At the end of 2021, a man who traces his uniparental male line to Kefalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands of Greece, was found through the J2b-M12 Panel at YSEQ to be positive for a line of J2b-Y23094 that, until then, was only represented by a single sample from a scientific study on Sardinians.
By the way, if you are reading this and you are positive for J2b-Y23094, you could join their active Facebook group to connect and learn more.
Using donations collected from those interested to advance the research into the deeper origins of our common J2b-L283 ancestors, I upgraded this man's sample to WGS at YSEQ (I recommend this WGS test) and now he's on the YFull YTree with the Kefalonia, Greece regional code.
Fast forward to today and if you go to their branch of the tree you will find a third sample with regional code for Palermo, Italy.
This man, who traces his male line to Polizzi Generosa, a town in northern-central Sicily, recently got his Big Y result and was found to share one SNP, YP136, with the sample from Sardinia that the Kefalonia-origin man was negative for.
Incidentally, according to the Wikipedia article, Martin Scorcese's paternal grandparents emigrated from Polizzi Generosa. And character actor and author Vincent Schiavelli wrote a book about his roots there in Many Beautiful Things: Stories and Recipes from Polizzi Generosa.
The geographic distribution of the three samples' paternal origins suggests that the most recent common ancestor of all of them may have been living around the Ionian Sea. Further, the subclade J2b-YP136 may have originated in southern Italy, Sicily or Sardinia, given that so far the only positive men are from Sicily and Sardinia.
The coverage of the samples may be too low for YFull to estimate when the most recent common ancestor lived. So it will really help if we can find a fourth sample positive for this line to test and do the YFull analysis.
Other J2b-Y23094 from Southern Italy
If more men in J2b-Y23094 from southern Italy were tested, we might find more men positive for this lineage.
There is a cluster of two J2b-Y23094 men from Calabria who differ on 12/67 STRs yet share several reliable rare alleles, which may be indicative of common descent.
I have been unable to reach these men in order to recommend further testing to advance our research. So if you are reading this and your ancestral male line surname is Montagnese or Crisafio, please contact me (hunter provyn at gmail dot com) and I'll pay for a Y-DNA test to confirm that you are positive for our haplogroup J2b-L283.
These two do not appear to share any STRs in common with the J2b-YP26 samples. In fact, they may end up more closely related to a man of Sicilian male line origin tracing descent to Zappala from Piedimonte Etneo, which is 35 km northeast of Catania, based on sharing three rare alleles among the first 37 STRs. I ordered a WGS at YSEQ for this man in late November 2022. He has already been confirmed negative for YP26 and all other known lineages of J2b-Y23094 via the J2b-M12 Panel.
It will be interesting to learn whether this Catania man's sample will split an existing line of J2b-Y23094 or not, and if so, where his next closest relatives trace their descent.
If you found this interesting and would like to help advance the research further, please consider donating toward our J2b-L283 Xmas WGS Wish List. There are three more samples in the queue I'd like to upgrade once the cost can be covered by donations.