Flemish Male Ancestry

Within the R1b haplogroup there are modal haplotypes. One of the best characterized of these haplotypes is the West European Atlantic Modal Haplotype (WAMH). This haplotype reaches the highest frequency in the Iberian peninsula and in the British Isles. In the Iberian peninsula it reaches 33% in Portugal.

Within the R1b haplogroup, my haplotype belongs to the subclade called R1b1c. Specifically this narrows me to Western Europeans who have a mutation called SNP M269 that share my haplotype exactly. Nearly all present-day Europeans with M269 also have M343 and P5 markers. These markers define the R1b1c subclade.

This subgroup probably originated in Central Asia/South Central Siberia and appears to have entered prehistoric Europe mainly from the area of modern Iran or Central Asia (Kazakhstan) via the coasts of the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. It is believed by some to have been widespread in Europe before the last Ice Age, and associated with the Aurignacian culture (32,000-21,000 BC) of the Cro-Magnon people, the first modern humans to enter Europe.

The Cro-Magnons were the first documented human artists, making sophisticated cave paintings. Famous sites include Lascaux in France, Cueva de las Monedas in Spain and Valley of Foz Côa in Portugal (the largest open-air site in Europe).

When the ice age intensified and the continent became increasingly uninhabitable, the genetic diversity narrowed through founder effects and population bottlenecks, as the population became limited to a few coastal refugia in Southern Europe and Asia Minor.

The present-day R1b population is believed to be descended from a refuge in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), where the R1b1c haplogroup may have achieved genetic homogeneity. As conditions of the ice age eased in about 12,000 before the present (bp), descendants of this group migrated and eventually re-colonized all of Western Europe, leading to the dominant position of R1b in variant degrees from Iberia to Scandinavia, so evident in haplogroup maps.

An alternative belief is that R1b represents the Western or centum-speaking branch of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, although this too remains uncertain.

A second R1b1c population, reflected in a somewhat different distribution of haplotypes of the more rapidly varying Y-STR markers, appears to have survived alongside other haplogroups in Asia Minor, from where they spread out to repopulate Eastern Europe. However, they do not have the same dominance that R1b has in Western Europe. Instead the most common haplogroup in Eastern Europe is haplogroup R1a1, often thought to be associated with a subsequent migration of Indo-Europeans (or perhaps their ancestors) from the East.

The haplogroup R1b and haplogroup R1a first existed at very different times. The mutations that characterize haplogroup R1b occurred ~30,000 years bp, whereas the mutations that characterize haplogroup R1a occurred ~10,000 years bp.