have tested my parents, but even without that they are doing their best to tease apart matches and ancestry. The graphic below is the ring chart from the perspective of the DNA I got from my dad. Southeastern England is a crossover group with my mom.

ancestry origin graphs from my dad showing southeastern england, west midlands, north east england, netherlands, southern wales, Devon and Somerset and east midlands.

Here is the ring graph for DNA from my mom with the associated regions. Again, Southeastern England is a shared group. Mystery spot, western Ukraine, is associated with my mom.

ancestry graph of DNA from my mom showing Southeaster England, Northern Wales, Denmark, Northwestern Germany, Scotland and Northern Ireland and western Ukraine.

All that kind of puts me back at 2011 and the green dot that represents me on average. British with significant continental input.

2011 ancestry average map showing me somewhere between southeastern england and normandy.

The Death of My Father

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boat partially submerged at Dronningborg Baadelaug

The End

My dad Tom died on June 27th 2025 from complications due to liver disease.

The story is that he was exposed to chemicals at work that damaged his liver and so the clock has been ticking since then. I suspect, but can’t say for certain, that he was exposed while working at a factory, but that may not be the case. It’s not such an odd story for working people. Two of his brothers were exposed to cancer causing chemicals and/or radiation at their jobs and died before him, in some part, due to those exposures. All of his siblings (older and younger) died before him.

End stage liver disease harms your brain. You build up too much ammonia in your blood and the ammonia sort of eats your brain. It gives you a form of dementia. At the end, he would wake up after several days of sleeping and remember or be reminded that he was sick and wasn’t going to get better. Rinse and repeat every two or three days. He faced his death with fresh eyes a few times a week.

Before he reached that point, he was on home hospice care. He said he would rather die like the neighbor did, at home, than go to a facility.

The neighbor was an elderly man who fell down his basement stairs, broke his hip and died, probably in agony, after days of laying in his basement alone. That was somehow better to my dad than being cared for in a facility that was literally down the block from his house. A facility his wife had worked for, since I was a child. A facility where we used to eat dinner with her and visit the old people.

Nope, better to die alone, dramatically, in the basement, with only the spiders to witness his passing. To my dad, that sounded like freedom and self determination.

Eventually, he was too much for my mom and sister to care for. He went to the facility. They set him up with bird feeders outside his window and his T.V. shows were always on. They took good care of him. He joked with the staff. He ate better than he was eating at home. They did a great job in his final days. I don’t think he appreciated it, but I definitely do.

My dad was 72 when he died. People tell me that that is too young, but he had a hard life. My parents paid for the good life their children have had, with their bodies. A sacrifice to the future.

The Beginning and Early Years

My dad was born in Flint Michigan in 1953. He was the fourth of five kids. I only know bits and snatches of his early life. His mother was a nurse in the women’s air core in WWII. His father contracted polio and worked various jobs. At some point my grandfather spent time in prison. They lived in Flint, where my dad said, they were desperately poor.

They moved to a farm in Gladwin, Michigan. I get the idea that they were tenant farmers. My grandfather could drive a tractor even without the full use of his legs. My grandmother at some time, was a county health worker who visited homes. He had a pet deer, in a pen, that he had raised from a fawn. Someone drove up to their property and shot it dead. He told me about the deer multiple times so I think it was traumatic for him. Especially, how they were treated by law enforcement when they reported it.

He described having lambs that could be picked off by the local eagles. So that was a concern. He drank milk right from the cows and ate raw hamburger. He seemed to enjoy life on the farm…maybe on multiple farms. At some point I believe the family moved to the McBain area. I had to ask about this because, although we lived in Cadillac where the Finks family had lived and where my grandfather was born, we have funerals in the area of McBain and my grandparents are buried in the vicinity.

That is pretty much what I know about him, other than small side facts, like that his brother once de-gloved his hand with a clothes wringer contraption peeling his skin off. He said his great grandmother Ida Mitchell Finks had long hair that he would brush when he would visit, but that he got in trouble for being around her. He called his grandmother Orvetta Finks “Grandma Abbott” because, that is how he knew her. She married Howard Abbott in 1940. He said she once held his hand to a hot stove for disobeying her.

A lot of my dad’s stories were woven with injustice and sadness, but also dark humor. I like to think that is a family trait.

There is a lot of void space there for me with my dad. I don’t come on the scene consciously until the mid to late 1970’s when he was in his 20’s.

My Perspective

My perspective on all this is a little skewed and makes story telling a bit hard. Exactly because it is from my limited point of view, it will be skewed or maybe even wrong.

I don’t have a conscious memory of my biological parents together. They divorced when I was three and I was a late bloomer for consciousness and memory. In my world, from the beginning, I have four parents. I’ve never had anything else, so I don’t know what it is like to have less parents. I don’t have any idea what their break up was like and no sorrow for their lost love. In my mind, I enter the world fully formed with four parents.

Later on, I’m told there is a difference and I learn to separate biological parents from “adoptive” parents, but in my youth that doesn’t really make sense. Those differentiations were really for the adults in my life. It mattered to them that biological parents had more significance, as a child I was obviously more about accurate labeling.

Parents in my life are more like grandparents. I have to identify them. Like “Grandma”, “Mom” isn’t enough. I had “Grandma Thompson” and “Mom Sue” for instance. Like my “Uncle Dave” I had a “Dad Tom”. I had eight grandparents by the way, right out of the gate.

Sitting here now, I wonder if that made it easier for me to think about genetic and non-genetic family.

The Middle

I’ve been around for the majority of my dad’s adult life. At least from the time he was 20. I met him while he was not done growing. He had to learn everything about being a parent with three other parents watching when a lot of people are in their partying phase.

You may have heard me say that my family clawed its way into the middle class. My parents were part of that movement. Some of my grandparents were illiterate. A few were poor, although a couple of them were born into families with some means and went to school, the majority of the eight were laborers. Several of them knew real hunger. My grandparents afforded my parents an early education and opportunity.

My parents started out working in factories. My dad would bring home boxes of parts from his job to assemble at night for extra money. The majority of my four parents had some post secondary education. Two sets of them started their own businesses later in life. They had ups and downs, success and failure. I always had a roof over my head and heat when it was cold. I never went without food for any length of time. My parents made that happen, when it didn’t always work that way for them.

Life wasn’t meant to be fair for us, it was meant to be better. Their sacrifices ensured that it was.

I was in a presentation on generational learning once, and asked one of the older people in our group if they had flush toilets when they were a kid. They got offended and made it out like I was calling them ancient. The thing is, my parents didn’t all have that luxury growing up. Progress wasn’t the same across the country. Your zip code determines access to resources. Some of my cousins grew up with outhouses in the 1980’s. My parents gave me a life where I always had a toilet, running water and, for the most part, electricity. Eventually both households had cable television!

The middle of my dad’s story, the part that I witnessed in person, is typified by the real struggle to be what today we call “average” and the majority of the world would call “exceptional”. In turn, I was expected to “make something of myself” but I was not expected to start where he started. I don’t get credit for their achievements, but I can honor them and benefit from them.

God willing I’ll be able to pass those benefits on to others.

The fruits of their labor were not just mine. I’ve devoted a lot of time to genetics, but now I need to talk about openness. When my parents were young, one of the neighbors, maybe four years old, walked into their house (door locking was not a thing). He asked them where the cookies were. They showed him the cookie jar and got him some cookies. We laugh about the idea that some kid could enter your house and just expect cookies, but here were young people, my parents, who were open to sharing what they had with children. Even random children from next door.

My dad taught me that kids are a protected class. Kids are supposed to take advantage of your kindness. That is the take away from the middle.

The Future

My youngest son turned eighteen a few days ago. Legally, he’s an adult, but he’ll have a roof over his head, heat, and food while he continues into post-secondary education. These are the things I can give my own kids and the other kids in my life. I can give them a safe place, resources and time to grow. The world they face is hard and it makes hard people, but my wife and I try to make room for quiet kindness and being a soft place to land after you shoot for the stars.

When I look at my kids, I see that my dad isn’t really dead. I see him in their willingness to help, their innate sense of justice and their openness to caring. The love and care and effort of a generation are being transmitted and shared.

A New Oldest R-Z18

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pine trees and a stream in winter.

The sample is CGG107465, Lille Vasby, Høje-Taastrup, Zealand, Denmark, 2194-2026 calBCE, Bell Beaker. In the image below they are the farthest down on the left. Visually represented close to the estimated beginning of R-Z18. This is the oldest sample for R-Z18 (R-Z19) that could not be placed in a child branch. He’s right at the edge of the Nordic Bronze Age.

R-Z18 time tree with Lillevasby 107465 in the time tree at R-Z18 closest to the estimated beginning of R-Z18.

Here is Lille Vasby on a map of Denmark and Southern Sweden. Tucked in there on Zealand.

A map of Denmark and Southwest Sweden highlighting Lille Vasby in eastern zealand between the Jutland peninsula and Sweden.

CGG107465 is roughly 65km away from the burial location of our previous oldest R-Z18 sample, NEO752 R-Z18 Madesø, Zealand, Denmark 1814-1483 calBCE Nordic Bronze Age. Madesø is a lake on the western side of Zealand.

A Few Child Branches Around the Same Time

CGG106705 CTS3624 Karlstrup, Tune, Zealand, Denmark 2126-1932 calBCE Bell Beaker
CGG106708 CTS3624 Karlstrup, Tune, Zealand, Denmark Bell Beaker 2125-1947 calBCE Bell Beaker

CTS3624 is my branch so, obviously, it is pretty awesome. Here it is on the time tree with two samples a bit younger than the age of CGG107465, which you would expect since they are a few generations away from the parent R-Z18 line. These are all Bell Beaker folk from the Dagger Period when flint daggers were being manufactured in Denmark and Sweden.

R-CTS3624 found in Karlstrup leading to R-CTS12023 on the time tree.

Here is a map of Lille Vasby to Karlstrup. The burial places for our R-Z18 man and CTS3624 men are roughly 16km apart, but probably separated by a few generations.

Lille Vasby Denmark to Karlstrup Denmark walking map, just outside of Copenhagen.

Another child branch, a few generations from our R-Z18 source. R-FTH164 in Southern Sweden.

CGG105923 Z18>FGC5817>FTH164 Albäcksbacken Maglarp, Skåne, (So.) Sweden 2200-1700 BCE Late Neolithic. CGG105923 does not appear on the time tree at Family Tree DNA yet, as far as I can see. It may be in the works still. The age estimate for FTH164 is 1988 BCE at FTDNA which is in line with this sample.

A map of eastern zealand and southwest sweden with points for early R-Z18 branches found in bell beaker graves.

The oversimplified story I’m clinging to currently is that R-Z18 and it’s early children pop up in this area. They are tied to flint mining or trading and are probably familiar with sewn plank boats, local currents and trade routes. Their ancestors came from central Europe as part of a movement of people and culture. I see those ancestors arriving in Denmark much the same way that the Amesbury Archer arrived in Britain, and then setting up camp in Zealand and Sweden.

I’m leaning on this simplified map of trade routes for flint daggers quite a bit. The map is following the origination points of different flint deposits and their paths through trade routes. I think it makes it easy to imagine people moving along with goods and possibly settling in an area. One thing I find really interesting are the criss-crosses. The Zealand to Frisia route overland through Schleswig-Holstein and the Pomerania route swinging south from Northern Jutland.

flint dagger trade routes and dispersal map with dagger trade coming out of zealand and northern jutland.

I am imagining this sort of placement in the early branches and the possibility of human movement along these routes as a form of explanation about why you might see branches of Y DNA that are distantly related in the same areas. If I think about the possibility of an early R-Z18 branch in pomerania in the early bronze age they could go off on their own further into the continent or down the coast, forming new branches, only to be followed hundreds or thousands of years later by men and boys from Sweden, for entirely different reasons into the same area. These two imaginary branches would be from different cultures and language groups but come from the same wellspring in Zealand. They went on migrations that are so distant, they are forgotten.

I could see ending up with R-Z18 men in Poland for instance, having traveled with these flint tradesmen, and then two thousand years later distantly related men arrive with the Weilbark culture, Goths, Gepids, Huns, only to have distantly related men show up a thousand years after that from Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands as vikings or later, farmers.

In my own group, I can recall wondering at the idea that you could have two men from a Y DNA branch with a shared ancestor in 400 AD with one family in England and another family in Poland, and then have a man related to both of you in 700 BC, popping up in England in the next county over.

Mapping that journey through time is a team effort with very individual results.

My Beaker Folk?

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pine trees and a stream in winter.

For reference we’re talking about DNA samples from a preprint released about a year ago: https://wanderingtrees.com/2024/04/13/notes-on-r-z18-in-steppe-ancestry-pre-print/

In a previous post I left notes about a new branch for the R-CTS12023/DF95 crew and it’s not a new descendant branch, but a new ancestral branch for all of us. Ancient DNA from males in buried near Karlstrup, Denmark circa 2100 BC contained two SNPs out of the long string of SNPs that used to be classified in a block as R-CTS12023. Family Tree DNA is clustering those two under R-CTS3624. Prior to this analysis, we had no idea what order the large list of SNPs in the CTS12023 block came in. Basically, we had a lot of family clustered together, but no idea of the birth order because everyone alive today was related equally to all of them.

I’ve written about this a lot, but everyone in CTS12023 today represents one line of a group that should have at least a thousand years of branches. The family tree went straight up from 600 BC to 2200 BC. It looked like you effectively had 1600 years of a man who was only survived by one son repeated for generations.

With this new feat of citizen science, we can mark a place in space and time, in the form of a person, near the beginning of that long line of lonely fathers and sons. That man is Mr. CTS3624.

Mr. CTS3624

It’s unlikely that we actually have Mr. CTS3624 (one of the sampled remains was maybe 10 years old) but we have his close descendants. By dumb luck, we could have got him, but I don’t think we’d ever know that. What can we learn from these descendants of Mr. CTS3624?

They were buried near Karlstrup in Denmark. Actually in what (given the coordinates 55.55281 Latitude 12.20887 Longitude) looks like a golf course to me. It’s a golf course now. I have no idea what it was like 4000 years ago when they died.

55.55281 Latitude 12.20887 Longitude outside of Karlstrup Denmark where the CTS3624 men are buried.

They’re in what is today Eastern Denmark. They are either associated with the late Neolithic, Bell Beakers, or the early Nordic Bronze Age. The timing and labeling are kind of goopy. People weren’t walking around calling themselves Bell Beakers or Nordic Bronze Age. This is us trying to identify them in a continuum of culture.

Stealing bits and bobs from the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

“Domestic sites with Beakers only appear 200–300 years after the first appearance of Bell Beakers in Europe, at the early part of the Danish Late Neolithic Period (LN I) starting at 2350 BC. These sites are concentrated in northern Jutland around the Limfjord and on the Djursland peninsula”

“The Danish Beaker period, however, was characterised by the manufacture of lanceolate flint daggers, described as a completely new material form without local antecedents in flint and clearly related to the style of daggers circulating elsewhere in Beaker dominated Europe. Presumably Beaker culture spread from here to the remainder of Denmark, and to other regions in Scandinavia and northern Germany as well. Central and eastern Denmark adopted this dagger fashion and, to a limited degree, also archer’s equipment characteristic to Beaker culture, although here Beaker pottery remained less common. This period in Scandinavian prehistory, from 2400 to 1800 BC, is also known as the Dagger Period.[242]“

“Clusters of Late Neolithic Beaker presence similar to northern Jutland appear as pockets or “islands” of Beaker Culture in northern Europe, such as Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and southern Norway.[247][248][249][250][251] In northern central Poland Beaker-like representations even occur in a contemporary EBA setting. The frequent occurrence of Beaker pottery in settlements points at a large-scaled form of social identity or cultural identity, or perhaps an ethnic identity.”

Wikipedia can’t be used as a source, but it is very quick and convenient.

What I walked away from Wikipedia with was the general notion that eastern Denmark was not the hub of beaker pottery, but that they picked up or brought along the flint daggers and archery equipment of the beakers in northern Jutland. Also the graves of our two men fall into the “Dagger Period”.

The Dagger Period

Scandinavian pre-history has the most metal names like Battle Axe culture, and Dagger Period.

Looking for dagger period references I found this great map, from a 2005 paper out at research gate:

map of flint dagger movements with arrows centered on Denmark fanning out north through Sweden, northwest through Norway, South to Germany, southeast to Mecklenberg, and southwest to Netherlands/Frisia.

This is interesting because you see all those arrows coming out of Zealand and northern Jutland, and you could imagine people moving right along with those daggers into Sweden, Norway, the northern Netherlands, Germany, and Mecklenburg. It looks similar to the map made by Iain McDonald, showing a possible R-Z18 homeland.

map of the northern homeland for R-Z18 in Denmark along with expansions of other haplogroups under R-U106

These two maps remind me of the R1b map from the McColl study, with clusters in northern Denmark, Zealand, and Southern Sweden.

McColl study maps showing the different groups with an R1b group in Southern Scandinavia centered on Zealand and Southern Sweden.

The dagger dispersal map with arrows pushing out from northern Jutland and Zealand comes from a 2005 paper by Helle Vankilde. A Review of the Early Late Neolithic Period in Denmark: Practice, Identity and Connectivity

It seems to be in line with the Wikipedia summary.

I am admittedly in over my head with this paper. From the parts I read and understood, northern Jutland is the main flint dagger production site, and Zealand is a secondary site. Vankilde describes “Islands” of beaker culture in Denmark, with other cultural communities nearby. Not all burial types are the same, and grave goods can be different.

“Although more Beaker sites are likely to appear
in the remainder of Denmark, especially in southern, western and
central Jutland, this picture of a Beaker ‘island’ surrounded by a
partly differing material culture is presumably representative for
the prehistoric conditions.”

“In other words, a large number of social groups seems to be
present within a comparatively small region. This entangled pic-
ture in the Limfjord region may suggest activities related to social
rivalry between individuals and between groups (Vankilde, 2005).”

The paper also talks about connections with what would become the Netherlands…

“Importantly, the material tie between northern Jut-
land and the Veluwe group in the Netherlands is as distinct as the
link between northern Jutland and the rest of Denmark. The inter-
action between the Beaker groups on the Veluwe Plain and in Jut-
land must therefore, at least initially, have been quite intensive.”

“The Beaker group in Jutland exhibits a closer material relation-
ship with the Dutch Veluwe Beaker group than, for instance, with
the developed Beakers in Britain and Ireland. Lanceolate flint dag-
gers of type I reached Holland quite frequently, where they occur
in burials related to the Veluwe series of Beakers (Vankilde, 2005).”

…and other parts of Northern Europe:

“From a bird’s eye perspective, a comparatively uniform mate-
rial culture emerges across northern Europe in the Late Neolith-
ic Period. Beaker pottery and accompanying Beaker items were
only rarely included in the materials that circulated. Interesting-
ly, here and there in northern Europe, in close analogy with north-
ern Jutland, there are clusters of Beaker presence. Such pockets or
‘islands’ of Beaker Culture occur within a Late Neolithic setting in
parts of Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and in southern Nor-
way (Struve 1955, pl. 22; Kühn 1979, pl. 11; 18; Myhre 1978/79;
Jacobs 1991; Prescott/Walderhaug 1995). In northern central Po-
land Beaker-like representations even occur in an EBA setting
contemporary with the early Late Neolithic in northern Europe
(Czebreszuk 1996; Czebreszuk in Nicolis 2001)(Vankilde, 2005).”

The overall picture I get is that people pushed up from central or western Europe and formed pockets of beaker culture around sites with good deposits of flint in Denmark. They set up shop and produced flint daggers and wrist guards, then moved those goods along trade routes to related sites or trade partners. They are both somewhat separate and linked to other local groups.

“The concentration of different artefact types of Beaker affiliation
in northern Jutland can hardly be a coincidence. They suggest, on
the one hand, the existence of a Beaker Culture in a restricted re-
gion; the Beaker representation, on the other hand, cannot be se-
parated from Late Neolithic Culture in the same region. In northern
Jutland a dual, and thus inseparable, relationship exists between
Beakers and Late Neolithic material expressions: Beaker Culture is
thoroughly integrated in Late Neolithic Culture, and the opposite
formulation would be equally true. Above, this has been interpret-
ed in terms of social construction of identities in the domain of
culture difference, competing local groupings, in addition to gen-
der and presumably rank (Vankilde, 2005).”

Since I’m from Michigan, I imagine my own little peninsula with the automobile industry that was once focused in Detroit, churning out vehicles, and spreading car culture across the U.S. Auto plants also eventually cropped up in “islands” across the country, and people moved to continue to work for the same company in those new plants. You end up with related people scattered across different geographies.

“LN I flint daggers, and in particular hoards with such daggers,
are then rather closely tied to two separate regions of high-quali-
ty primary flint in Denmark, one in northern Jutland and another
in southeastern Zealand, Møn and Falster (fig. 4; 13). Apel’s (2001,
passim, fig. 9, 16–17) recent studies strongly suggest that these
two regions produced the main bulk of flint daggers during LN I.
From the production area in northern Jutland daggers were di-
rectly exchanged towards the north, across Skaggerak and Katte-
gat, into southern Norway and central Sweden, and towards the
south, into southern Jutland and the entire north German low-
land region. By contrast, from the production area in southeastern
Denmark daggers went across the Øresund into Scania and cen-
tral Sweden and across the Baltic into the north German lowlands
(fig. 5; ibid.) (Vankilde, 2005)”

Wrapping Up

I don’t know whether our R-CTS3624 guys were actually involved in the manufacturing of the Beaker package or part of the culture. I don’t have a list of their grave goods handy. I’ll have to try to find those. The movements and locations seem to line up with what we find later in ancient DNA.

People aren’t flint daggers, but it is easy to imagine moving people along these same trade routes, maybe setting up shop, and eventually becoming the locals. Mixed in with this commercial and genetic exchange swirling around Denmark could be the descendant of Mr. CTS3624, who leads to all of us.

According to Ewenn at the U106 group, at least one other R-Z18 branch gained new SNPs, R-Z18>R-FGC5817, and an intermediate haplogroup was also placed from these results upstream of R-BY66533.

If we’re lucky there will be more to come and more to learn about these early branches of R-Z18. It would be excellent to chip a few more SNPs away from what is still a big stretch of time between R-CTS3624 and R-CTS12023/DF95.

Time tree for R-CTS3624 to R-CTS12023 covering roughly 1400 years.

As things are, I’m walking away with the sense that the line of men from what we call R-CTS3624 to what we call R-CTS12023, roughly 1400 years from 2100 BC to 700 BC, is bopping around that world, circling modern-day Denmark through the Nordic Bronze Age.

I do wonder, since we seem to be hovering around for a few thousand years, if any of us will pop up in the Tollense Valley battle remains.

Pre-CTS12023 Notes

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two boats on shore

For reference, the Y DNA reads I’m talking about are from this study which recently released BAM files, which Ewenn at the U106 group was able to analyze for subclades: Notes on R-Z18 in Steppe Ancestry Pre-print

The study left a great number of ancient samples at R-Z19 (R-Z18). The oldest samples of R-Z18 seemed to be in Denmark and Southern Sweden, really between Zealand and Southern Sweden. That study concluded that R-Z18 looked like a local variant of R-U106. At the time, there was no information about further subclades.

Breaking up CTS12023

A lot of haplogroups represent multiple SNPs in blocks. CTS12023 has a large block of SNPs after it split from the rest of R-Z18. Everyone alive today (so far) has all the SNPs in that large block. That means we’re all related to a single branch going back a thousand-plus years until R-CTS12023 begins to break out into other branches. This represents the likely death of all the branches that would be there, but became extinct.

cts12023 large block of 26 SNPs leading to all the living branches

That big dark blue block represents generations of men in a single line. We’re all related to Mr. ZP86. Other branches of the tree are gone. Well, they were gone until the release of those ancient results from Zealand, Denmark.

Today. The block tree for CTS12023 looks like this:

Large block of 24 SNPs now that two have been identified as earlier branches.

Two values are missing from the long chain: R-CTS3624 and R-A19698. R-Z18 now looks like this:

R-CTS3624 and R-A19698 as a branch under R-Z18.

This seems to be FTDNA mapping out the information that was also found by the U106 group. Three of the samples from Karlstrup Tune, Zealand in modern Denmark are positive for R-CTS3624, and at least one is positive for R-A19698. All have negative calls for many of the downstream SNPs.

That means we can put at least two SNPs of that large block in some order. We know that R-CTS3624 and R-A19698 are the oldest branches of what would become R-CTS12023/R-DF95. One of the samples had a mixed read for R-DF95, which is interesting, but currently inconclusive.

This is what the new branch R-CTS3624 with its child branch R-CTS12023 looks like:

New branch R-CTS3624 with a large block of R-CTS12023 beneath it forming its own branch.

The samples in question are CGG106705 and CGG106706, both listed as Bell Beakers born roughly 2100 to 1900 BCE, and CGG106708, born roughly between 2000 and 1900 BCE. CGG106705 and CGG106706 are listed as Bell Beakers, while CGG106708 is listed as Nordic Bronze Age. All are from Karlstrup, Denmark.

google map of Karlstrup Denmark on Zealand between the Jutland peninsula and Sweden.

Random Thoughts

This is really early, and I look forward to seeing what happens at Family Tree DNA as they look at the samples. There are many other R-Z18 samples in this group. I focused on CTS12023 because, well, I’m me, but there is more there to go through. There are other R-Z18 brethren in the mix and more to explore.

Mito Changes?

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Cecilia Price nee Murphy and children

A few weeks ago, I received a notification about a new MTDNA relative. I went in to see who was new and who had any information on their last known mito relative. Many of my matches have no information at all. I haven’t made much progress with it.

Metal Ages

Heavy Metal poster from the 1981 movie featuring stereotypical blonde, mostly naked, woman with sword riding a winged beast of some kind.

MTDNA has been frustrating the way that Y DNA was in years past. With MTDNA I’ve been sitting at T2a1a for a long time. In the Metal Ages. Similar to when I wanted to know more about a man born in the 1800s and Y DNA had me sitting at the time of Cave Paintings. Nice, but, not as helpful as you’d like. Getting back from the 1700s to the metal ages without more waypoints is really hard.

Haplogroup T to T2a1a ancestral path to the metal ages,

I could get lucky though. I’m still interested, and I still go and look to see what has come in, but this time, I noticed something was different on my full matches.

F9796825 looks a lot like a family tree DNA haplogroup. I went back to my dashboard to make sure I’m still T2a1a there and I noticed something else. A beta Discover Haplogroup Reports.

image of the discvoer haplogroups beta button on my FTDNA MTDNA matches section.

Exciting stuff. I clicked that and got this report that is similar in style to the Y DNA reports I see. Except for the massive amount of descendant lineages. 112 Descendant lineages!

T2a1a haplogroup story, with 112 descendants and 65 yet unnamed lineages.

For reference, this is the T2a1a tree I think more people are used to. It has eight subgroups as opposed to 112.

T2a1a descendant tree with 8 descendants.

The Time Tree

Next I went to the Match Time Tree report and there I was in a large group of people, clustered as F9796825.

T2a1a and my haplotype cluster
My haplotype cluster named F9796825 contains a lot of people and has a warning that they may not be any more closely related to me.

When I hovered over the group though I was informed that this is a haplotype cluster, not a haplogroup. So we have a bunch of matching values in both fast mutating and slowly mutating areas. The explanation from FTDNA reminded me of the Cumberland Cluster, where STR values lined up with a group of people, but it would take Big Y to sort out who was actually more closely related in that group of similar results.

Scrolling down the time tree, I saw other large clusters like mine and smaller groups that had broken out into haplogroups, some with clusters beneath them.

Newer haplogroups appearing in genealogical time also have clusters beneath them.

I also saw some beta priority groups. They look almost like haplogroups in progress. Like defined haplogroups, they have age estimates, bringing many of them closer in time to genealogical records.

Beta Priority Focus Groups appear to be haplogroups in training.

This is exciting news for people researching maternal lines. Haplogroups and Priority groups lining up in the 1530s are a lot closer to home than the metal ages. It will be so much more helpful for MTDNA completionists (like me) and people who have real burning questions about their maternal line that have been waiting for a good pointer in the right direction.

The Official Word

It turns out that FTDNA has an official blog post about this from February. So it seems that it is all shiny and new and there is still work in progress.

Updated mtDNA Haplotree: 35,000 New Branches for Genealogy Research

Where Does that Leave Me?

It’s my diary so it’s all about me. For now, I’m pretty much where I was before…with a tantalizing new possibility. My badges for the new beta and legacy still say T2a1a, but this new intriguing cluster may turn into something else one day. There is also the hopeful optimism that comes from seeing work going on in the mtDNA world.

I could get lucky.