History of man in Y-DNA branches

with a focus on population growth.

The URL for the website is penninx.nl/oldbranches

Continuous population growth or population jumps

Historic knowledge on population growth is limited. With the lack of good data a slow and continuous population growth was the common model for a long period: slowly increasing and spreading of knowledge results in a slow increase of population. We now know that a large part of the population growth does not fit this slow model. Many population jumps contributed to the population growth. On this website i used data of the yfull website to gain additional understanding of the population growth in different regions and periods. The data was cleaned as described in the TimeMaps page. It shows that population jumps (moments with fast population growth) is a phenomenon that happened many times in history and can be used to study history of man. If it is possible to match a population jump with a moment and location in history, it can be used to improve the standard candle of mutation rate and the knowledge of these historic moments and locations. This method has been used on individual cases (e.g. Francalacci et al., 2013, Poznik et al. 2013). In this website i show relations between Y-DNA population jumps and likely historic events.

The importance of looking into population jumps was nicely described in Sikora et al. (2013)

On this website

For this website i collected the public data from the 9.04 archive data of the yfull website and present different views to that data. Population jumps are visible in different ways. For the FoundingFathers page i counted the number of descending lines at a specific SNP. I show that this is an easy method to find population jumps. A nice aspect of this population jump is that we have many descending lines which originates at a specific moment and location. This means that these moments give us the best statistical accuracy for time estimates. R-DF27 has now 62 branches that are used in the time estimate, which gives (in its simplest form) in yfull combBED region an accuracy which is better than 2.5 percent. Using the present ftdna Big Y 700 accuracy this can further be improved. Since the population jump took probably place in a small geographical region, the geographic distribution of descendants may help us to find the location of the population jump. To see if this is possible i decided to make maps of shared ancestor, which are based on the location of descendants. In the Time Maps page i explained how i made the maps and listed the maps of the known haplogroups. It appeared that these Time Maps can be used to get an view on the history of tribes and mixtures. In the Phylogenetic trees page i visualized the classic phylogenetic trees. These are focussed on the period between 50000-5000 years before present.

I appeared thet the Time Maps helped to better visualize the history of language development. So i decided to add webpages on specific languages which visualise the relation between population jumps and languages.

Some global numbers on population growth

Distribution of branchsplits in number of SNPs of each branch and number of descending branch splits at a branchsplit.