haplogroup

A haplogroup is a named branch on the tree of the Y chromosome, inherited down the paternal line, or of mitochondrial DNA, inherited down the maternal line. Each is defined by a set of variants, and a raw file from a chip test can be placed on the tree as far as the markers it tested allow, which for most consumer kits is a broad branch rather than a terminal one. A haplogroup follows one line of descent among thousands, so it says little about overall ancestry and nothing about identity.

The articles explain how to get a free paternal or maternal haplogroup call from a 23andMe, AncestryDNA or MyHeritage export, what the common maternal branches H, U5, K and T2 tell you, why most chip kits resolve to a broad branch, how to browse the complete paternal tree of over 109,000 named branches and the full maternal tree with defining variants and tester counts by country, and why no Y-DNA branch among Albanians is an Illyrian gene, since a label describes one family line and drift amplifies its frequency.