Origins & History
Haplogroup Q is thought to have originated in Central Asia or North Asia during of shortly after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 26,000 to 19,000 years ago). Q descends from haplogroup P, which is also the ancestor of haplogroups R1a and R1b. Haplogroup Q quickly split into two main branches: Q1a and Q1b. The northern Q1a tribes expanded over Siberia as the climate warmed up after the LGM. Some Q1a crossed the still frozen Bering Strait to the American continent some time between 16,500 and 13,000 years ago. Q1b tribes stayed in Central Asia and later migrated south towards the Middle East.
Siberian & Native American Q1a
Many of clades of haplogroup
Q1a are believed to have been brought by the Huns, the Mongols and the Turks, who all originated in the Altai region and around modern Mongolia. Haplogroup Q has been identified in Iron Age remains from Hunnic sites in Mongolia by
Petkovski et al. (2006) and in Xinjiang by Kang et al. (2013). Modern Mongols belong to various subclades of Q1a, including by order of frequency Q1a2a1c (L330), Q1a1a1 (M120), Q1a1b (M25) and Q1a2a2 (YP4004).
Among those, the
M25 subclade has been found in the North Caucasus (1000 year-old BZ640 subclade), in Poland and Hungary (1750 year-old BZ1000 subclade), in northern Ireland (YP1669 subclade), in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan (Y16840 subclade) and in Arabia (F5005 subclade).
Q1a is also the main paternal lineage of Native Americans. The testing of the
genome of 12,600 year-old boy (known as Anzick-1) from
Clovis culture in the USA confirmed that haplogroup
Q1a2a1 (L54) was already present on the American continent before the end of the Last Glaciation. The vast maority of modern Native Americans belong to the Q1a2a1a1 (M3) subclade. As this subclade is exclusive to the American continent and the Anzick boy was negative for the M3 mutation, it is likely that M3 appeared after Q1a2a1 reached America.
