The last day of 2021 held a surprise for J2b-Z4133 and for those interested in the origins of Polish lineages of J2b-L283.

On 12/31/2021 YFull discovered that two men tracing male line descent to NE Poland share two SNPs with each other that a man tracing descent to Cormont, France (near Pas-de-Calais) was negative for.

The MRCA, Most Recent Common Ancestor, of these three men had been estimated to have lived about 1500 years ago. Link to the live tree where you can see J-Y210000.

One man has ancestral surname Lipka and traces descent to Szczytno, Warmian-Masurian Voivodship.

The other man traces descent to the small village of Załuski-Lipniewo to Józef Załuski through his son Franiczek Załuska born 1764 in Pieńki Wielkie, near the Podlaskie border of Masovian Voivodeship.

YFull found that they share two SNPs and I think the TMRCA of their exclusively NE Polish J2b-Y210000 will end up being between 1200-1500 years ago.

I predicted that they would share some SNPs because they both had a single off-modal rare allele, DYS617 = 14 instead of 13 that all the other men in their position of the tree have. Because DYS617 is one of the more stable of the 111 STRs, you can rely on it more to indicate common inheritance of a rare shared allele.

STR Match Finder is a free-to-use tool I developed with input and support from Thomas Krahn of YSEQ to help discover relationships, sometimes distant, on the basis of inheritance of rare alleles. I use this tool virtually everyday and wouldn't be able to make discoveries regarding distant relationships like this anywhere near as quickly without it.

Trzeci Człowiek - The Third Man

A third man with ancestral surname Chmielewski and tracing descent to Chmiele-Pogorzele tested only 67 STRs but is likely related. He is not closely related to these men but has DYS459 = 8-10 that the J2b-Z4133 ancestor had acquired plus some of the alleles defining J2b-BY75735, including DYS487 14 -> 13 and DYS458 18 -> 15.

The intriguing things regarding this third man are:

• He traces descent to a village just 10 km away from Załuski
• He does not have the rare DYS617 = 14 inherited by both Załuski and Lipka. He has the same ancestral allele 13 that the Frenchman has.

Unless we are looking at a big coincidence, Chmielewski's line branched off from their common ancestral line sometime before the Załuski-Lipka MRCA lived.

Unless a later comigration coincidentally brought both Chmielewski's and Załuski's ancestors to within 10km of one another, we might otherwise assume that their MRCA had been living in the approximate area between what are now Ostrów Mazowiecka and Łomża counties sometime before 1200-1500 years ago.

One other possibly Poland origin subclade of J2b-L283 is about the same age, J-BY41400 with TMRCA 1500 ybp. It has a lot of diversity around the mountainous border area with Slovakia and may have actually originated there.

J2b-YP91>YP61 with TMRCA 1300 BCE has a number of Polish and other eastern European samples, however no two of them have established an exclusively Polish origin subclade by SNP testing. I think the great geographic diversity of these lines precludes making confident assumptions regarding the potential origin at this time. But it should be noted that there is greater upstream diversity of this lineage around the Upper Rhein and Upper Danube in southern Germany (refer to https://phylogeographer.com/oberallgau-bavarian-sample-splits-j2b-yp91-and-adds-more-diversity-north-of-the-alps/).

So this line, J2b-Y210000, will end up being either the oldest or second oldest likely Poland origin J2b-L283 lineage backed by NGS testing. If there are older lineages that formed in Poland, these have yet to be clearly demonstrated by NGS testing.