Ancestral Healing 3
The Genographic Project has finaly coughed up my DNA analysis, and I am haplogroup H, a descendant of Haplogroup R, an offshoot of Haplogroup N which left Africa in the very first migrations out of Africa over 60.000 years ago.
Haplogroup R emerged from Haplogroup N after it settled somewhere along the eastern coast of the Black Sea, presumably between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. Haplogroup H is an offshoot of group R, first travelling north into Europe and then settling in Eastern Europe, and thence populating along the Northern European ice sheet edge and hence into the British Isles and up to Scotland after the ice melt, where my ancestors were thrown out during the clearances in the 19th century or earlier!
Haplogroup H is now a very large lineage indeed, half of all Europeans are group H, as well as many North Africans and Middle Easterners. Group H reaches to Northern India and Central Asia - about 5-10% of all people tested.
This may explain my fascination with the Steppes and the continued migrations from there into Europe, and indeed into the Takla Makan. Just to think that I may have had an ancestor that saw the collapse of the Black Sea bridge and its inudation from the Mediterranean, or that one of my ancestors could have been an Amazon riding a fiery steed across the Steppes, doing battle with the early Greek warriors, even Heracles himself, if the myths speak true! I may have an ancestor who rode into Europe bringing the cult of Epona, free and with the wind in their hair and all that vast and empty landscape behind them to eventually settle on the edge of the World in the Highlands and valleys of the awesome beauty of Scotland, or even to gentler lowlands and pleasant pastures of England, where my mother’s people come from. It is also a fact that these peoples were the Cromagnons, and that they may have been responsible for exterminating the Neanderthals. My ancestors were also responsible for the magnificant cave paintings at Lascoux. All of this has made me look in more detail at the Scythians and the Sarmartians and think about these peoples a great deal more. These semi mythican peoples inhabit the European myth cycles like ghosts on the margins of history.
I really must find out more about my more recent ancestors, as I am sure that they would have gotten all over these islands, especially with all that long journeying behind them. It’s in the genes! And yet I am quite happy to stay put, here in these Blessed Islands and to travel in the mind and via the internet. Let’s see what FamilyTreeDNA.com can come up with!
(Addendum - check out Ancestral Healing addendum blog dated 28.12.2006 for the FTDNA further breakdown of my DNA)
