Overview
Since my first DNA test in the mid-2000s, I’ve been fascinated by and driven to learn about how my paternal ancestors could have possibly made their way from the Altai Mountains in Siberia (origin point of the Q Haplogroup) to Menninghausen/ Oeftinghausen, Germany.
If traveled by car today, this drive would take 73 hours.
Q, formed in the Altai Mountain region in southern Siberia between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, is the same haplogroup of the first settlers of North, South, and Central America who travelled over the Bering Land Bridge. An example can be found here: https://www.exploreyourdna.com/sample/usa/shukakaa
Q was the dominant Y DNA haplogroup of all people following this path into the new world.
Because 90% of the pre-Spanish population of the new world is part of this group, I was shocked when I got my first Y-DNA results… to the point where I comically was asking my parents if I was adopted. After a few years, I even ordered another test and got the same results.
Back then, there was very little information on the internet that could enlighten me. I had no idea how my paternal ancestors could have possibly gotten from the Altai Mountains to northern Germany. Several things have happened in recent history to allow me to fill in a lot of blanks.
First, DNA technology, especially as it pertains to the “industrialization” of testing and processing has accelerated.
Second, AI has allowed us to ask very specific questions and receive very relevant results, rather than using pared-down search queries and receiving mountains of (or very limited) results which need to be sifted through. As with all AI results, you still have to sort through some hallucinations, but when links are provided, you’re able to verify.
The “industrialization” has come from two primary areas:
First, the number of “home tests” has skyrocketed in the past decade. Many people are genuinely interested in understanding their DNA for a variety of reasons. A basic test through companies like 23 and Me, FamilyTree DNA, Ancestry, and others has become very affordable.
Second, academia, specifically archaeologists and anthropologists, are reaching into their storage drawers and are testing material from previous excavations for DNA, using material from a huge inventory of bones collected over hundreds of years from a variety of archaeological sites all over the world. This provides us with a wealth of data which is helpful for people like me who are interested in learning about their ancient histories.
To get a feel for the academic angle, take a look at what David Reich is doing at Harvard. His wiki page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reich_(geneticist)
Dr. Reich and his group at Harvard are on a quest to understand the migratory patterns of humans. But rather than chasing down one specific group of people, their interest lies in understanding how ALL humans have migrated over thousands of years.
In this presentation, Dr. Reich brought up a point that I found fascinating. He claims that in almost every single geographic location, the people who were there at any given time, were almost always replaced by another subsequent group. Not blended with…replaced by.
There are a multitude of scenarios that could explain how/ why this replacement took place, but I stumbled upon this story as a possible example. Brutal!
How All of This Applies to My Ancestral Branch (RATHKAMP)
The challenge today is resolution…
As a 14 year old living in Milwaukee, I attended Milwaukee Trade and Technical high school for one year. It was a great option for kids to get exposed to various trades and skills. For freshmen, the first year was an “exploratory” year. You’d spend 6 weeks in each of the programs. Some of these programs included machine shop, plumbing, sheet metal, drafting, cabinet making, automotive mechanics, etc.
In the cabinet making shop, our project was to make a knife holder for our moms. I decided to go the extra mile by adding the Tech Trojan, our school mascot, to the face of the knife holder. I created a paper template with the graphic carefully drawn, taped that to the face of the knife holder, and used an awl to punch the wood every 1/4″ along the path of the graphic.
When I removed the template, I was shocked to see that you couldn’t even make out the graphic. It just looked like a bunch of random dots. The answer to my knife holder problem was to tape the template back onto the face and punch every 1/8″. This time, when I lifted the template, an easy to identify Tech Trojan appeared.
This is where we find ourselves today with regard to archaeology and the corresponding Q samples.
I’ve mentioned before that Q is exceptionally rare in Germany, with far less than 1% of Germans belonging to this group. What I’m finding is that Q is also “underrepresented” in each of the studies and correlating archaeology sites that the studies come from. I’ll talk more about this later…because I have thoughts!
Until more testing and indexing are done, we’re left with an image that “needs more holes”, just like my knife holder did.
My Methodology
My first order of business was to plot my “Haplotree”. Before I lay that out, let me first say that I am NOT an expert in DNA. When I listen to experts, I’m only able to absorb probably 5-10% of what they’re saying. But I’m learning and I’m not going to let me lack of knowledge stop me from my quest.
When I took the Family Tree BigY test, the objective is to find my “Terminal SNP”.
SNPs (pronounced “snips,” short for single nucleotide polymorphisms) are tiny, one-letter changes in our DNA that occasionally happen by accident as it gets passed from father to son. Think of DNA as an incredibly long book that’s copied generation after generation. Every so often, a single letter gets typo’d, and that typo (the accident) then gets carried forward in every future copy made from that point on.
Because these typos are rare and essentially permanent, once they occur, they act like little timestamps; if two people share a particular typo, it means they both descend from the same ancestor who first “made” it. The more recent typos they share, the more recently they shared that common ancestor, which is exactly how geneticists can sort people into family branches and figure out who’s more closely related to whom, sometimes across thousands of years.
Here’s what my haplotree looks like:
Once I defined my haplotree, I started doing Google searches for scientific papers for some of the later SNPs. I was particularly interested in Q-L935 and newer, as I knew these would be more likely to help start defining my ancestors’ migratory path.
Most of these papers were focused on DNA information centered around the sequencing of the entire genome, as opposed to the specific Y DNA (in my case Q) that I was tracking. The entire genome is far more informative for them, but does nothing for my search of the path my ancestors took over thousands of years to get from Siberia to Northern Germany.
It started feeling like I was searching for a needle in a haystack, so I was elated when I stumbled upon Explore Your DNA.
The Explore Your DNA website has several useful tools. One of them is the Haplogroup Explorer which can be found here: https://www.exploreyourdna.com/Tools/HaplogroupExplorer
When you plug a specific Haplogroup into the search field, you get several useful pieces of information. This information includes:
-Average Ancestry Components (based on whole-genome sequencing, defines where our ancestors most likely lived, and what culture they were part of)
-mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to daughter)
-Specific Y DNA SNP
-Geographic distribution
-Chronological timeline
-Country distribution (which current countries these sites are located)
-The actual samples
If I type only “Q” in the the search parameters, this retrieves every known sample of Q. Useful for Q research, but not useful in terms of my search for the Q migration between Siberia and Northern Germany. It’s too much information.
Searching for my SNP, I get ZERO results.
However, Q-L935 seems to be the sweet spot. When I type this into the search parameters, I not only get that SNP, but also 935’s sub-haplogroups. This seems to give me a nice timeline, and more importantly, a distribution of sites plotted on a map, showing me a likely migratory path!
Finally, the picture I’ve been searching for is gradually coming into focus!
Keep in mind, this journey didn’t take weeks or months. It likely took thousands of years.
Only time (along with a lot more archaeology and genetic sequencing/ indexing) will fill this picture out more completely. But this works for me…for now.
Prior to getting the results from my BigY test, I thought the most likely migratory explanation was that my Q ancestors travelled northwest into the Nordic countries, then south into Northern Germany.
Now I know they took a much different, and in my eyes, a MUCH more interesting path.
Closing Observations
First, I want to stress that the resolution problem is real. Over time, this picture can change…a lot.
Second, I want to stress that each of the dots on the map above represent a person or a group of people. I find myself having a certain respect for them and am very curious to know more about their lives.
I’m not claiming to be related to them. At best, you could only draw the conclusion that our ancestors were distant cousins at the time they lived. Even if a sample from 2000 BC was a direct ancestor, let’s face it, that’s about 200 generations ago. We’re barely related.
Cultures
This might be the most interesting aspect of what I’ve learned over the past few months. Each of the dots on the map represents people or a group of people. When people migrate, they normally do so in groups. When my Rathkamp ancestors, Fritz and Dora, came to the United States, they came to Milwaukee with their family and with a handful of other people in nearby villages.
When my Walz ancestors came to South Dakota, three brothers came initially, then sent for the rest of their family once they were settled. Their entire community in South Dakota consisted of Germans from Russia.
Getting settled usually means eventually blending in with the people who are already there. They eventually become part of the local culture.
Prior to this exercise, I knew next to nothing about Scythians, Sarmatians, the Maikop culture, the Kurgan cultures, etc. Each of these cultures, on their own, are fascinating. Knowing that “my people” were part of these cultures, makes them even more interesting to me. At times throughout this project, I’ve felt like I’m experiencing information overload. It’s a lot to digest.
The Rarity of Q
As I was absorbing all of this information, one thing kept coming up, over and over: The rarity of Q in almost every archaeological example used to compile this information. When I’d find a bit of new information, I’d often feed it into AI asking a variety of questions. The phrase “passenger DNA” or “specialist DNA” kept coming up.
The explanation is that these DNA passengers with “specialist” DNA most likely possessed some sort of skill that made them useful in a group, while being genetically vastly different. What could that skill or skills be?
A great example were the results found in the Caucasus region during the Bronze age. It’s said that this Steppe Maikop group acted as some sort of buffer between the Maikop south of them and the newly forming Yamnaya culture to their north.
It seems our people, while being a part of a group, have always had a bit of unique character. Keep in mind that 80-90% of Q travelled over the Bering land bridge to the “new world”. Our group didn’t. Zoom in and think about that in a micro scale. Let’s say you’re part of an extended family with 100 members. 90 of them decide to move to New Zealand. Your group of 10 close family members decides to stay. At that point, you’re already a minority….what does that look like?
I have a theory…
Over and over, as I was reading these papers and learning about these cultures, metalworking kept coming up.
I can’t ignore the fact that in Oeftinghausen, the location of my Rathkamp ancestors, we were masters of the Forge…blacksmiths. This was true from the 1500s until the late 2000s, just prior to my visit in 2010. Written records were only introduced in the 15th-16th century, so there’s a chance they were blacksmiths/ metalworkers long before that. I’ve been reading about blacksmiths in Medieval Germany. You didn’t simply decide one day to become a blacksmith. You were part of a guild with incredibly rigid standards and were expected to be able to keep trade secrets. It was a skill almost always passed from father to eldest son.
When Korey and I visited Germany, Herr Wessels told us that he felt very strongly that the origin of the Rathkamp surname happened in Menninghausen, just a few miles from Oeftinghausen. Just last week I learned that just outside the tiny village of Menninghausen lies a protected historical area. I didn’t know this when Korey and I visited Menninghausen. What’s the protected area? A set of burial mounds. The information is scant, but I think this might be my next project. The article I read described these mounds, and to me, they sounded like…Kurgans.
This is an incredible coincidence that deserves more investigation, as every single paper I read pertaining to our Q cousins mentioned Kurgans.
I felt a bit of melancholy reading about the 15 people represented by one dot in the map above. These were people found in the Nepluyevsky Barrow Necropolis. They were from one extended family.
They couldn’t have had an easy life. Several of them were newborns or very young children when they died. I don’t think there was a single person over 40 years old.
From what I’ve read, they were part of a patrilineal group, which apparently was common at the time. All of the males in the group were related. All of the females were “imported” from other locations.
I’m embedding the map for the area which there were found. If you navigate to the map, you can go into StreetView mode. Even the people living there today don’t seem to have easy lives.
Conclusion
Shortly after I received the results from my BigY test, I wrote this post. I may have jumped the gun. I was so blown away with the results and put together a hypothesis. That hypothesis could very well be wrong, but it’s still in play. Only time, along with a lot more testing resolution will prove or disprove that hypothesis. Traditional genealogy, where the genealogist uses fragments of information to build a story, is no different than using DNA to build that story.
Still, if there’s enough data, you often get a feel for the people you’re learning about. Their personalities often reveal themselves, and their struggles are sometimes exposed. This, to me, is the rewarding aspect of what I’m doing. I started when I was 12 years old, and I don’t see myself ever giving up. We all have stories worth telling to future generations.