Haplogroup R-U106 (R1b, Germanic)
R-U106 is R1b's northern wing, the lineage of the Germanic-speaking world, peaking from the Netherlands and northern Germany through Denmark and into England. Explore the branch in the full Y-DNA haplotree: sub-branches, defining variants and where its testers live. Free, no account needed.
Paternal branch
Live tester counts
Free · no account needed
Paternal line
R-U106
- Testers
- 73,453
- 8,693 on this exact branch
- Strongest today
- Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark
- Formed
- Oldest man on this line
Origin and distribution of R-U106 (R1b, Germanic)
What is R-U106? It is R1b's northern wing, the lineage of the Germanic-speaking world, peaking from the Netherlands and northern Germany through Denmark and into England.
- How it arrived
- The Corded Ware and Bell Beaker horizons carried steppe-derived ancestry and R1b sublineages into northwest Europe in the third millennium BCE.Source: The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe (2018)
- Where it is common
- Highest in the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark, common in England and southern Scandinavia, thinning southward and eastward.
- Why England carries it
- The Anglo-Saxon settlement drew on exactly that continental North Sea coast, at about 76% of eastern England's early medieval ancestry.Source: The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool (2022)
R-U106 is the branch of R-M269 that turned north. Where its Atlantic siblings dominate the Celtic-speaking edge, U106 tracks the historical Germanic world: highest frequencies in the Netherlands and Frisia, northern Germany and Denmark, strong through England (carried across the North Sea in the Anglo-Saxon migrations), southern Scandinavia and Austria, thinning south and west. Ancient DNA places its expansion with the Bronze Age cultures of the North European Plain, downstream of the same steppe-derived ancestry as the rest of M269.
Its major children, Z18 along the North Sea coasts and Z381 with its dense L48 cluster through the Low Countries and England, are resolved finely enough to separate English, Frisian and Scandinavian lines that diverged within the last two millennia. In Britain, the U106-versus-L21 balance still roughly echoes the Anglo-Saxon-versus-Celtic settlement geography, one of the tidiest historical signals a single haplogroup pair carries anywhere.
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.
England
5,587 · 25%
United States
5,049 · 23%
Germany
3,107 · 14%
United Kingdom
1,711 · 7.8%
Scotland
1,662 · 7.6%
Ireland
1,435 · 6.5%
Sweden
1,306 · 5.9%
Netherlands
632 · 2.9%
Plus 47,799 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.
Netherlands
1 in 4 · 27%
Belgium
1 in 5 · 20%
Denmark
1 in 5 · 19%
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, freePrefer 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 R-U106 (R1b, Germanic)?
R-U106 is R1b's northern wing, the lineage of the Germanic-speaking world, peaking from the Netherlands and northern Germany through Denmark and into England. 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 R-U106 (R1b, Germanic)?
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 R-U106 (R1b, Germanic) 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: