Genographic project Haplogroup W

[jackpa]

I recently participated in the Genographic project, supplying a cheek swab to have my maternal deep ancestry analysed. It came back with Haplogroup W, which basically identifies I have a maternal (mother's mother's mother's etc) link to an ancestress who originated somewhere in what they describe as West Eurasia around 25,000 years ago, possibly near present day Afghanistan, Iran or North Pak region ! This result, incidentally, applies to all my maternal cousins, aunts, uncles and everyone else who can trace a common maternal line to me.
My mother's home district is Sylhet, thana Beani Bazar. I suspect much of the clan, if not the people of this region will share this haplogroup (and hence ancestral link to West Eurasia) with me. Also, as descendants can only be produced with a paternal ancestral line, it can be inferred a community of males also originating from there have migrated to Bengal region.

I am hoping that over time, as more people with ancestry in the Bengal region participate in the project, it will help build a picture of the complex and mixed ancestry of this region. It is so often commented that in Bangladesh, and in some sub groups in particular (eg; Sylhetis, tribal peoples) people have features resembling middle eastern or Indo-European peoples. The project at the moment only concludes that group W is present in North Pakistan, Iran and some central and eastern european states in significant numbers. It would be interesting to see what the concentration in areas of Bangladesh are like, and what other haplogroups and therefore maternal ancestors other Bengalis can trace their ancestry to. It raises many other interesting questions, such as what brought the ancestors here, and when. Similar picture of ancestry in Europe is developing much faster, I suspect because far more people have the resources to fund their own test and allow the results to be added to the Nat Geo database.

Background:
The Genographic project at http://nationalgeographic.com/genographic uses genetic markers that are faithfully transmitted from the first human ancestor of us all somewhere in Africa, to all humans descended since then. Further genetic markers (I think of them as 'signatures') that randomly occured as humans migrated in various directions allows the project to build a map of migration patterns and to help answer the question of where specific peoples originated from.

Project has only been going since about 2005 and is already showing that we are all descended from a small number of maternal and parternal ancestors, whose descendants have surivived to present day.
National Geographic Genographic project
Haplogroup W infomration