I was recently made aware that a number of samples, mostly from the canton of Wallis, Switzerland but also including two samples just across the border in Italy form their own subclade of prolific J2b-Z1043 known as J2b-FTD29000. At writing of this post, the estimate for when the Most Recent Common Ancestor of this line lived was 889 CE.
In other words, this Wallis, Switzerland J2b-FTD29000 line is one of many child branches of Iron Age J2b-Z1043, itself one of the children of the Bronze Age J2b-L283 haplogroup that we now know came to Europe with the Yamnaya steppe-herders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
Canton of Wallis/Valais
Wallis is the German name of the Swiss canton south of Bern and bordering France and Italy along the Alps. It may be more widely recognized in the English-speaking world by its French name Valais. In this article I use the German name, because most of the samples in this subclade are German speakers, however it should be pointed out that some of the men in this subclade are from the Vallée du Trient, which is in the Franco-Provençal-speaking region of Wallis/Valais.
As I understand it, the two samples with Italian flags trace their paternal lines to the Anzasca Valley and are considered as Walser, a group that migrated from various parts of the German-speaking Oberwallis area.
Raymond Lonfat, an amateur medievalist, who is organizing the research into these samples, is preparing a paper on this J2b-FTD29000 cluster and other findings from his valleys.
In the meantime, he notified me of an upcoming conference on August 10, 2025 in Evolene, Switzerland organized by two of his friends and co-founders of the ValaisADN-WallisDNA project on FTDNA.
It may be that the definition of Walser or related groups may be more clearly or differently defined as a result of the Y-DNA and other research to be presented there.
Here is a link to the ValaisADN-WallisDNA project on FTDNA that Raymond manages along with other colleagues.
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/valais-adn-wallis-dna/about
Prediction from STRs that Neukommet is also J2b-FTD29000
I used STR Match Finder to identify that several rare STRs alleles were likely inherited by the J2b-FTD29000 Most Recent Common Ancestor who lived about 1100 years ago. Because two men with paper trails to a Neukommet ancestor from Bern also share these rare alleles, I predicted that they, along with a sample tracing descent to Metker from Germany(?) will also be J2b-FTD29000 positive.
Hi Hunter, I was very intrigued by your article. On May 16th, a match appeared between me and my Y-Match, B. Brun, a man also from Wallais, Switzerland. He did the Big Y, and we are awaiting the results.
He has a 6-year difference in Y67 with me, a 4-year difference in Y37, and a 5-year difference in Y67 with Brun.
I’m excited that this may reveal a possible path for my lineage in the border region of the Italian Peninsula with the Alps. This suggests that my ancestor may have migrated directly west, creating a bottleneck in the Iberian Peninsula sometime between 316 BC and after the Plague of Justinian.