The Euro African or the story of the Haplogroup R1b

R1b in Africa

Something odd happened within the clade R1b — Western Europes most common haplogroup. It has 80 plus percent density in Ireland, Scottland’s Highlands, and stretches along the western side of Wales. It takes in bit of France along the Atlantic fringe and is thick among the Basque and into Spain. There are traces of it across Europe and hot spots that crop up as far as Russia. It is, however, this isolated island of in the Kirdi culture of Nigeria and northern Cameroon where the mutation shows up in frequencies as high as 95 percent.

18,500 years ago as the ice stretched across the Altai region in south-central Siberia people braved the frigid wasteland roaming the tundra and ice sheets for mammoth. This is Haplogroup R1. R1b populated Western Europe and R1A populated Eastern Europe. The question we want to ask is how did R1b end up in such concentrations in Northern Cameroon?

Some 20,000 years ago, Europe could be divided into four areas, the ice, the tundra,the Steppe, and forests. These bands ranged horizontally from the South to the North. Northern ice and Southern Forests sandwiching the Steppe and tundra.

The story of their migration goes something like this. 10,000 years ago most of the mammoth go extinct though evidence points to a small population that died out just 3,900 years ago in Britain. Sad state of affairs for mammoth hunters. That is also the time when the glacial expansion ended and the ice began to retreat. Such changes, pressure to survive and plain old curiosity may have driven the great mammoth hunters to roam farther for food.

Glaciation causes sea levels to drop and such an occurrence likely provided R1b a route across what would then have been tundra into mainland Europe. The Doggerland, now buried beneath the Southern Northern Sea might have been such a land bridge during the Holocene. The Doggerland land bridge disappeared between 6,500-6,200 years ago so the exodus from Britain would likely have occurred before then if the path R1b took was by foot.

The population map of R1b mutation follows such an intense curve all along Britain, Wales, Scotland and down the Atlantic side of France, and into Spain that migration by foot is likely.

It would have been very possible to be a nomad in the Sahara desert some 7000-6000 years ago. This would have been right in time with the land bridge from Britain to France. The Sahara was, for a brief window, an oasis of lush green grasslands, lakes, and plenty of wildlife to hunt. What secrets lie beneath those shifting sands is anyone’s guess. For nomadic hunters, such a trek was doable. This is a far-reaching grasp at a straw that is not proven only hypothesized — an attempt to link R1b Britain to R1b Cameroon.

Epilog

With such a sudden end to the oasis that was the Sahara people who relied upon the bounty would have been pushed outward. That is one explanation about how such a dense population of R1b ended up in Cameroon. If that is the case what a fate these people, all of R1b shared. One would have to ask which God they offended. They would have been driven by climate change at every turn. From the die off of the mammoth, to the formation of land bridge as the long cold glacial period shrank sea levels and began to change life as they knew it. Such a splinter group from the R1b clade that continued to hunt when many of their clade-kin mingled with the influx of farmers. To cross the Sarah when it was green only to have that paradise erased by a world shifting on its axis. Is this the story of how R1b returned to Africa?

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Categories: Featured, R

Tags: Altai region, Cameroon, Euro African, genealogy, genetic genealogy, genetics, Haplogroup R1b, Kirdi, northern Cameroon, Western Europe

Haplogroup R1a -Eastern Europe Y-Haplogroup J1 – Caucasus, North Africa, Southern Europe, Arabs, Jews