Akar Nusa
## A short opening scene A man holds a newborn son and thinks about the family name. The name will go to the child. So will something else, a small mark on the Y chromosome, passed father to son, long before surnames existed.
## The story Only men carry a father line, and they pass it to their sons. Of the 10,350 Malaysians we have tested, 4,858 are men. For the other 5,492 (53.1%) there is no father line to read. That is how biology works, not a fault. Women can ask a father, brother or son to be tested.
Of the men, 4,816 were named (4,644 clearly, 172 partly) and 42 (0.9%) could not be read. These shares are of the 4,816 named men.
One branch stands out. O-M324 has 2,277 men (47.3%), almost one in two. O-M119 follows with 707 (14.7%) and O-M268 with 668 (13.9%). These three hold about 76 in every 100 men. All three sit inside the same wide O family, which in total is 77 in every 100.
After that the list is small and varied. R-M420 (155, 3.2%), C-F1067 (151, 3.1%), H-M69 (93, 1.9%), C-F1370 (77, 1.6%), N-M1785 (75, 1.6%), D-CTS9290 (64, 1.3%) and O-M122 (61, 1.3%).
We saw 29 main branches and 175 exact branches. 86 of those exact branches have fewer than 5 men each, so we do not show them. One main branch has fewer than 5 men and is hidden.
By where each branch is most common today, about 88 in 100 named men carry branches best known in East, North and Southeast Asia, about 5 in 100 South Asia, and about 3 in 100 West Asia, Europe or Africa. About 3 in 100 carry R branches that are found from Central Asia to Europe.
## Where you can still see it today The father-line map is also a map of families who crossed seas and borders, and settled here. In Malaysia you can see the same movement in the kopitiam, the mamak stall and the kampung kitchen, though food does not show DNA.
## What DNA can tell, and what it cannot A father line is one thread, from father to father to father. Across the world, father lines have narrowed in the last 10,000 years, with some branches growing much larger than others (Karmin et al, 2015). So a very common branch does not mean a "pure" people. It means one branch spread widely.
It does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. The branch name is where a line is most common today, not what a man or his community is.
Our testers are not a perfect picture of all Malaysians. They chose to be tested, and some communities are tested more than others.
## Read more - International Society of Genetic Genealogy wiki: https://isogg.org/wiki/Wiki_Welcome_Page - Karmin et al 2015, A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture, Genome Research: https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.186684.114
