Haplogroup C-M130

C-M130 preserves one of the earliest chapters of the human expansion out of Africa: its deep branches scatter along the old coastal route — Aboriginal Australian C lines, Papuan and Wallacean branches, relict pockets in South and Southeast Asia — while its northern wing, C2 (M217), became a great lineage of Inner and Northeast Asia. C2 dominates among Mongols, Kazakhs, Buryats, Tungusic-speaking peoples and reaches into Korea and Japan; across the Bering Strait, C2 lines are among the founding paternal lineages of several Indigenous North American peoples, notably in the Na-Dene-speaking world.

The branch carries genetic genealogy's most storied cluster: a C2 'star cluster' that expanded explosively from around the eleventh to thirteenth centuries across the former Mongol world — long popularly attributed to Genghis Khan's male line, an attribution the sources cannot confirm and recent scholarship treats with caution. What the tree does record, regardless of the name attached, is a single medieval lineage multiplying across half of Asia.

One line among many: your Y haplogroup traces a single paternal line — one ancestor per generation out of thousands — so it is a thread of deep ancestry, not an ethnicity and not a percentage of who you are. Two men in the same branch share a forefather, but the rest of their genomes can differ as much as any two strangers'.