new HVR2 match question

[Carolyn1955]

I was wondering how can you tell the generations match from someone newly added to your HVR2 list? Y-DNA has a generations FTDNATip calculator but can not be done through mtDNA matches other than family ancestry. Any advice?

Comparing family tree's is not possible since my 4th great grandmother never told anyone where her family was from. There is no record of her past. She's my brick wall. All I have to go on is I'm a U8a1 and that's pretty much it.

[cacio]

Carolyn:

The mtdna doesn't provide the level of detail of Y dna. For instance, the usual mutation rate for HVR1 is one mutation every 20,000 years, which means that if you match somebody on HVR1, the common ancestor could be 10,000 years ago (!). So even a match on HVR1 and 2 doesn't say much.

Of course, looking at the geographic distribution of matches is useful. And sometimes there are peculiar mutations. But there's very little one can say regarding recent common ancestry.

cacio

[darroll]

Did you try National Geographic.
They have the most DNA samples.

[PDHOTLEN]

Re mtDNA mutation rate

I think that 20,000 year mutation rate is misleading. That is just an average. Some haplotypes have mutated faster than others. I'm talking about the control region. I don't know anything about the coding region.