Haplogroup U4
U4 is an old lineage of Europe's eastern foragers and the steppe, common in Mesolithic and Bronze Age burials, modest today from the Baltic to Central Asia. 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
U4
- Testers
- 10,960
- 3,292 on this exact branch
- Strongest today
- Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia
- Oldest person on this line
Origin and distribution of U4
What is mtDNA haplogroup U4? It is U5's eastern sister, a lineage of Europe's post-glacial foragers traced to a refuge on the East European Plain and later carried far and wide by the Bronze Age steppe expansions. Today it is modest in frequency and tilted east.
- Where it survived the Ice Age
- U4 and U5a are the lineages traced to a refugium on the East European Plain, as H1, H3, V and U5b1 are to Franco-Cantabria and U5b3 to the Italian peninsula.Source: Mitochondrial DNA Signals of Late Glacial Recolonization of Europe from Near Eastern Refugia (2012)
- Its forager record
- U4 recurs among the hunter-gatherers of the East European plain and the Baltic, the populations whose ancestry the later steppe cultures were built on.Source: Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia (2024)
- Its steppe passage
- The third millennium BCE migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppe carried eastern European ancestry deep into central and northern Europe, spreading the maternal lines the pastoralists carried with it.Source: Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (2015)
- Where it is common
- Modest frequencies with an eastern tilt: strongest around the Baltic, through Russia and into the Volga-Ural peoples and Central Asia, thinner in Western Europe.
- What its age does not mean
- An old branch is not a purer or more native lineage. It is one maternal line, and everyone's other ancestry lies outside it.
- 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.
U4 is U5's eastern sister: a lineage of Europe's post-glacial hunter-gatherers whose centre of gravity always lay further east. Ancient DNA finds it repeatedly among the foragers of the East European plain and the Baltic, and later among the Bronze Age pastoralists of the steppe. Yamnaya and their successors carry U4 lines regularly, which spread them wherever the steppe expansions reached.
Today it survives at modest frequencies with an eastern tilt: strongest around the Baltic, through Russia and into Central Asia and the Volga-Ural peoples, thinner in Western Europe. A U4 result usually reads as a thread of the continent's forager-and-steppe inheritance, one of the maternal lines that watched both the glaciers retreat and the wagons arrive.
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
435 · 19%
Germany
339 · 15%
Sweden
311 · 14%
England
260 · 12%
Finland
172 · 7.6%
Ireland
165 · 7.3%
Poland
146 · 6.5%
United Kingdom
118 · 5.2%
Plus 3,070 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.
Estonia
1 in 16 · 6.2%
Latvia
1 in 19 · 5.4%
Slovenia
1 in 23 · 4.3%
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 U4?
U4 is an old lineage of Europe's eastern foragers and the steppe, common in Mesolithic and Bronze Age burials, modest today from the Baltic to Central Asia. 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 U4?
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 U4 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: