From a North Sea tribe

Given the paucity of records that have thus far been immediately available to me (which isn’t to say that they don’t exist or that they have been neglected by other members of the family!), genetic genealogy has been rather instrumental in tracking down some of my Cooper family connexions. In particular, the Y-DNA test (which traces back the direct paternal line ancestry, through mutations transmitted on the Y-chromosome in men) helped me confirm a direct relationship with the line descending from the William Jacob Cooper who left Bucks County, PA and moved his family to the Quaker settlement at Bush River, SC.

The Y-DNA test also helped me to confirm a certain ‘branch’ of my more distant ‘Cooper’ ancestry (though, of course, the surname wouldn’t come into existence until much, much later), to a certain man who lived around 2200 BC somewhere on the continental European coast of the North Sea, likely in what is now Frisia. This man belonged to the Western European R1b Y-haplogroup, and transmitted to his descendants a Y-DNA mutation called R-Z18. Significant clusters of the modern male-line descendants of this ancestor can be found in the modern-day Low Countries, southern Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway), Scotland and the historical region of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. R-Z18 is genetically ‘downstream’ of the ‘Germanic’ (disclaimer: these labels attributing modern cultural characteristics to pre-historic people are inexact and possibly inappropriate) common ancestor R-U106, and descendants of R-Z18 seem to account for only about five percent of modern-day progeny of R-U106. R-U106 is subsequently ‘downstream’ of R-M269, a mutation associated with human remains belonging to the nomadic Yamnaya culture of remote Eurasian antiquity, which lived between 3300 and 2600 BC in what is now southern Russia, Crimea and the eastern Ukraine.

Imagined depiction of a Yamnaya burial rite, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1899

Again, having only dabbled thus far in genetic genealogy, I am not even certain I am representing even this small sliver of the genetic history with anything close to the needed degree of epistemological humility, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse into the distant prehistory of the ‘spear-side’ forebears of the Cooper family.