In 2012, the great-grandson of Albert Perry, a man born into slavery in South Carolina, tested his Y DNA and the result was the groundbreaking discovery of haplogroup A00, a very ancient branch of the Y tree found in Africa.
The results were announced at the Family Tree DNA Conference in 2012 and published the following year.
Early Y DNA tree dating was imprecise at best. As the tree expands and additional branches are added, our understanding of the Y tree structure, the movement of peoples, and the evolution of branches is enhanced.
In 2015, two Mbo people from Cameroon tested as described in the paper by Karmin et al.
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Those men added branch A-YP2683 to the tree.
In 2018, a paper by D’Atanasio et al sequenced 104 living males including a man from Cameroon which added branch A-L1149.
In 2020, the paper by Lipson et all found an ancient branch of A00 subsequently named A-L1087 that was added above A00, dating from between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago and believed to have been found among the remains of Bantu-speakers. Of course, that doesn’t tell us when A-L1087 occurred, but it does tell us that it occurred sometime before they were born.
How do you like the little skull indicating ancient DNA, as compared to the flags indicating the location of the earliest known ancestor of present-day testers? I’m very pleased to see ancient DNA results being incorporated into the tree.
What About Albert Perry’s Great-Grandson’s Y DNA?
The Y DNA of Albert Perry’s great-grandson had never been NGS sequenced with either the Big Y-500 or the current Big Y-700. NGS technology for Y DNA wasn’t yet available at the time. Is there more information to be gleaned from his DNA?
Recently, Albert Perry’s great-grandson’s DNA was upgraded to the Big Y-700, and two other descendants of Albert Perry tested at the Big Y-700 level as well.
The original 2012 tester, Albert Perry’s great-grandson, added branch A-L1100, and Albert’s great-great and great-great-great-grandsons split his branch once again by adding branch A-FT272432.
The haplogroup A Y DNA tree shows the new tree structure.
Looking at the Block Tree at FamilyTreeDNA, Albert Perry’s descendants are shown, along with the ancient sample at the far right.
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Because so few men have tested and fallen into this line, the dark blue equivalent SNPs reach far back in time. As more men test, these will eventually be broken into individual branches.
The men who carry these important SNPs and their branching information will either be men from Africa or the diaspora.
I would like to thank the Perry family for their continuing contributions to science.
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