Mother line and father line: do they point to the same place?

## A short opening scene A man opens two results side by side. His mother line says one part of the world. His father line says another. He wonders if one of them is wrong. Often neither is.

## The story Your mother line and your father line are two separate threads. One comes through your mother's mothers. The other, for men, comes through father's fathers. They can come from the same region, or from very different ones.

Of the 10,350 Malaysians we tested, 4,816 men have both lines. Where both lines can be placed in a broad region, that is 4,235 men, we compared them.

For 3,963 men (93.6%), both lines are best known from the same broad region. The biggest group is East and Southeast Asia on both sides: 3,706 men, 77 in every 100 men with both lines.

For 272 men (6.4%), the two lines point to different regions. - South Asian mother line, East or Southeast Asian father line: 83 men - East or Southeast Asian mother line, South Asian father line: 73 men - East or Southeast Asian mother line, West Asian or European father line: 60 men - South Asian mother line, West Asian or European father line: 23 men - West Asian or European mother line, East or Southeast Asian father line: 16 men - West Asian or European mother line, South Asian father line: 16 men

A few other pairings have fewer than 5 men, so we do not show them.

## Where you can still see it today Many Malaysian families have stories of a grandfather from one place and a grandmother from another. This page is a count of how often DNA shows that kind of meeting.

## What DNA can tell, and what it cannot It can show that your two lines start in different regions. It cannot tell who moved, when, or why. Worldwide, father lines have narrowed more than mother lines in recent millennia (Karmin et al, 2015), so the two threads do not always tell the same story.

It does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. A mixed pair is not a "surprise" or a problem. Mixing between peoples is very common (Hellenthal et al, 2014).

Our testers are not a perfect picture of all Malaysians. They chose to be tested. Also, only men can be compared, since only men have a father line.

## Read more - PhyloTree: https://www.phylotree.org - Karmin et al 2015, Genome Research: https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.186684.114 - Hellenthal et al 2014, Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1243518