Time Travel and Haplogroup Ancestry - the Index

Odyssey of Y explores the plausible migratory routes of the variants expressed on my Y-DNA—a genetic marker inherited exclusively through the paternal line. Conversely, Ovum imagines the potential journeys taken by the variants on my mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is a genetic marker passed down strictly through the maternal line.

As a digital time traveller, I have used haplogroup studies and human population genetics to weave a fictional narrative, illustrated by AI-generated reconstructions. These stories represent only a few possibilities out of thousands, depicting how these genetic markers may have drifted through diverse global cultures before arriving in a modern-day Englishman.

It raises the ultimate questions: Who are we really? And what does it actually mean to be British?

Index

Father-line of an English Time-traveller

Odyssey of Y charts the journey of my Y-DNA, from the Zagros Mountains 25,000 years ago, to my Great Grandfather on the Western Front. It is yDNA haplogroup L. My terminal is Y-DNA Haplogroup L (M20) > M22 > M317 > SK1412 > SK1414 > FGC51088 > FGC 51041 > FGC51036 or simply L-FGC51036.

  • Odyssey of Y - Act 1.  25,000 BCE - Baradostian ibex hunters of the Ice Age Zagros mountains (present day Iran).
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 2.  18,000 BCE - Zarzian hunter-gatherers of the Zagros
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 3.    7,500 BCE - Aceramic Neolithic. Pioneer agriculturalists of the Zagros.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 4.    3,800 BCE - Chalcolithic teller at Godin Tepe in the Zagros.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 5.    2,050 BCE - Bronze Age smith at Bakr Awa, Shahrizor Plain of the Zagros. Visits a Ur III City.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 6.    1,500 BCE - Hurrian merchant takes the lineage westwards to Aleppo, Syria, now under Mitanni control.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 7.         64 BCE - Temple treasurer at Baalat Gebal, Byblos, Roman Syria.

Two alternative routes next follow, Option A Early migration to Britain (Roman) or Option B Late migration to Britain (Late Medieval). In reality there are countless possibilities of the route to Britain. Here, I give you just two of those possibilities as options. The choice is yours.

  • Odyssey of Y Act 8 Option A      235 CE - Early Migration Hypothesis (Roman Empire). A bureaucrat with Levantine roots is posted to Roman Britannia. Political events drives him to seek refuge in the Thames Valley.
  • Odyssey of Y Act 9 Option A    1432 CE - Early Migration Hypothesis (continued).  Johannes de la Broke at a manor court

OR:

  • Odyssey of Y - Act 8 Option B    1490 CE - Late Migration Hypothesis (Venetian Galley). Fishermen and mariners at Beirut, travels by the route of Venetian galleys to Venice and  onto Southampton, Early Tudor England. 
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 9 Option B    1530 CE -  Late Migration Hypothesis (continued). Mariner's son and a wool merchant, takes the lineage from Southampton docks, to the wool producing Hampshire and Berkshire Downs

Either possibility takes us onto the recorded ancestry:

  • Odyssey of Y - Act 10.     1746 CE - Recorded genealogy. John Brooker, Copyhold tenant farmer of Long Wittenham in Berkshire, England.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 11.      1916 CE - My great grandfather on the Western Front in World War One.
  • Odyssey of Y - Act 12.      1939 CE - my paternal grandfather carries the yDNA L-FGC51036 to Norfolk, East Anglia. An Edwardian Love Triangle solved through genetic genealogy and DNA matching.
  • Odyssey of Y - Finale.  - Summary and rationale for my hypothesis that my "ghost" Y-DNA lineage L-FGC51036 remained for millennia in the Zagros region of South West Asia, before transferring to the Levant, where it later hopped onto Venetian galleys, to leave a son in Southampton, England.

Mother-line of an English Time-traveller

Ovum charts the journey of my mitochondrial DNA, from the Levant 25,000 years ago, to my great grandmother at Southwood Hall Farm in Norfolk. It begins as mtDNA Haplogroup H (Helena) and grows over time to H6a1a8 (F8693412). You could say that it's route over the past 25,000 years has been: H (Clan Helena) > H6 > H6a > H6a1 > H6a1a > H6a1a8 > f8693412

  • Ovum - Act 1.    25,000 BCE - Helena, Ice-Age hunter-gatherer mother in the refuge of the Levant.
  • Ovum - Act 2.      4,500 BCE - H6/a, early pastoralists and fishing on the Volga (present day South Russian Federation).
  • Ovum - Act 3.      3,000 BCE - H6a1 widow in Chalcolithic Yamnaya culture, leading her herding folk westwards towards the Pannonian plain (present day Moldovia to Hungary).
  • Ovum - Act 4.      2,200 BCE - Hypothesis for the movement of my lineage, and H6a1/a woman in Bronze Age Únětice culture at Moravian Gate (present day Czech Republic). Two alternative routes next follow - Option A and Option B

Two alternative routes next follow, Option A Late Migration path to Britain (Anglo-Saxon) or Option B Early migration path to Britain to Britain (Earlier Iron-Age). In reality there are countless possibilities of the route to Britain. Here, I give you just two of those possibilities as options. The choice is yours.

OR:

Either route eventually takes us to Medieval East Anglia:

  • Ovum - Act 9.         1349 CE - Medieval villager in South Norfolk faces loss, grief and hardship from the Great Death of the Plague.
  • Ovum - Act 10.       1661 CE - Recorded genealogy.  Generations of yeomanry in the South Norfolk parish of Carleton Rode. Conformist Anglicans and Worstead spinners.
  • Ovum - Act 11.        1871 CE - Restored portraits, agricultural labourers and rural poverty. A great grandmother from personal memory. Family tales.
  • Ovum - Act 12 Finale.        - My Norfolk mother, the wedding of her parents, ancestral resilience. A research link between my mitochondrial DNA and a resistance to Alzheimer's. 

Zen and the Art of the Haplogroup

​Haplogroup testing has slipped somewhat into the shadows following the surge of general autosomal DNA testing. It is a pity, though I suspect haplogroup testing will see a significant resurrection in the future.

​General genetic tests—those examining recombined nuclear DNA in the autosomes (and occasionally the X chromosome)—work well at a continental level and are sometimes slightly more refined. However, their ability to define lineages much deeper than that is often grossly exaggerated. They are also limited to a span of only several generations; beyond that, an individual's specific ancestral signature is inevitably washed out by the tides of recombination.

​I believe you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

​In comparison, testing for Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups shines in its logic and scientific rigour. Whilst restricted to only one or two narrow lines of descent, these genetic markers are incredibly resilient, carrying us back through the millennia.

​Integrated Ancestral Studies

These studies are not restricted to autosomal DNA alone. They embrace recorded genealogy, genetic matching, and local social and economic history. They draw upon landscape history, prehistory, archaeology, topography, architecture, and the broader context of evolutionary life on Earth.

It is, ultimately, a celebration of the ancestors. It is time travel.

Odyssey of Y Act 8 - Option A Severan Bureaucrat, Romans in Londinium 230 CE

Back to the Future: Time Travel and Haplogroup Index

My yDNA follows the path: L-M20 > M22 > M317 > SK1412 > SK1414 > FGC51041 > FGC51088 > FGC51036. I have been posting episodes detailing events that could have occurred during its 25,000-year journey of development. I traced a journey from its roots in the Zagros and Caucasus mountains to the Levant, culminating in a fictional temple treasurer of Byblos in 64 BCE.

From that point, I have developed two competing hypotheses regarding its leap to the open-field systems of Berkshire. Option A represents the Early Migration or Roman Empire route. In this scenario, my lineage migrates to Londinium, Britannia, via the Romano-Greek colony of Patras and Rome itself, between 180 CE and 205 CE.


A fictional descendant of Phoenician temple treasurers in Byblos had outgrown his Levantine homeland. Seizing the opportunities offered by the Roman Empire, he first relocated to the Greek colony of Patras (Achaia) to bolster his bureaucratic credentials. There, he married a daughter of his Romano-Greek patrons before travelling to Rome itself to receive a new commission.

Septimius Severus (reigned 193–211 CE) was eagerly recruiting administrators from the East to dismantle the entrenched autocracy within his empire. Our ancestor, Aurelius, was keen to advance his career. Yet, once in Rome, he found the appointment to be a formidable challenge—not only for himself but also for his wife and daughter. The posting was Britannia.


The Gateway of Londinium

Home became a town house near the Walbrook stream, a short distance from the massive stone quays of the Thames. To Aurelius’s Greek wife, the docks were a cacophony of damp timber and salted fish—a far cry from her warm home in Achaia. To Aurelius, however, they were his lifeline.

Under Septimius Severus, the province was being transformed into a supply base for the Emperor’s planned campaigns in the North. Aurelius’s days were spent at the Forum, the largest building of its kind north of the Alps, overseeing the arrival of Spanish oil, Gaulish wine, and the local grain destined to feed the legions at Eboracum (York).

On the Road: The Procurement Trail

Aurelius’s duties took him away from the comforts of the capital and onto the straight, paved arteries of Watling Street and the Ermine Way. His task was the annona militaris—the requisitioning of supplies for the army. In the South and East, he met with local civitas leaders; men who styled themselves as Roman senators but still spoke with the lilt of the Belgae or the Iceni. In the ‘palace’ at Fishbourne, he negotiated with regional administrators who were eager to prove their loyalty to the new African Emperor.

The era of independent British kings was largely over, yet the chieftains still held sway over the rural populations. Aurelius had to be a diplomat; he needed their cattle, their leather for tents, and their lead from the Mendip Hills. He carried the authority of an emperor who did not care for tradition. If a local magistrate grumbled about the grain tax, Aurelius reminded them—perhaps with a touch of Levantine wit—that Severus rewarded loyalty but had little patience for the ‘old ways’ of the Italian elite.

The Domestic Struggle

The ‘great challenge’ he had feared in Rome manifested in the small details of daily life. He likely spent a fortune on hypocaust heating, burning endless cords of wood to keep his growing family warm during the ‘perpetual mist’ of the British winter. Whilst he could procure the finest Mediterranean imports for the Governor’s table, his own family had to adapt to local butter instead of olive oil, and the heavy, hopped ales of the North instead of the sweet wines of Achaia.

A Man of Two Worlds

Aurelius was a ‘Severan Man’—a product of a meritocratic, globalised empire. In the morning, he might have offered incense to Mithras or the Syrian Goddess in a small shrine by the London docks; in the afternoon, he was a cold-eyed bureaucrat calculating the weight of British wool.

He was the bridge between the ancient traditions of the East and the raw, developing frontier of the West. He was not just living in Britain; he was building the Roman machinery that kept it pinned to the map of the world.


In 235 CE, on the docks of Londinium, Aurelius heard the news: the assassination of Alexander Severus.

In March of that year, the last of the Syrian line, Alexander Severus, had been murdered by his own troops at Mogontiacum (Mainz, Germany). He was killed alongside his mother, Julia Mamaea—the woman who had effectively governed the Empire. For Aurelius, this was the death of his patron. The new Emperor, Maximinus Thrax, was a career soldier who had risen from the ranks; he had no use for the sophisticated ‘Eastern’ civil administrators favoured by the Severans. To the new regime, men like Aurelius were viewed as ‘palace softies’ who had drained the treasury on bureaucracy rather than the army.

The shift would have been felt instantly in Londinium. Aurelius gathered his family—which now included two daughters and a younger son. They were in grave danger. His only advantage was being among the first to receive the news at the quayside. He acted quickly before his property could be confiscated. Prepared for such a crisis, Aurelius had already formulated an emergency plan: an escape up the Thames with his wealth to a refuge he had kept secret.

Aurelius Belicatus (the son) By 250 CE, Aurelius the senior had passed away, succeeded by his son, Aurelius Belicatus, as head of the household. The farmstead was now developing into a respectable villa. He had married a young, local British wife.


The lineage remained, surviving into the mid-18th century as copyhold tenants. No longer following the imperial bureaucratic rules of movement, the paternal line now adhered to an agricultural rule of stability.

In the villages of the Thames Valley, across the borders of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, the family held their place not by deed, but by the "custom of the manor". Their names were etched into the manorial court rolls, securing their right to the land through generations of quiet husbandry. The ancient Levantine heritage, once carried by soldiers or traders across vast distances, was now tethered to a few acres of English soil—preserved by the very permanence of the feudal tradition.


With each passing generation, the lineage becomes increasingly British, then more specifically English. Few would ever guess at the ancient Asian heritage encoded within the nucleotides of the Y-DNA. That a line of descent has its roots in the Zagros Mountains, and later among the Hurrians and Phoenicians, could remain forgotten for over 1,700 years.

Whether one prefers the "Early Migration" theory or the "Late Migration" narrative—centred on late-medieval Venetian galleys—the genetic reality remains the same. We know that Y-DNA L-M20 > M22 > M317 > SK1412 > SK1414 > FGC51041 > FGC51088 > FGC51036 originated in Western Asia (most likely the Zagros or South Caucasus). It likely moved into the Levant, where it persisted as an uncommon, narrow "ghost" haplogroup. Eventually—whether in antiquity or more recently—it reached Southern Britain, where it remains incredibly rare today.

GO TO NEXT ACT - Option A. Medieval Thames Valley villeins. 1432 CE


Back to the Future: Time Travel and Haplogroup Index