Welcome to the L3 Haplogroup Project Forum

[mulkeyusa]

This forum was created as an additional platform to ask questions and exchange L3 ancestral data and ideas.

In this forum there is NO such thing as a dumb question!!!!

Lincoln Mulkey
L3 mtDNA Project Administrator

[yliser]

Futher testing on L3 in the works?

Does anyone know if there are any academic studies in the work for the L3 haplogroup? I've seen only 2 studies and both gave metion that there needed to be further studies. My family mtDNA is L3e2* and I still don't understand where they're from. Academic papers (done in 2003, but published in 2004) say west-central Africa, but looking at the map on the Genographic Project, which breaks the haplogroup down to L3, I would think it was eastern Africa. I'm very confused and hoping for more research being published in the near future.

[cherylt4]

I have a question

My mtdna haplogroup is L3*. What is the difference between L3 and L3*. Thanks Cheryl

[cacio]

yliser:

I believe you refer to the Salas paper The African diaspora: mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic slave trade. There has been an update (with more sequences):
Salas et al. Charting the Ancestry of African Americans,
Am J Hum Genet. October 2005; 77(4): 676–680.
Which essentially confirms the previous paper, and once again warns that most lineages are very diffused in Africa so it is often not possible, with our current knowledges, to pinpoint exactly the area of origin.

Also, just in case you missed it, there is an older paper on L3e:
Bandelt et al. 2001
Phylogeography of the human mitochondrial haplogroup L3e: a snapshot of African prehistory and Atlantic slave trade

Don't read much into the Genographic project arrows, they're drawn this way for aesthetic reasons, and the text is often based on old information that has been qualified or disproved by more recent research. The papers you've read are the right source.

cherylt:
in scientific papers, L3* means that the person has been found to belong to L3, but not to the subgroups of L3 that were tested. this means that either the person belongs to a new, unknown subgroup, or that his belonging to a known group could not be established. However, I don't think FTDNA does much deep testing, so my guess is that in FTDNA they mean the same. You should however send an email to FTDNA asking for information. you should ask about how your assignment was made, that is, you can ask whether the assignment to L3 was made only looking at HVR1, or if they tested something else, and if so, what.

cacio

[mulkeyusa]

L3*

Cherylt, I received the following reply from FTDNA:

The * after the L3 indicates that they do not belong to L3b or L3e, which
are the two branches of L3 that we can identify based on the results.

Lincoln