If you take a look at my previous posts on DF95 and the Cumberland Cluster, you’ll see that Big Y showed us to be a lone line of men straight from Z18, among other lone lines of men also coming directly form Z18. All our branches (save one) died out around the tail end of the Nordic Bronze age. That makes us a relatively small group and both young (all related to someone who lived around 500BCE give or take a few hundred years) and very old ( the next ancestor in line after 500 BCE is about 2100 BCE with 14 SNPs worth of generations in between).
On the one hand, that removes a lot of the arguments that revolve around the bronze age movements of different Y groups. On the other hand, you’re stuck on an island.
A lot of the ideas in my previous posts are based on discussions I’ve had in the Z18 facebook group along with things I’ve learned from the age estimates and SNP spreadsheets from the U106 group Forum. All the groups and analysis verify that the Cumberlands are basically alone on their island branching directly off Z370/Z18.
Then maybe a month or so ago, Alex Williamson posted a link to his work in progress U106 Big Tree in the U106 Forum. This is his independent work. Normally he focuses on R1b-P312 (the bigger sibling of U106) and that is basically the content of the Big Tree, but he must have heard the cries of the many U106 people asking for their own version of the Big Tree and began to plug away at one.
It’s based on Big Y or FGC tests that Alex has access to, so panel results and individual SNP tests will be missing, but it’s a great start.
When I clicked the link to go look at it I was shocked by two things. One…there we were, the Cumberlands front and center!
And two, The Cumberlands were not alone anymore. Apparently, Alex looks for specific SNPs that occur in the palindromic regions. of the Y. Each ZZ prefix represents two possible SNP locations. If you look at the top you’ll see two ZZ SNPs 61 and 62. They are two sides of a coin (if I have things straight), the third SNP was more trouble and is only listed by reference number.
What you will notice is that these ZZ SNPs fall below the R-Z18/Z370 parent of all Z18 men which was our original connection point. You’ll see DF95 there below this new SNP set. You may also notice then that another group shares those SNPs. That group is the East Anglia group marked by ZP24.
Cumberland has a new parent and a brother?!!
It was unbelievable. I contacted Alex to ask about it. He said that they are real SNPs, but they cannot be tested in the traditional way (Sanger Sequencing), so they may not be offered by FTDNA for testing. They do show up in Big Y or FGC Y tests though.
The group just to the right of that (the next straight line going down not connected to ZZ61 etc.) contains men from the Poland cluster and from the Swede cluster. I’m guessing these are just unfinished at the moment.
Until new discoveries come along, DF95 Cumberland shares a common ancestor with ZP24 East Anglia…likely a few hundred years after the formation of Z18 around 2300 BCE. So, In that 2000 BCE range is one man our two groups are related to. Then we split and have a really crappy time through the Bronze age (as evidenced by those long runs of SNPs) and come out as two survivors in the pre-roman iron age.
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