Quote Originally Posted by gamerdude873 View Post
Forgive me if i'm wrong, but as i understand it, this would be very difficult/nigh impossible. The y chromosome has very little actual " understand that the Y is fairly generic. I'm fresh from high school bio, and i did very well in it. One of the things my teacher taught was why men get screwed when it comes to genetic disease. Women, in order to have a recessive genetic disease, need to have both of their X chromosomes to have that disease. Men only have one X, so all it takes for a man to have a recessive genetic disease is for that X to be defective. The point of this is, many fewer genes exist on the Y than X, so like I said, the Y has very fewer features to track. Besides, there are many other chromosomes and genes that one could track much more easily, I think.

For all those that care or don't understand:
Mitochondrial DNA is also extranuclear, meaning outside the nucleus. It is located with mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. The mitochondria are all inheirited from the mother, because the sperm contains only DNA, and could not possibly donate mitochondria paternally.

Unless my teacher and book are asses, i think this is pretty accurate. Just my 2 cents anyways
Well I'll clear up some mistakes here. By 'recessive genetic disease' I take it you implicitly meant an X linked recessive trait like color blindness and hemophilia A. While it is true there are very few functional genes, only 86, are found on the Y chromosome (compare this to ~2000 on the X chromosome) there is still plenty of genetic material present or features as you put it, over 58 million base pairs (153 Mbp for X chromosome).

The Y chromosome has some unique quality that makes it a nice target for population genetics. For one because all males (there are some rare exceptions) have only 1 Y chromosome there is no homologous recombination. Meaning the Y chromosome a person inherits is the same one their father had, and their paternal grandfather and so on and so forth. This genetic material passed exclusively from father to son allows for a paternal line to be created. If a mutation occurs in the Y chromosome of a germline cell, this mutation will be inherited in ALL male descendents. The accumulation of these unique mutation events in each line give geneticist a tool to determine how close two populations are.

Also I think you have a misconception about what geneticist look at when they are comparing DNA sequences. Forgive me if I am reading you wrong but your statement sounds like they look at the genes in the Y chromosome when really it is the opposite. You don’t want to look at mutations with in a functional gene because these mutations often have an effect negative/positive on the health of an organism. This change in fitness puts evolutionary pressure on the mutation, and can change the rate it appears in the population. When genetic genealogists do research on the Y chromosome they look at non coding DNA, commonly called by the misnomer Junk DNA (specifically they count short tandem repeat (STR) & look for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)). They look here because in non-coding DNA these mutations are neutral and have no impact on the health of the organism*.

To show my point that the Y chromosome is indeed useful for studying this issue of the inhabitants of ancient Britain take a look at this NYT article that highlights arguments from both camps.A United Kingdom? Maybe

*(Disclaimer non-coding DNA can effect gene expression in complex ways)