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How the journey of my ancestors is written in my DNA
DNA evidence has shown that every human alive today shares one common ancestor arising from Africa between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. Over time, different groups of people made a decision to embark on an epic journey to find new places to live. These perilous paths our ancestors traveled brought them to the far-reaching corners of the globe over thousands of years, from the rocky cliffs of Scotland to the sandy beaches of Thailand. Along these varied journeys, small changes called mutations occurred in our ancestors' DNA. These mutations act like markers, or time and date stamps, pinpointing our ancestors to a particular time and place. Each ensuing generation of our ancestors then inherited these mutations, and everyone today has these same mutations that our ancestors acquired so many years ago.
The groups or tribal clans that our ancestors migrated around the world in are called haplogroups. Each haplogroup is defined by it's own unique set of the genetic markers, or mutations located on the Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) or in the MtDNA. Y-DNA is passed down through the generations along the paternal line, while MtDNA is passed down along the maternal line. These markers found on our Y-DNA and MtDNA allow us to follow our ancestors back in time and discover our deep ancestral roots.
Source: Genebase Systems.
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