Haplogroup Atlas

Two maps, from two different kinds of evidence, behind one switch. In the ancient view the pins are ancient individuals from the AADR reference panel — over ten thousand people with a readable Y-DNA result and about as many with a maternal one — placed at the archaeological site they were excavated from and coloured by how long ago they lived. Each one is matched to the haplogroup you typed through the phylogenetic tree itself, not by name: a burial labelled with a branch below yours is a descendant, one labelled with a branch above yours is an ancestor, and one on a neighbouring branch is a cousin. The list beside the map says which is which, and the rung filter lets you keep only the men on your own line.

The modern view is a different dataset with a different meaning. Its country shading comes from the public Y-DNA and mtDNA haplotrees, which report how many tested customers from each country sit on each branch. The atlas divides a country's testers on your branch by that country's testers on the whole tree, so the shading shows where the branch is concentrated among people who have tested — not how common it is in a country's population. Every country with a tester on the branch is shaded, and the counts behind each share are printed beside it, because a percentage over a handful of people is only as good as the handful.

The lineage path joins, for each ancestor branch of your haplogroup, the centre of the burial sites where its carriers were found, oldest branch to youngest. It is drawn only where a branch has at least three dated carriers, and it describes where archaeology has recovered those people — not where the branch arose. Ancient DNA sampling is dense in Europe and the Near East and thin across much of Africa, South Asia and the Americas, so a path that bends towards Europe is often reporting where excavation has happened rather than where a lineage travelled. Read it as a summary of the record, and the record as incomplete.

Type R-M269 and start ancient. The pins run from Bronze Age steppe burials westward across Europe, thickening dramatically after about 2500 BCE — the Beaker-era expansion, watched as dots. The tree-matching legend is what keeps the reading honest: pins on branches BELOW M269 are descendants of your queried branch, pins on ancestor branches mark the line's earlier history, and cousins on neighbouring branches share an origin without being on the line at all. The rung filter cuts to direct-line carriers only, and the time scrubber replays the spread century by century.

Switch to modern and the meaning changes with the dataset: country shading now reports where TESTED families carry the branch, as that branch's share of each country's testers on the public haplotree — never a population frequency, because who chooses to test is nothing like a census. The two maps disagreeing is normal and informative: a branch dense in ancient Iberia and pale in modern Iberian testing, or the reverse, is history and testing culture each having their say.

The reading rule both maps share: geography of evidence, not geography of origin. Excavation density decides the ancient map's bright spots; testing enthusiasm decides the modern one's. A lineage path bending through well-dug Europe reports archaeology's habits as much as any migration — the atlas's own captions keep saying so, and they mean it.

The two established destinations for haplogroup geography are FamilyTreeDNA's Discover reports and YFull's tree — both excellent at what they are built for, both organised around their own customers' sequenced samples. Discover's ancient-connections view and YFull's dated branches draw on curated ancient matches and tester-derived TMRCA estimates respectively; each rewards a sequencing customer with detail no chip-based tool matches.

This atlas differs on three axes. It is complete over the AADR reference panel — over ten thousand ancient Y results and as many maternal ones, every dated, geolocated individual the compilation carries, matched to your branch through the phylogeny rather than by label. It needs no test purchase, no login and no sequencing to explore any branch, either tree. And it states its evidence limits on the surface — tester-share shading with the counts printed beside each figure, lineage paths only where three or more dated carriers exist. What it deliberately lacks is the personal layer: no matching, no TMRCA to YOUR line, no private variants. For that, sequencing with the specialist services is the genuine next step; for seeing what the published ancient record holds for any branch, this page is the free, complete view.