The previous pages in this series have discussed the history of the Clan Donald starting early in the Christian era. But DNA can tell us, in a general sense, about migrations much longer ago. For these discussion, we do not use those lists of STR numbers like 13-24-14-10-11-14 but rather the Haplogroup designations E, I, R1a, and R1b. These tell stories that stretch back 10,000 to 30,000 years. For more info see links at the bottom of Mark's DNA page, Kerchner, Dennis Garvey, and the National Geographic Society, but be warned that the NGS tends to badly over-simplify things, especially on their maps.
The idea of using haplogroups to study ancient migrations is simple: it is likely that a haplogroup originated where one finds the largest number of different haplotypes in it. Many academic studies have measured this. As time went on, men migrated to new places and their descendants multiplied again and again. The descendants of the most successful men grew to dominate the population. Doug has made maps of the world and of Europe showing the current distribution of haplogroups, except for America where he has tried to back-calculate the situation as it was in the year 1492. The current distribution is not all that different from the situation during Somerled's lifetime. We now discuss where you can expect to have found your very distant ancestors in prehistoric times.
Though E3b likely originated in East Africa some 25,000 years ago, it came to Europe about 9000 years from the Middle East. Today the variety of it (E3b-M78 or E3b1a in the 2006 nomenclature) common in Europeans is found most commonly on the shores of the Mediterranean. E3b is rare in the British Isles, and especially so in Scotland.
I is a strongly European haplogroup, present almost exclusively there. The mutation that defined it apparently occurred in Europe. It is a young group, less than 25,000 years old. There are several subdivisions, called by FTDNA I1a, I1b, and I1c. In the current nomenclature I1a remains that, while I1b becomes I1b1 and I1c becomes I1b2a. We call them by their old names. I of various sorts is very common in the British Isles.
J2 is thought to have originated in the Mideast, likely Iraq, some 7000 to 10,000 years ago and spread east and west. Today it is very prominent along the northeast shore of the Mediterranean from Israel to Italy, and north as far as Georgia and Romania, and in Mideastern Arabs.
R1a1, the extremely dominant subdivision of R1a, probably arose about 15,000 years ago in the people who lived just south of the glaciers then dominating Eurasia. It's exact original location is controversial, with proposals ranging from Ukraine in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. See Dennis Garvey's discussion. All the proposals do center on the wide grasslands that sweep across this part of the world, where peoples associated with the origin of the Indo-European language family and the domestication of the horse spread it widely. Today it is very dominant in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and is prominent in northern India, Kyrgyzstan, and the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe.
It is also the group of the Clan leaders of the Clan Donald. However, our leaders and almost all other R1a1 men in our Clan do not come, at least not recently, from southern Asia or the Slavic lands. We can tell this because our haplotypes have some very characteristic features which differ from the common patterns elsewhere. These are the pattern 25-15 at DYS390 and DYS19, and more importantly 16-8 at 458 and 459a (the 10 at 459b is very common), and most importantly of all the 21 at YCAII-b. Slavic, Polish, German, and South Asian R1a1 is normally 23 at YCAIIb. Our pattern is seen almost exclusively in Norway, adjacent parts of Scandinavia (though not Denmark), Iceland, and the parts of Highland Scotland and the Western Isles where it is associated mostly with the Clan Donald itself. This pattern of the "Norse R1a1" as it is best called has lead to the deduction that it came to Scotland with the Norse Vikings (not Danish Vikings). When tied with our Clan history and the very name "Somerled", which is the English version of the Gaelic version of a Norse word meaning "Viking" , this becomes a near certainty.
But how it got it Norway is also an interesting subject, with very romantic speculations dominating. The Norse Sagas imply an eastern origin. When our dominant haplotype is put into Family Tree Dna's Recent Ancestral Origins database search, one naturally finds most close matches in Norway, England, Scotland, and India. When one takes into account not the absolute numbers but rather the percentages found in each area one finds a great excess in Central Asia, in the Russian Altai (southern Siberia) and thereabouts. Could this indicate that the olds stories are true? Only more extensive testing, especially of DYS 459, 459, and YCAII, can tell. There are no sub-divisions of R1a1 that are of any significance.
R1b is the dominant haplogroup in the British Isles, and adjacent parts of mainland Europe, so it is only to be expected that most Clan Donald men who do not originate from Somerled himself are R1b. R1b is an old group, perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years old, originating in Europe before the last ice age, and spending that period in southern Europe in various ice free "refugia", most prominently in Spain but also in more eastern areas. Our group of R1b people is extremely diffuse, indications that most MacDonalds in it adopted the MacDonald surname quite independently.
The nomenclature of R1b is currently in flux. See the ISOGG chart. This chart may not agree with what Family Tree DNA itself calls various sub-haplogroups. The mutation M343 defines R1b itself, while P25 defines R1b1 and M269 defines R1b1c. R1b1c used to be called R1b3 or HG1. All our R1b participants are surely R1b1c. This group is further subdivided by more UEPs, some old, some discovered only in 2006. Our "green" R1b group is defined by the SNP marker called M222. We also have a small number of people who have tested positive for the marker, downstream of M269, called variously S21, U106, or M405. These cannot be discerned by their haplotype. When we get more of them they will get their own color-coded group. Currently they are included in the R1b "yellow" group.