My old haplogroup posts are so out of date I ought to hunt them down and delete them. I don’t do it because I (still) like the idea of coming across them them now and then and being reminded what the world was like.
This map is not the most rigorous replacement I could find for those old posts, but it shows something much more interesting than mere detail. It shows the approximate boundaries of the male mega lineages of Europe. Or more strictly, where each of those lineages is the majority. Like nations but not. Or tribes but not.
I’m drawn to this map for the simple reason that this (in a way) is the most common question newbies have.
Everyone wants to know what their haplogroup tells them about their family history. That’s not an easy question to answer. For one thing, your haplogroup is not who you are. Everyone in Europe and in the European Diaspora is descended from men who belonged to all the different haplogroups. That’s just the way it works.
On top of that, no matter what your haplogroup, it is almost certainly spread throughout Europe by links that are tens of thousands of years old. Knowing where it originated or where it’s been for the past few thousand years tells you almost nothing meaningful about your personal history.
That doesn’t mean the big picture is meaningless. That’s what I like about this map. It gives the big picture. If you look at it, and remember what you see here, you’ll be able to get your bearings whenever anyone starts talking about haplogroups.
I encourage you to go read the original post If European Borders Were Drawn By DNA Instead Of Ethnicity at BrilliantMaps.com (June 25, 2017). There’s a short and very nifty piece about each of the haplogroups shown here. Then if you’re in love with the data, go explore the DNA pages at Eupedia.com, starting with Distribution of European Y-chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) haplogroups by country in percentage. Or, if you’re looking for something not quite as hardcore, European Prehistory, Anthropology & Genetics.