Y-DNA E22 In China

The Y-DNA E-V22 clade has an interesting distribution that even includes a dozen sampled individual in China. One of the nice things about uniparental historical genetics is that it naturally invites efforts to construct an eminently understandable narrative that explains it.

Also bonus points for the use of the term "brother lineage" to describe Y-DNA clades.

[T]he phylogeny of E-V22, at least based on the samples uploaded to yFull, reveals the following:

* The E-V22 haplogroup appears to be roughly 11,800 years old, with a “TMRCA,” or time to most-recent common ancestor, of 8,200 “ybp,” or years-before-present.

* While there are many deep and relatively old sublineages whose members have diverse geographical origins, there does appear to be a general pattern of E-V22 prevalence in/among the following regions and populations: the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf; diverse Jewish and related populations (including Bukharian, Ashkenazi, an apparent Moroccan Jewish, Italki, and Ashkenazi branch, the Samaritans [note: this lineage is apparently that of the Samaritan priestly class], and others); the Saho people, a Cushitic-speaking ethnic group of Eritrea and Ethiopia; and other groups such as Egyptians, Levantine Arabs, Sicilians, and at least one Caucasian-Iranian lineage. (There are Northwestern European exemplars, too.)

* Perhaps surprisingly, there are no fewer than twelve reported samples on yFull with origins in the present-day People’s Republic of China, including a well-developed lineage of Chinese men who report their origins as Dungan, Manchu, Mongol, and in Liaoning [i.e., the gateway to Manchuria], and who share a common paternal-line ancestor who lived about 600 years ago, right around the tail-end of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. (Note their Czech "brother lineage," with a TMRCA of 5,700 years-before present.) Zooming out a bit farther back on the overall E-V22 phylogeny, three more Chinese samples emerge who are nested within different lineages altogether: a self-described “Mandarin Chinese” isolate lineage with Shandong origins that has a TMRCA of 4,100 years-before-present; a Chinese sample with Mongolian origins who shares a common Armenian paternal-line ancestor as of 4,500 years ago, and who has even more remote Irish and British (exotic for E-V22!) paternal-line cousins; and a rather old Henan-based lineage with a Saudi cousin as of 6,200 years ago, and diverse brother lineages with Nablusi, Moroccan Jewish, and Khorasani Turkish origins, among others (including an apparent ancient Longobard sample unearthed in Hungary).

It is possible to speculate endlessly about the historical migrations that led to E-V22’s present-day distribution, both in China and elsewhere. Yet I note that the Dungan-Manchu-Mongol-Liaoning branch shares as a brother lineage the Caucasian-Iranian group consisting of three samples with respective Talysh, Persian, and Georgian-Azerbaijani origins. Does this nearly 8,000-year-old Irano-Chinese lineage (with a Czech exemplar nested within them) reflect a more recent Silk Road-era migration eastward, or does the Chinese branch have altogether different, more ancient origins? More fodder for speculation: there is an ancient Xiongnu E-V22 sample among the data underlying a study from just last year entitled “Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales.” Perhaps the sequencing of more ancient DNA will one day give us the complete historical migratory picture, but the phylogeny of this lineage does seem to point in a westerly direction.

From Language Log.