Haplogroup E-M2 (E1b1a)

E-M2 is one of the most successful paternal lineages in human history: born in West or Central Africa, it swept across the continent's southern half with the Bantu expansions of the last three thousand years — one of the largest demographic events of the ancient world — and today dominates the paternal gene pools of West, Central, Southern and much of East Africa. Through the Atlantic slave trade it also became the majority Y lineage of African-descended populations across the Americas, from the United States to Brazil and the Caribbean.

Its dense sub-branches (M191/U174, U175 and their children) are increasingly well resolved and increasingly well dated, which matters practically: for African-diaspora genealogy, the sub-branch can point toward a region of origin at a resolution the paper trail almost never reaches. In Europe and the Near East, E-M2 appears at low frequency along old Mediterranean and Saharan corridors — a small signal of contacts that long predate the modern era.

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'.