Haplogroup L3
L3 is the African trunk from which all non-African maternal lineages descend, and a dominant haplogroup across sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora in its own right. Explore the branch in the full mtDNA haplotree: sub-branches, defining variants and where its testers live. Free, no account needed.
Maternal branch
Live tester counts
Free · no account needed
Maternal line
L3
- Testers
- 489,864
- 479 on this exact branch
- Strongest today
- Finland, Norway, Belgium
- Oldest person on this line
Origin and distribution of L3
What is mtDNA haplogroup L3? It is the African maternal trunk from which every non-African lineage descends, dated to roughly 70,000 years ago. Inside Africa it is a dominant haplogroup in its own right, dense across East, Central and West Africa and in the diaspora.
- Its age
- An analysis of 369 complete African L3 sequences places the age of the haplogroup at about 70,000 years, which sets an upper bound on the dispersal out of Africa and virtually rules out a successful exit before 74,000 years ago.Source: The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa (2012)
- What descends from it
- The M and N super-haplogroups that carry every maternal line outside Africa are daughters of L3, and their ages are close to L3's own, suggesting one process behind both the African expansion and the dispersal out of it.Source: The Expansion of mtDNA Haplogroup L3 within and out of Africa (2012)
- Inside Africa
- Ancient genomes show once contiguous hunter-gatherer populations contracting as food producers spread across eastern and southern Africa, the movements that carried L3 branches south in the past few millennia.Source: Ancient genomes reveal complex patterns of population movement, interaction, and replacement in sub-Saharan Africa (2020)
- In the diaspora
- Through the Atlantic slave trade, L3 lineages with their L2 and L1 relatives became a major share of the maternal ancestry of African-descended populations across the Americas.
- What its position does not mean
- Sitting close to the trunk is not being the ancestor of everyone alive. L3 is one maternal line among many, read on a tree defined from complete mitochondrial genomes.Source: A Copernican Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from Its Root (2012)
- What Ancestrify reports
- The free mtDNA Haplogroup Finder places your maternal line on this branch from a raw DNA export, at the resolution your file supports. Ancestry proportions come from the Ancient Ancestry (qpAdm) and Ancestry Map (Global25) reports, never from a haplogroup.
L3 sits at one of the human story's hinges: it arose in Africa on the order of seventy thousand years ago, and the M and N super-haplogroups that populate every other continent are its daughters: every maternal line outside Africa descends from within L3. Inside Africa, L3 flourished on its own terms: its branches are dense across East, Central and West Africa, were carried south with the Bantu expansions, and travelled the Sahel and the Indian Ocean trade worlds.
Through the Atlantic slave trade, L3 lineages (with their L2 and L1 relatives) became a major share of the maternal ancestry of African-descended populations across the Americas, and the branch structure is increasingly fine enough to point a diaspora line toward a region, sometimes a people, of origin. An L3 result is therefore two findings at once: membership in one of Africa's great maternal families, and a seat close to the trunk of everyone's tree.
One line among many: your mtDNA haplogroup traces a single maternal line, mother to mother into deep time, so it is a thread of ancestry, not an ethnicity and not a percentage of who you are. Two people in the same branch share a foremother; the rest of their genomes are their own story.
The line through time
Each branch on this line from the root of the tree, oldest first.
Where testers are found
Counts of people who took an mtDNA test and shared an origin. They describe the tested world, not ancient frequencies.
United States
19,187 · 21%
England
12,302 · 14%
Germany
10,868 · 12%
Ireland
10,096 · 11%
Sweden
9,281 · 10%
Finland
7,414 · 8.2%
Scotland
4,580 · 5.1%
United Kingdom
4,432 · 4.9%
Plus 138,486 testers who gave no country. Shares are of testers with a known country.
Where this branch runs strongest
The share of each country's testers who sit on this branch.
Finland
100%
Norway
100%
Belgium
100%
What defines it
The changes in the mitochondrial genome that every person on this branch carries. Positions are on the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence.
Is this your line?
If you have tested with a consumer DNA company, your own maternal branch is already in your raw data file. The free mtDNA Haplogroup Finder reads it and shows you where you sit on this tree.
Find my branch, freePrefer it read for you? The Ancient Ancestry report can carry your maternal haplogroup as an add-on, placed on this same tree beside your ancestry model, when your file holds enough mitochondrial markers.
Frequently asked questions
What is haplogroup L3?
L3 is the African trunk from which all non-African maternal lineages descend, and a dominant haplogroup across sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora in its own right. It is a branch of the mtDNA tree: everyone in it inherits the same set of defining mutations from one shared foremother.
How do I find out if I belong to L3?
If you have already tested with a consumer DNA company, the free mtDNA Haplogroup Finder reads a raw DNA export and places you on the tree at the resolution your file supports. It is free, and the file is discarded after analysis. A dedicated mtDNA sequencing test resolves deeper branches than a genotyping chip can.
Does belonging to L3 make me related to one people?
No. A haplogroup follows a single maternal line, one ancestor per generation, while the rest of your ancestry doubles every generation back. It is a deep-time thread, not an ethnicity, and two members of the same branch can otherwise be as genetically different as any two strangers.
What does this page's tree data show?
The branch view on this page shows the branch inside the full mtDNA haplotree of tested lineages: the line it descends from, the branches below it, the variants that define it, and the countries its testers report. Counts reflect people who have taken a mtDNA test and shared an origin, so they describe the tested world, not ancient frequencies.
Keep exploring
Don't know your haplogroup yet? The free mtDNA Haplogroup Finder reads it from a raw DNA export. Or browse the whole tree in the mtDNA Haplotree. Other major branches: