Although I like much of what I have read of your posts thus far, I have to disagree with what you have written about characterizing L21 as "Britanno-Irish". Most people, reading that L21 is "Britanno-Irish", will reasonably conclude that you mean L21 is "Britanno-Irish" everywhere it occurs. In other words, if I am Swiss, get an L21+ result, and read that L21 is "Britanno-Irish", I am going to come to the conclusion that I am somehow descended from an ancestor who came from the British Isles. I am not going to think, "That just means L21 is very common in the British Isles."
I respectfully suggest you correct the entry for L21 to read something other than "Britanno-Irish". You did not intend it to be misleading, but it is misleading.
Thanks for your advice. I have modified the R1b subclade table replacing the title "associated ethnicity" by "most prevalent ancient ethnic group". Most prevalent only means that it is most common in that ethnic group, not that it originated there.
I have also replaced "Britanno-Irish" in the chart by "Gallo-Britanno-Alpine". This encompass Central Europe (Alpine), France (Gallo) and the British Isles (Britanno). I will try to come up with something better once we have a clearer picture of the distribution of L21.
If everyone took the care of reading the R1b history above the table there would be no confusion. It is explained that the main subclades of R1b1b2a1b (L21, S28, M167) spread from the central European homeland (Unetice to Hallstatt cultures) to western Europe.
I even created a
migration map of R1b for more visual people who don't like reading.
By the way, even though testing for L21 has only been going on since October of 2008, and was not included in Family Tree DNA's Deep Clade-R test until sometime in January of 2009, we already know of at least 21 men of German and German-Swiss ancestry who are R-L21*.
Testing for U152 and U106 has been going on since 2005 and began in better economic times.
Indeed. I also noticed two L21+ in Eastern Europe along the Danube. This could mean that L21 already existed before the mass migration of Proto-Italo-Celts from the Black Sea region.
It remains to be seen why L21 became to predominant in the British Isles. If it is due to a founder effect, the replacement of native haplogroups by the R1b invaders must have been absolutely massive. It would mean that a small group of L21 invaders (the smaller the group the lower the chance of other subclade being present) would have eventually replaced the majority of paternal lineages in the British Isles.
Was Bronze-Age culture really so superior or did the Indo-Europeans carry germs that wiped out most of the native population, in the same way as when Europeans reached the Americas ? Archeological records show that the Bronze-Age transition was an unusually violent time. Diseases also spread fast across continents, so I would rather go for the violent replacement hypothesis.
I also like the idea that native female population remained fairly stable (men were killed and women taken as wives by the invaders), and that this is why Western Europeans look so different from each others in Iberia, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Ireland or Scandinavia, Local native populations were already quite diversified. It is unlikely that the phenotypes changed so much just by genetic drift over a mere 4,000 years since the Indo-European migrations.