Male Takigawa genetic journey

Your Y chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup O3, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M122. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168.
The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual—"Eurasian Adam." This African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity's home continent.

Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source.

Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave "Eurasian Adam's" descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages.

Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is defined by the marker M89.

M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of "Eurasian Adam," and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East.

Many people of this lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.

With much of Earth's water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era's vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe "superhighway" and eventually peopled much of the continent.

A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.

Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

Most residents of the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to this unique individual, and carry his defining marker. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians have the M9 marker, as do most Europeans and many Indians. The haplogroup defined by M9, K, is known as the Eurasian Clan.

This large lineage dispersed gradually. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along a vast belt of Eurasian steppe, until the massive mountain ranges of south central Asia blocked their path.

The Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya, even more formidable during the era's ice age, divided eastward migrations. These migrations through the "Pamir Knot" region would subsequently become defined by additional genetic markers.

M175, first arose among early Siberians of the lineage M9. The haplogroup it defines, O, uniquely represents East Asia.

Siberian hunters followed the great steppes eastward, across southern Siberia, about 35,000 years ago. After these ancient migrants arrived in China and East Asia, the ice age advanced toward glacial maximum. Encroaching ice sheets and Central Asia's impassible mountain ranges (the Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya) effectively isolated the haplogroup in East Asia. There they evolved in isolation over the millennia.

Today, some eighty to ninety percent of all people living east of Central Asia's great mountain ranges are members of haplogroup O. M175 is nearly non-existent in western Asia and Europe.

More than half of all male Chinese carry the genetic marker M122, which arose on the M175 lineage. M122 is also widespread throughout east Asia and found in lower frequencies in Tahiti and Indonesia. This geographic pattern strongly suggests that the spread of haplogroup O3 is intimately tied to the advance of east Asian agriculture within the past 10,000 years.

Members of haplogroup O3 may well be descendents of China's first rice farmers. Archaeological evidence for the spread of rice agriculture to Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia parallels the genetic data and suggests that a unique population carrying this marker expanded and spread throughout the region.

This lineage is rarely found west of Central Asia's towering mountain ranges and is nearly unknown in the Middle East and Europe.