When I first got my father’s 23andMe results the Y and mtDNA were an interesting contrast. He, and therefore myself, carried Y lineage R1a1a, the lord of the paternal lineages. That was not that great a surprise. In the 1000 Genomes results for the Bangladeshi sample 20% of the men were direct paternal descendants of the R1a1a progenitor.
The mtDNA was a surprise. It was G1a2. This was curious to me since Bangladesh has some of the highest frequencies in the world of haplogroups M, the subhaplogroups in question being mostly restricted to South Asia. I wasn’t surprised that I was R1a1a, but I was even more confident that my maternal lineage was going to be an M, as would my father’s (my own mtDNA is U2b, not common, but not so surprising). As you can see from the map 23andMe places my father’s maternal lineage somewhere in Northeast Asia. The only information I could get about the geography was for G1a, “G1a has been found in samples from China (Daur, Hui, Kazakh, Korean, Manchu, and a sample of the general population of the city of Shenyang), Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Siberia (Yakut).”
The biggest sample of mtDNA results from Bangladesh I could find at N = 240 does not find any G at all, let alone G1a2. So this is clearly it is a rare haplogroup in the region. But, the authors do classify 13% of the Bangladeshis as carrying an “East Eurasian” haplogroup. Haplogroup A is found among Southeast Asians and Southern China, though not among Austronesians. Haplogroup F seems to have a similar distribution, as does D, B. The other haplogroups also seem “correctly” assigned in terms of modal distribution. They are all mostly East Asian.
Looking at the Y chromosome haplogroups in the 1000 Genomes there are two of O2 and O3, and one of C3, which are clearly of Southeast Asian origin. With N =5 out of 44 samples that is ~10%. O2 is interesting because it is found at very high frequencies among the Austro-Asiatic populations in South Asia, whether it be the Khasi, or Munda groups (general O2a). O3 seems associated with Tibeto-Burman populations, and C3 with East Asia more generally.