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Haplogroup N-M231

N-M231 is the lineage of the Eurasian north. Spread from Siberia with Uralic-speaking peoples, it is today the leading paternal line in Finland, the Baltics and northern Russia. Explore the branch in the full Y-DNA haplotree: sub-branches, defining variants and where its testers live. Free, no account needed.

Paternal branch

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Paternal line

N-M231

Testers: 22,334; 303 on this exact branch
Strongest today: Finland, Estonia, Latvia
Formed
Oldest man on this line

See it on the map Explore it in the full tree

Origin and distribution of N-M231

Where does N-M231 come from? It was born in East Asia and carried north and west across Siberia, and its northern branches expanded through the Eurasian taiga within the last five thousand years. Today it is the leading paternal line in Finland, the Baltic states and northern Russia.

Its northern expansion: A dated phylogeny built from 94 high-coverage Y chromosomes finds prominent clades of common N3a3'6 ancestry in regionally dissimilar northern Eurasian populations, indicating almost simultaneous regional diversification and expansion within the last 5,000 years.Source: Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup N: A Non-trivial Time-Resolved Phylogeography that Cuts across Language Families (2016)
When it reached the Baltic: Pre-Roman Iron Age individuals from Estonia carry ancestry related to modern Siberians that is absent in the preceding Late Bronze Age, reaching the Baltic coast no later than the mid first millennium BC, in the same window as the diversification of the west Uralic languages.Source: The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East (2019)
Genes and language: Uralic speakers are genetically very similar to their local neighbours, but most of them share a genetic component of possibly Siberian origin, and they share more segments identical by descent with each other than with geographically closer groups.Source: Genes reveal traces of common recent demographic history for most of the Uralic-speaking populations (2018)
Where it is common: The most common paternal lineage in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, among the Sámi, across northern Russia's Uralic-speaking peoples, and nearly universal among the Yakuts.
What it is not: A lineage is not a language. Lithuanians and Latvians carry the same paternal branch while speaking Baltic rather than Uralic languages.
What Ancestrify reports: The free Y-DNA Clade Finder places your paternal 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.

N-M231 tells a west-moving story most European haplogroups tell in reverse. Born in East Asia and carried north and west through Siberia, its N1a1 (N-M46/Tat) branch expanded across the whole Eurasian taiga belt within roughly the last four thousand years, arriving in the eastern Baltic in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, where ancient DNA marks its appearance alongside the ancestors of today's Finnic and Baltic peoples.

Today N is the most common paternal lineage in Finland (particularly the east), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, among the Sámi, and across northern Russia's Uralic-speaking peoples (Komi, Udmurts, Nenets), as well as the Yakuts of eastern Siberia, where a founder effect made it nearly universal. Its correlation with the Uralic language family is one of the most cited parallels between genes and language in population genetics, though Lithuanians and Latvians show the same lineage with Baltic speech.

One line among many: your Y haplogroup traces a single paternal line, one ancestor per generation out of thousands, so it is a thread of deep ancestry, not an ethnicity and not a percentage of who you are. Two men in the same branch share a forefather, but the rest of their genomes can differ as much as any two strangers'.

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 a Y-DNA test and shared an origin. They describe the tested world, not ancient frequencies.

Finland

6,376 · 67%

Russian Federation

1,056 · 11%

Sweden

904 · 9.5%

Lithuania

333 · 3.5%

Poland

255 · 2.7%

Ukraine

134 · 1.4%

Norway

121 · 1.3%

Estonia

117 · 1.2%

Plus 11,871 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

63%

Estonia

1 in 3 · 40%

Latvia

1 in 4 · 24%

What defines it

The changes on the Y chromosome that every man on this branch carries. Positions are on the GRCh38 reference.

Is this your line?

If you have tested with a consumer DNA company, your own branch is already in your raw data file. The free Clade Finder reads it and shows you where you sit on this tree.

Find my branch, free

Prefer it read for you? The Ancient Ancestry report can carry your paternal haplogroup as an add-on, placed on this same tree beside your ancestry model.

Frequently asked questions

What is haplogroup N-M231?

N-M231 is the lineage of the Eurasian north. Spread from Siberia with Uralic-speaking peoples, it is today the leading paternal line in Finland, the Baltics and northern Russia. It is a branch of the Y-DNA tree: everyone in it inherits the same set of defining mutations from one shared forefather.

How do I find out if I belong to N-M231?

If you have already tested with a consumer DNA company, the free Y-DNA Clade Finder reads a raw DNA export (23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage or a VCF) and places you on the tree at the resolution your file supports. It is free, and the file is discarded after analysis. A dedicated Y-DNA sequencing test resolves deeper branches than a genotyping chip can.

Does belonging to N-M231 make me descend from one people?

No. A haplogroup follows a single paternal 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 Y-DNA 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 Y-DNA test and shared an origin, so they describe the tested world, not ancient frequencies.

Keep exploring

Don't know your haplogroup yet? The free Y-DNA Clade Finder reads it from a raw DNA export. Or browse the whole tree in the Y-DNA Haplotree. Other major branches: