Haplogroup O-M175

O-M175 is, by carrier count, among the most common paternal haplogroups on Earth: the dominant lineage of East and Southeast Asia, carried by most men in China, Vietnam, Korea and the Malay world and a large share in Japan. It divided early into wings whose geographies still structure the region — O2 (M122) expanding with the Neolithic millet and rice worlds that became the Han heartland, O1b tracking the rice-farming and Austroasiatic-speaking south, and O1a strongest in Taiwan and among Austronesian-speaking peoples.

That last wing sailed: O1a and O1b lineages travelled with the Austronesian expansion from Taiwan through the Philippines and Indonesia into the remote Pacific, and westward to Madagascar — one haplogroup's children scattered from Easter Island to East Africa. In Europe and the Americas, an O result almost always marks East or Southeast Asian paternal ancestry within recent generations.

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'.