What Is a Y-Chromosome Haplogroup?

 At first glance, this may seem like a basic, tutorial post.  Like one of those you see on a genealogical DNA website, designed to help people understand what a Y-chromosome haplogroup is.  However, we seek to explain the term another way.

We've remarked before that there has been a trend in the Ancient DNA and Genealogical DNA community to transfer the 1950's brain and its thoughts on ethnic supremacy to a 2020s version of the same, which is this notion on haplogroup supremacy.  The worst practitioner of the same is Davidski, who publishes Eurogenes blog, who simply cannot wrap his brain around this.  He is a R1 supremacist, to be sure.  There are many others on Anthrogenica and Eupedia, notably Maciamo Hay.

We've tried explaining that the expansion of R1 could be from refugees not conquerors, or simply just population growth from having more babies, a demographic trait that usually accompanies the poor, not the elite.  

We've tried explaining that the expansion of R1 does not correlate with Steppe autosomes, which means that the expansion was not only male mediated, but included many females too, who mated with non R1 males.

And finally, we've tried explaining that if under the Davidski "R1 Conqueror" fantasy model, the notion that people in locations with much R1b or R1a are descendants of conquerors cannot be accurate, because by definition the conquerors conquered someone.  Wouldn't they be descendants of the conquered?  And similarly, while those folks appear to look down at European lands without much R1a and R1b, doesn't that mean that those places simply weren't conquered?  I.e., were stronger?

So you see why we think all of these R1a and R1b theories you see online are silly. It is just pointless to think like many folks do.

But today, we try to expand brains further, by simply explaining what a Haplogroup is.  Spoiler: it's not just biological.  They are manmade.

What do we mean by that?  Well, of course the SNP mutations that indicate a haplogroup come from nature.  But the names and dividing lines are completely arbitrary.

Imagine a ruler with 12 lines, one for every inch.  You can place a letter at any inch you want.  Remember that many of the inches are "descendants" of other stops on the line.

When haplogroups were "discovered," they were originally the results of research done on Europeans, so the initial names for these groupings were Eu1, Eu2, Eu19, etc.  The researchers simply wanted to delineate the 25 or so Y chromosome haplogroups they had found in Europe at that time, in the infancy of the research.

Those groups, by sheer chance, ended up getting the "named letter."  There is no special SNP that marks where a letter was placed!

In other words, HUMANS decided to place the Haplogroup I designation at the M170 SNP mutation.  We humans could have placed the "I" designation (or any other haplogroup) higher upstream or lower downstream, and it would skew the statistics.

Why is this relevant?  Well, idiots online love to say, "Haplogroup R accounts for X% of European lineages..."  Great.  That tells you nothing.  Or very little.  It's just where we happened to assign a letter.

I and J are closely related.  Had scientists placed the "letter" designation at their point of common origin, calling what we now call "paragroup IJ" or "paragroup IJK" as simple "Haplogroup I" (Or H or J -- whatever), then the numbers of those with that designation in Europe would double.

Then, maybe you'd have idiots like the people above trying to explain why this randomly assigned letter accounted for such large percentages of the European population.

Think this isn't accurate?  Don't grasp it?  Think again.  What we call "Haplogroup R" split off from the others around 27,000 years ago.  A 2008 estimate suggested that the most recent common ancestor of haplogroup IJ could have lived 30,500 years ago. This difference is insignificant on the human scale, because it so far predates any historical movement of peoples.

Because our haplogroups are NOT calibrated to be when the mutation occurred, the groupings mean nothing.

We see this in the ISOGG tree being rewritten every year, and overhauled every 5 years or so.  Many designations, for example I1b from 20 years ago which is now I2a1, have been assigned and reassigned.  The letters mean nothing.  They're arbitrary.  The numbers mean little.  The lower number is not ancestral or older!!!  (Witness I1 versus I2).  It's awful.

And so are the people trying to draw profound conclusions from large, prehistoric groupings.  It's arbitrary.

If you can't wrap your brain around this, feel free to ask questions in the comments section below.