G-M377 Diversity Across Eurasia and the Americas

The following information is from a conversation I had January 20, 2020 with Ted Kandell of Open Genomes. I then made some edits and added some information about additional YFull samples.

G-M377

G-M377 went through a long bottleneck, from 18,000 BC to 6500 BC. Late PPNB / Earliest Pottery Neolithic.
There are two lineages not represented on YFull yet, which are very divergent from each other and from all others:
  1. An Armenian noble family from Lachin, Nagorno-Karabakh, who seem to be in the same clade as a Tabassaran from Dagestan
  2. A sample from Pozuolli, the port of Naples
Then there is a very diverse clade of South Syrian Christians from around Damascus, (Saidnaya and Damascus), with many others from Lebanon, some of whom are clearly of South Syrian origin.
There is a single representative of this group on YFull so their subclade of G-M377 is not yet identified by SNPs. However, in YHRD, they are quite diverse. They represent about 1% of the Lebanese male population.
G-M377 has one child lineage on YFull called J-Y12297 which all others descend from.

G-M377>Y12297

The other lineage of G-M377 is G-Y12297. There appear to be three lineages of this man. Only two are on YFull and the estimated most recent common ancestor of them 2700 BC.
The third group consists of Rushani and Shugni Pamiris from Tajikistan and there is a cluster of similar haplotypes from around Benevento and Salerno in Italy, and also one from Liaoning, China! (Yan et al, 2010)
Not clear what they are on the SNP tree, but they appear to be at least in G-Y12297.
The other two known lineages of G-Y12297 are G-M3124 and G-Y12975.

G-M377>Y12297>M3124

This is the most common branch under G-Y12297. It's represented by:
  1. one single Sicilian family from Caltagirone
  2. and, a HUGE number of Pathans (also known as Pashtuns) from around the Khyber Pass region, and their descendants.

Pashtun men in Kandahar from Wikipedia article on Pashtuns. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/Released)"

Their common ancestor lived 1300 BC. The Pathans, G-M283, represent a host of "Karlani" tribes: Wardak, Afridi, Mohman, Orakzai, Yusafzai, Khogyani, etc. This extends to Afridis and other Pathans brought by the Mughals to India.

  • There's one from Kyrgyzstan, clearly in this clade, from a town that was established as a fortress in the 1820s by the Emirate of Bukhara.
  • Also, a Burusho. The Burusho were ruled by a Pathan dynasty for centuries, and there were Pathan descendants among them.
  • And a 1K Genomes Punjabi from Lahore.
  • Also, an "Indian" from Malaysia from Britain. (Clearly of Pathan descent.)
This is a really big lineage. Perhaps over 1 million men.
It's difficult to explain the presence of G-M3124 in both Sicily and Afghanistan. The only thing they have in common are the Greeks. The problem is that there are no Greeks in G-M377. NONE.
There clearly is one from Tehran, but Pathan mercenaries helped overthrown the Safavids and served the Qajars in the mid-late 18th century.

G-M377>Y12297>Y12975

This is a mostly Ashkenazi lineage all descending from a man who lived about 1050 years ago. However there are also some mestizos from Merida, Mexico and Eskimo Aleuts with this mutation...
Most of the living members who have tested on YFull can only trace their descent through genealogical records back to Central or Eastern Europe a few hundred years ago. However, Jews were not in Poland-Lithuania before 1350.
The tMRCA of 970 CE is just before the migration of Italian Jews to the Rhineland, in 987, under the Emperor Otto III.
I have written a separate article on G-Y12975 for it because it has a complicated history with a lot of material to cover.

Other G-M377 Samples

The specific lineage of these samples has not yet been determined:
  1. A sample from Egypt from a Haber study. We don't have the BAM, but he's divergent from the Lebanese.
  2. A sample from Kars Turkey from Cinnioglu (2006), uncertain clade.
  3. A sample from Azerbaijan from Grugni (2012), no STRs. Possibly the Armenian clade, who knows?
These posts are the opinion of Hunter Provyn, a haplogroup researcher in J-M241 and J-M102.

3 thoughts on “G-M377 Diversity Across Eurasia and the Americas”

  1. The only other real connection that can be made between Sicily and Afghanistan are Canaanites/Jews/Israelites. Especially since there is a Jewish lineage. Jews have lived in Persia and surrounding areas since Cyrus. They also made up about 10% of the Roman Empire and were living in Greece and Anatolia after Alexander. Judah was part of Alexander’s territory. And many Canaanites were taken into Assyria and Babylon and never returned. It’s quite likely they would have integrated into the old Assyrian/Babylonian worlds and from there it is not a far shot to Afghanistan/Pakistan. It could just as easily arrive in Italy through Phoenicians as Greeks. And then obviously, the Jewish clade, if it was Canaanite origin would descent from the same group. Or if the date of separation ends up being later, form an Israelite/Jewish origin perhaps.

    All it would require is a for the descendants to end up in these various places, long before Pashtuns were Pashtuns, giving the descendants plenty of opportunity and time to integrate into the broader Central Asian population.

    It seems at least that the Ashkenazi and Pashtun branches both derive from the same source right, around 2700 CE? Isrelites start showing up around 1300 BCE…..

    That could also explain the Egyptian, Turkish and Azerbaijani samples as well.

    Plus another clade being found in Syria and Lebanon, and then with the diversity of G in general in the Caucasus, that entire Near East region seems to be Key to unlocking the lineage’s migrations. The Near East farmers that brought G2a into Europe similarly from that region.

    But yea, a Canaanite origin for the Pashtun/Sicilian/Ashkenazi branch would make the most sense to me at least.

  2. Pingback: G-M283

Leave a Reply to Galbán-moro Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *