A few years ago I saw an interesting graphic of a Y-tree, which I found very illustrative, so I wanted to create such a tree for our Y-haplogroup I-L38, i.e. the Y-haplogroup I-S2599. The aim was to present a complete I-L38 Y-haplogroup tree from the combination of the Y-trees from FamilytreeDNA.com and YFull.com on just one page. The first version was from September 2018 and was published in our I-L38 Facebook group, to which you are warmly invited if you belong to the I-L38 family. A Y-cousin said it would look like an olive tree. I thought “fig tree” would fit better, made a play on words and called the illustration “FigUre Tree”. I update it once or twice a year, so that several versions have already been created.
The sources for the FigUre tree are:
- BigY 700 NGS Tests from FTDNA, partly uploaded to YFull.com. There are regular sales here, e.g. in summer (August), before Black Friday (November) and in winter (December).
- WGS tests from YSEQ.net, e.g. WGS+, WGS++, uploaded at YFull.com, or transferred directly.
- WGS test from Nebula Genomics and other WGS providers, uploaded to YFull.com, or transferred directly.
- All other NGS/WGS tests from other providers not explicitly mentioned above and uploaded to YFull.com.
- NGS test from studies (living people). E.g. medical studies.
- Old DNA samples from international studies. The exact placement of these kits is particularly difficult due to the often poor quality of the samples.
- In very rare cases, kits based on SNP packs can also be added if they can be placed unambiguously and all known sub-branches are negative.
The greatest difficulty lies in combining the kits from these different sources. The position of the individual kits on the Y-tree is unambiguous in most cases. Sometimes, however, it is not possible for me to determine them accurately. At these points I had to improvise in the hope that I was right with my assessment. This is the case when one or more testers are not members of the I-L38 Haplogroup Project or the YFull group. Please join if you have not already done so. Thank you
The tree lives on the basis of the data you provide me with. Each kit is placed anonymously and contains only the information from which country the earliest paternal ancestor came. Unfortunately, this information is often forgotten (if known at all), so that many kits are only added with “Unknown Origin”. Please log in to your account, go to the settings and set your “Country of Origin”. The link for this is: www.familytreedna.com/my/genealogy to set your “earliest known ancestor”. Ideally, you should enter the known location in Europe. If this is unknown, please enter the place outside Europe that is known to you. This is still better than choosing “Unknown Origin”.
This I-L38 – FigUre tree is also available as a PDF download at: I-L38 – FigUre tree.pdf.
Note that ancient DNA samples are usually degraded and lack sufficient coverage. This leads to less specific haplogroup assignments for conservative trees such as FTDNA and YFull. I took a chance and re-sorted the old DNA on the trunk of the tree after determining the possible and impossible positions. I will soon be publishing an article here on the blog explaining this in more detail.
The number of kits for this year is declining, albeit at a high level. As the year is not quite over yet, we may be curious how many more will be added by the end of the month. I have added about 100 kits to the FigUre tree for this year. This year three BigY were supported from the Donation Fund of the Haplogroup I-L38 project. That was three Pre I-L38 kits on the trunk of the tree. Thank you again for your support.
December is the big sale at FTDNA again. I hope that once again some I-L38 men will take advantage of one of the many offers and order a Big Y700 or another test and upload it to YFull.com. It would be nice if we could get back to the level of 2021 to 2023.