German / Bulgaria J-FTC79873 Who are we?

[EngelhornRon]

Hello, my FTDNA Y DNA kit # is 369210, and Haplogroup # is J-FTC79873.

I have been on FTDNA for years with no Y-DNA matches but one my brother. Bought the Big Y over a year ago with no matches. My biological surname is Engelhorn with solid paper trail in Germany back to the early 1500's. Rumor is we migrated from Switzerland.

I am trying to trace our migration line back to its origin around 950 BCE were I match with another J-FTC79873 Bulgarian guy.......does this mean my ancestor migrated from the Bulgarian region?

Thank you,

Ron Engelhorn

 

[Riverman]

If you go to FTDNA, you can find your time tree position:

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Beside the Bulgarian, in your upstream clade are Albanians, Sardinians and Turks. This looks like its associated with Greeks or other East Mediterranean people in the Bronze to Early Iron Age and spread out along the Mediterranean routes. The TMRCA to the Bulgarian is 1.000-900 BC, therefore we are again in the LBA-EIA transition. That's pretty old.

What happened in between, between the Early Iron Age and the early modern period, when your tree starts, is completely unknown and its not even possible to guess. No other modern, no other ancient DNA results to work with.

Upstream of your position are branches which show how it can work: One French at the root, than a split between Ashkenazi Jewish and Irish! Both the Ashkenazi and Irish are well tested, their common ancestor is back in the LBA, around 1.300-1.200 BC. The Irish-Scottish branch can be traced back to about 1.000 AD!

Needless to say that both in their and your case a lot could have happened in 2.000-2.500 undocumented years of your branch. Probably it spread already in the Iron Age, or with the Romans. You will probably know eventually, with more samples from both ancients and moderns. For now we can just say it starts from the Near East, moved into the East Mediterranean presumably in the Bronze Age and then spread into various parts of Europe subsequently.

The earlist, very distantly related samples from upstream branches, with a common ancestor to you about 5.000 years BC, are all Imperial Roman (one from Croatia, the other from Italy).