I have more than 17,000 names on my family tree now. Some common ancestors are German,.
Here is one:
Dragon legend
Geldern Coat of Arms
According to folk legend, local noblemen Wichard (36th GGF), and Lupold of Pont fought a fire-breathing dragon around 878. They found it under a medlar tree, and one of them stabbed it with his spear. The dying dragon rattled two or three times: Gelre! Gelre!. In commemoration of this heroic feat, the Lords of Pont founded the city of Geldern at the confluence of the Niers and the Fleuth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldern
Dragon legends are fascinating since they are found in stories from many different ancient cultures. (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Germany, England, France, Biblical Middle East, Ancient Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon
I made another interesting discovery this time.
I finally received the DNA Ethnicity estimate results for my wife from ancestry.com. I discussed her family tree in another blog. She is from Mexico. Her family is from a classical Spanish Colonial city, Atlixco, in the state of Puebla. Her paternal grandfather was a city historian and textile factory owner. The family has lived in a large house and property near the center of Atlixco for many years. They have a family coat of arms. They have many relatives that are prominent members of the city.
Mexico is known by one of its tourist ads as the country of three cultures. Those being the Indian or Native American culture, ie. Aztecs, Maya, and many hundreds of different native cultures; Spanish colonialism; and the modern culture. There have been many immigrants from many parts of the world, also.
I was not able to go further back than great-grandparents for my wife's family. Her mother's side remains mysterious, but her mother and grandmother were from the state of Puebla.
My wife's grandmother spoke of knowledge of a hidden treasure of gold in her village. None of her family wanted to hunt for it. They thought the area was haunted. I was willing to go look for it, but I could not get anyone else to go.
So, anyway, here is my wife's DNA ethnicity estimate:
65% Native American, or indigenous peoples of the Americas, (both North and South America-ancestry does not have breakdown for each group) 15% Great Britain, 8% Italy/Greece, 6% Iberian Peninsula, 1% Ireland,
4% Africa, 1% Middle East,
Dragon legends are fascinating since they are found in stories from many different ancient cultures. (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Germany, England, France, Biblical Middle East, Ancient Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe, etc.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon
I made another interesting discovery this time.
I finally received the DNA Ethnicity estimate results for my wife from ancestry.com. I discussed her family tree in another blog. She is from Mexico. Her family is from a classical Spanish Colonial city, Atlixco, in the state of Puebla. Her paternal grandfather was a city historian and textile factory owner. The family has lived in a large house and property near the center of Atlixco for many years. They have a family coat of arms. They have many relatives that are prominent members of the city.
Mexico is known by one of its tourist ads as the country of three cultures. Those being the Indian or Native American culture, ie. Aztecs, Maya, and many hundreds of different native cultures; Spanish colonialism; and the modern culture. There have been many immigrants from many parts of the world, also.
I was not able to go further back than great-grandparents for my wife's family. Her mother's side remains mysterious, but her mother and grandmother were from the state of Puebla.
My wife's grandmother spoke of knowledge of a hidden treasure of gold in her village. None of her family wanted to hunt for it. They thought the area was haunted. I was willing to go look for it, but I could not get anyone else to go.
So, anyway, here is my wife's DNA ethnicity estimate:
65% Native American, or indigenous peoples of the Americas, (both North and South America-ancestry does not have breakdown for each group) 15% Great Britain, 8% Italy/Greece, 6% Iberian Peninsula, 1% Ireland,
4% Africa, 1% Middle East,
Very interesting.
There were surprises such as the amount of Great Britain and Ireland and Italian/Greek percentages. My wife thought she had French and Spanish ancestors. The State of Puebla is known to have French and Italian ancestors. The French invasion in the 19th century went right through Puebla,
There is a town near Atlixco that is made of ancestors to Italian dairy farmers.
I have no idea how she has English and Irish DNA, other than speculate that her ancestors could had been living in the Caribbean Islands where there was a mixing of English, Irish and Spanish, or there was also some mixing during medieval times.
The African DNA can be explained due to the influence of North Africans in Spain from the Islamic invasions and occupations for hundreds of years (711-1610).
The central African and South African hunter-gather's DNA is a lot harder to imagine, other than this is original human being's DNA showing up in modern humans. (unless there is legitimacy in ancient African migration.)(or African slaves got into the mix at some newer point).
Ancestry.com provides the DNA ethnicity estimate of what they call close cousins (4th to 8th cousins). My wife has about 2000 of these "cousins" who had submitted their DNA. Their DNA is very close to my wife's as far as having English, Irish, Italy/Greek, Iberian, African DNA, as well as Native American DNA. They all would be considered Latino, with most having family from Mexico, but all live throughout the United States.
Here is one example from a "cousin":
There were surprises such as the amount of Great Britain and Ireland and Italian/Greek percentages. My wife thought she had French and Spanish ancestors. The State of Puebla is known to have French and Italian ancestors. The French invasion in the 19th century went right through Puebla,
There is a town near Atlixco that is made of ancestors to Italian dairy farmers.
I have no idea how she has English and Irish DNA, other than speculate that her ancestors could had been living in the Caribbean Islands where there was a mixing of English, Irish and Spanish, or there was also some mixing during medieval times.
The African DNA can be explained due to the influence of North Africans in Spain from the Islamic invasions and occupations for hundreds of years (711-1610).
The central African and South African hunter-gather's DNA is a lot harder to imagine, other than this is original human being's DNA showing up in modern humans. (unless there is legitimacy in ancient African migration.)(or African slaves got into the mix at some newer point).
Ancestry.com provides the DNA ethnicity estimate of what they call close cousins (4th to 8th cousins). My wife has about 2000 of these "cousins" who had submitted their DNA. Their DNA is very close to my wife's as far as having English, Irish, Italy/Greek, Iberian, African DNA, as well as Native American DNA. They all would be considered Latino, with most having family from Mexico, but all live throughout the United States.
Here is one example from a "cousin":
Ethnicity: Regions: Native American, Iberian Peninsula, Italy/Greece
Trace Regions: Ireland, Middle East, Senegal, Asia East, Ivory Coast/Ghana, Africa South-Central Hunter-Gatherers, Caucasus, Cameroon/Congo, European Jewish, Europe West, Europe East, Africa Southeastern Bantu, Finland/Northwest Russia, Africa North, Asia Central, Great Britain.
More DNA information
A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two Thirds Of Europeans, May 21, 2015 | by Daniel Zadik
For such a large and culturally diverse place, Europe has surprisingly little genetic variety. Learning how and when the modern gene-pool came together has been a long journey. But thanks to new technological advances a picture is slowly coming together of repeated colonization by peoples from the east with more efficient lifestyles.
In a new study, we have added a piece to the puzzle: the Y chromosomes of the majority of European men can be traced back to just three individuals living between 3,500 and 7,300 years ago. How their lineages came to dominate Europe makes for interesting speculation. One possibility could be that their DNA rode across Europe on a wave of new culture brought by nomadic people from the Steppe known as the Yamnaya.
Stone Age Europe
The first-known people to enter Europe were the Neanderthals – and though they have left some genetic legacy, it is later waves who account for the majority of modern European ancestry. The first “anatomically modern humans” arrived in the continent around 40,000 years ago. These were the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers sometimes called the Cro-Magnons. They populated Europe quite sparsely and lived a lifestyle not very different from that of the Neanderthals they replaced.
Then something revolutionary happened in the Middle East – farming, which allowed for enormous population growth. We know that from around 8,000 years ago a wave of farming and population growth exploded into both Europe and South Asia. But what has been much less clear is the mechanism of this spread. How much was due to the children of the farmers moving into new territories and how much was due to the neighboring hunter-gathers adopting this new way of life?
In recent years, new technologies, including the ability to read the sequences of DNA in ancient bones, have shed much light on such questions. Researchers have found evidence in the DNA of modern Europeans for ancestry from both groups, as well as from a third fascinating people known as the Yamnaya.
The Yamnaya were nomadic herders from the steppe in what is now Ukraine and Russia. Archaeological evidence shows that they swept into Europe around 4,500 years ago, bringing with them horses, wheels, their famous “kurgan” burial mounds and quite possibly Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most European, as well as many South Asian languages. Just like farming before it, their package of resources, technologies and behaviors gave them an advantage over the pre-existing Europeans and they seem to have left a substantial genetic legacy across Europe.
An 1899 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov imagining a kurgan burial rite. wikimedia
Now, by looking at the variability between the Y chromosomes of 334 modern European and Middle-Eastern men, my colleagues and I have discovered another interesting pattern.
Y chromosomes are pieces of DNA that are very useful when studying populations. Every male has a Y chromosome, inherited from his father. Unlike most DNA, the Y chromosome is not shuffled as it is passed down, so change happens only slowly through mutation. Tracking these mutations allows scientists to create a family tree of fathers and sons going back through time. Each man may have several sons, or none – and while some branches die out each generation, others become more common and go on to produce many more branches themselves.
Genetic Revelation
The new technology of “Next-Generation Sequencing” allowed us to identify many mutations and to make a more accurate and detailed tree than ever before. Figure 1 shows such a tree generated using our European samples.
Figure 1: the Y chromosomal tree generated from our European samples, with their most recent shared ancestor at the top. Different major branches are displayed in different colours. Nature Communications
Two-thirds of modern European men are found on just three branches (called I1, R1a and R1b). Our results show that these branches each trace their paternal ancestry to a surprisingly recent individual (shown as red dots in Figure 1). By counting the number of mutations that have accumulated within each branch over the generations, we estimate that these three men lived at different times between 3,500 and 7,300 years ago. The lineages of each seem to have exploded in the centuries following their lifetimes, to dominate Europe.
Similarly, a maternal tree can be generated by looking at mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely from mothers to their children. However, when looking at this maternal tree, there is no similar explosion. This indicates that whatever factors were responsible for this pattern were specific to men. As the Y chromosome itself contains few genes that could give one man an evolutionary advantage over another, the explanations for this must be a mixture of chance and the cultural factors passed down alongside the genes.
It has previously been proposed that these very branches became established across Europe during the spread of the Yamnaya legacy. One might speculate that, if a male elite was established with the advantages of Yamnaya culture, along with a paternal ancestry from a very few Yamnaya and/or European Y lineages, they could have monopolized women and had children with a large number of partners. Over many generations, this could lead to those lineages becoming extremely widespread. In fact, similar inferences have previously been made for the situation when Neolithic farmers first arrived.
Then, between 2,100 and 4,200 years ago, in the Bronze Age, something else interesting started to happen. Our tree suddenly splits into many smaller branches (within the pink bar across Figure 1), meaning that the number of men reproducing was on the rise. It’s important not to fall into the trap of over-interpreting data but it is interesting to speculate as to what this might mean. Could it represent a return to a system of relatively monogamous relationships? Could it be that as the Yamnaya cultural package had become so widespread that it no longer gave anyone an advantage over anyone else?
For the moment such questions remain to be answered, but as each new study adds new evidence and the technology continues to improve, our picture becomes more complete and more fascinating.
