Roland Henry Baker, III: N is a huge group - one of the two main branches of L3 from Africa. L21 is generally from South East Asia.
I know very little about South African genealogy and history. What is the history of Cham, Malaysia and Indonesia immigrants to South Africa? Possibly also from Cambodia, etc. What about these peoples and their relationships to the mother country?
Would this admixture be expected in the ancestry of this immigrant?
If we understand these questions we might have some clues about how a female from South East Asia got into the mix.
If we get the full list of markets we can look it up on Ian Logan's site:
http://www.ianlogan.co.uk/mtDNA.htm
Haplogroup N21 - In ethnic Malays from Malaysia and Indonesia Hill, C.; Soares, P.; Mormina, M.; MacAulay, V.; Meehan, W.; Blackburn, J.; Clarke, D.; Raja, J. M.; Ismail, P.; Bulbeck, D.; Oppenheimer, S.; Richards, M. (2006). "Phylogeography and Ethnogenesis of Aboriginal Southeast Asians". Molecular Biology and Evolution 23 (12): 2480–91. doi:10.1093/molbev/msl124. PMID 16982817
Tracing the Austronesian Footprint in Mainland Southeast Asia: A Perspective from Mitochondrial DNA 2010
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/10/2417.full
A Mitochondrial Stratigraphy for Island Southeast Asia
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1876738/
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Good question Jan! As stated I am ignorant about the genealogy and history of South Africa. So I was surprised when you stated that one of the descendants tested was from N21 which derives from Southeast Asia - see above.
We need to see if this is a full sequence or a marker test or if it was just a "predicted" haplogroup based on a couple of markers in a panel like 23andMe does or NatGeo does. Because if it is just predicted the haplogroup call could be way off. And that's going to really through off the investigation. If we have a female from Southeast Asia as progenitor that could offer clues. But as I said N is a super-group which spans the whole globe and if the call is wrong we could be looking in the wrong places.
If they tested at FTDNA, the type of test and all the markers and name of the reference used would be a good start and I believe this is on the downloadable PDF certificate they give you. So it can be cut and pasted.
The full sequence is always nice but you would want to email that off to Mr Logan and that will take at least two weeks to process. Still it could be very interesting especially for the N21 sample.
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Above I meant to type N21 is from Souteast Asia not L21. Very interesting!
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N is also the mother haplogroup of U:
http://www.phylotree.org/tree/main.htm
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On the other hand we have U2c which is common in India. Does the progenitor have a historical link to India?
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So yes, we really want to know if these are based on a full sequence or a partial sequence or just a couple of markers. If both of these are based on a full sequence that we can start by looking that these geographical origins and compare this to the historical origins of the progenitor. Whichever matches the progenitors origins would probably satisfy the requirement of a null hypothesis. In other words if the progenitor is from Indonesia then N21 is probably the correct call. If the progenitor is from India then U2c is probably the correct call. If the ancestor is from Europe - that we are in deep water over our head :) But it would give us a null hypothesis to start with.
Erica Howton
Catharina van Malabar, SM/PROG. Birth: circa 1637 Malabar or Coromandel in India
Private User: Hmmm another piece of South African puzzle, is that a person that stepped on land here (progenitor), was attributed to the land from which he or she left port from, not land of birth. So we may have to assign probabilities there too...
Roland Henry Baker, III:
Thanks for the link!
I wouldn't put any probability on it.
What I mean by null hypothesis is we simply have no idea. So we make the best guess based on the fact that the boat came from India. We create a hypothesis that she was probably U2c. Then we try to kick the daylights out of that hypothesis and see if we can disprove it. It doesn't mean we believe the hypothesis or we don't believe it. Nor do we give it a probability. It just means we have something to test.
But before we do that do we actually have a source for that? Do we know for certain 100% that she came on a boat from India? Or did the boat from from nowhere? Because I know I have a lot of ancestors who "came on a boat from Devon, England" and when I go to actually find a source for it I find there is nothing... so it would be a good time right now to see if there is an actual piece of paper like a ship's passenger manifest that records that she was a passenger, etc. Otherwise we're just making stuff up. And as Ericka knows I like to delete data that's made up.
And we need to know if these are both full sequences and not just marker tests. Because U is a branch off of N. And if N or U is just a guess we could actually be looking at the same haplotype - no joke. I doubt that's the case but we don't want to spin our wheels if these data are not full sequences. If they are not full sequences now might be the time to upgrade them because things just got interesting! With FTDNA you don't need to retest or re-sample - you just pay and upgrade price which is a deal.
How much fun is this?