Y-DNA Q-Z780 was one of the earliest discoveries to come out of the 1K Genomes project. It was documented on the now defunct DNA-Forums website. Without an archive it is hard to be sure of sources. However, I believe that we owe Q-Z780 to Ray Banks of Colorado. Who would have guessed that a SNP discovered in samples from Mexico would prove so important to paternal lineages across the Americas?

Once the Z780 marker became available at Family Tree DNA, the Y-DNA Q-M242 project began testing those who had a history of native ancestry and were Q-M242 but were not the well established Native American Q-M3. It quickly became clear that almost all were part of the Q-Z780 lineage.

Meanwhile, the National Geographic Genographic project launched Geno 2.0. With the vast amounts of new data, they began building a Y-DNA Tree that includes many 1K Genomes markers. They recently released the first version of their tree to the public. They show the Y-DNA tree under Q-Z780 as so:

• Z780, CTS1780, CTS2730
  • L570, L569
    • L568
  • F2393
  • L66, M481, P329
  • L191

In my next post, I will tell the story of how Q-Z780 is now placed on the larger Q-M242 tree.