R1b

It's not all about cycling:

I had myself haplotyped through the National Geographic's Genographic project. As a male, I can have my Y chromosome tested and it will tell me what my ancestral father's geographic origin is, my father's father's father's father, etc. Pretty amazing. Note that this isn't an admixture test: it doesn't tell me if I'm half Irish or half Indian. In fact, I could be 15/16 European but my ancestral father could be from Africa and my test would come back as only African.

To go a little deeper, we ARE all from Africa, that's borne out by these tests, it's just a question of when we left. You find out which 'out of Africa' route you're ancestral father took.

So, to get to me. My haplotype is R1B. Turns out that my ancestral father ended up in Spain during the last Ice Age (around 15K years ago), and probably migrated to England once it became habitable again at 13K years ago. I say 'probably' cause it can't discern when exactly my ancestors moved there, though there are more tests to find out my 'subclade' giving more definition on the migration pattern. If I turn out to be R1b1c7 for example then I'll know that I was part of the original post Ice Age migration to the specter ed isle. In fact, they moved there so long ago that it wasn't even an island at the time. They just walked from Spain to Ipswitch.

In a word: I'm Basque. In a way...

I was born in England by the way, as were all my known relatives, if you're wondering why I'm assuming the early migration to the UK. The ale must have been good already.

I'm reading a really great book on this whole thing, that really gets technical on what's know archaeologically, linguistically, and genetically. The basic thesis being: neither the Vikings, nor the Anglo Saxons, wiped out all my ancesters that already inhabited the island when the invaded. The gene makeup is largely as it was 13K years ago. Rather they had large cultural effects, but didn't kill everybody. My ancestral father was probably there before all the later invasions. I'm the original briton, probably speaking something related to Basque, then moving to something related to Welsh, then lastly taking on English after the Anglo Saxon invasions.

Better go out and get my subclade testing next.

You can also do Mitochondrial testing to find out about your ancestral mother. In fact, for women, that's the only test you can do. My wife had it done and, surprise surprise, she's western european. Doesn't seem like you can get the same detail from the mtDNA test.