From my mom’s mom to my mom to me. That’s how mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) likes to travel. You can see how it’s helpful in determining maternal ancestry.
My mtDNA determines that I belong to the PreHV maternal haplogroup (It sounds so all-encompassing, right?).
More specifically, I guess I’m part of daughter branches H and V, which are both most commonly found in Europe.
The map below shows where concentrations of PreHV might have been located 500 years ago (Darker color equals more concentration).
Supposedly, the PreHV haplogroup originated in Arabia and than spread to the Near East and than to Europe, Asia and northern Africa.
23andMe provides a fun little tool to explore “the tree of all maternal haplogroups”.
It lets you expand and collapse subgroups, find your own haplogroup and the haplogroups of friends and family that you’re sharing your genome with.
Oh yeah, how could any 23andMe blog post or article be complete without letting you know what famous people are in my haplogroup.
I think they need to add some more famous people to the PreHV haplogroup database, because these ones seem to pop up in everyone’s 23andMe ancestry post or article. :)
All in all, this is a nice general overview of my maternal ancestry, but now I need to do some more digging. I will be posting about my paternal ancestry later this week.
