What this evidence cannot show
Every claim on this site rests on two haplogroup assignments and a body of published population genetics. Both have real limits. A reader who knows what the evidence cannot show is better placed to judge what it can.
Two lines out of more than a thousand
A Y-DNA haplogroup traces exactly one path: father, to his father, to his father. An mtDNA haplogroup traces the equivalent path through mothers. Neither says anything about any other ancestor.
Ten generations back — roughly 250 to 300 years — a person has up to 1,024 ancestral slots. Y-DNA describes one of them. mtDNA describes one more. The other 1,022 are invisible to both tests. A great-grandmother's father contributes to who someone is and appears in neither result.
E-PF2546 and H1-T16189C! are real, specific and informative — about two threads. They are not a summary of anyone's ancestry.
A haplogroup is not an ethnicity, a nationality or a tribe
Haplogroups are branches defined by mutations. They are older than any modern nation and older than most named peoples. E-M81 is often called "the Berber marker" as shorthand, but that label describes a statistical association with Amazigh populations — it is not a definition of who is Amazigh.
Carrying E-M81 does not make someone Amazigh, and not carrying it does not make someone less so. Amazigh identity is carried by language, culture, self-designation and community. Tachelhit spoken in a household does more to make that identity real than any marker on a chromosome.
Tribal and confederation membership, Chtouka affiliation included, is likewise a social and historical fact. It lives in genealogy, custom and place — not in a test result.
The dates carry wide error bars
Coalescence dates on this site are estimates, not measurements. They depend on which mutation rate is used for calibration, how many samples were sequenced, and which populations those samples came from. Different published methods produce genuinely different answers from the same data.
E-M81 — a two-millennium spread
Solé-Morata et al. (2017) put the TMRCA at roughly 2,000–3,000 years ago. D'Atanasio et al. (2018) put it at 2,000–4,200. That gap spans the difference between a Roman-era expansion and a much older one.
H1 — two different numbers
The global coalescence of H1 is estimated at about 11,400 years ago (range ~9,000–13,700). Its coalescence within North Africa is estimated at 8,000–11,000 years ago. These are different quantities and easy to confuse.
This site conflated those two H1 figures until September 2026. One family now quotes the North African coalescence, because that is the one relevant to when this maternal line arrived in the Maghreb. Where a single figure appears anywhere on this site, it is a midpoint — and the range is what the evidence actually supports.
One sample cannot describe a population
An individual result is a single data point. It can confirm that a lineage exists in a region. It cannot establish how common that lineage is, how it is distributed, or how it got there.
Every population-level claim on this site comes from the published studies listed under research — never from the personal result. Where the two appear near each other, the published work is doing all the generalising.
North African ancient DNA is still a thin record
Ancient genomes from the Maghreb remain scarce compared with Europe, and preservation conditions across much of North Africa are poor. Several conclusions summarised here rest on small sample counts from a handful of sites.
This is a field whose picture has changed substantially within the last decade and can be expected to change again. Findings described here as established should be read as currently best supported. Where studies genuinely disagree, this site tries to say so rather than pick a winner.
What this site does claim
That two specific haplogroups sit in one Souss-Massa family line; that the published literature places those haplogroups in a particular historical and geographic context; and that the cultural material here reflects the Chtouka confederation as it is lived and remembered.
It does not claim to have measured anyone's ancestry, resolved a debated date, or spoken for Amazigh people generally.
Last updated: 10 September 2026