Genographic project Haplogroup M

[jackpa]

Any discussion related to Haplogroup M is welcome here. This haplogroup traces maternal ancestry to a common ancestress over 50,000 years ago either in Asia or Africa. Descendants of this mother could therefore consider themselves some of the earliest Asians and their migration can be tracked all across South Asia and as far afield as Papua New Guinea.

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.

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. 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 different ancestral groups of this region here, why and when. Similar picture of ancestry in Europe is developing much faster, I suspect partly because far more people have the resources to fund their own test and allow the results to be added to the Nat Geo database.

National Geographic Genographic project