Pedro used the DNA testing company 23andMe, and along with an ethnic breakdown he got his Y-chromosomal haplogroup. Just as we share the last name Rueda, it turns out we also share the same Y-chromosomal haplogroup -- R-CTS4065. Pedro told me that at least five other men on 23andMe with the last name Rueda also have the haplogroup R-CTS4065. This isn't just a bag of letters and numbers, it shows that Pedro and I and all these other Rueda men share a common direct male chain of descent.
Amazingly, and luckily, Pedro and I have the parish records from Zapatoca, San Gil, Guane, and other towns in Santander Department, Colombia to directly trace our paternal lineage. We can infer from the records that my 9th-great-grandfather is the same as Pedro's 6th-great-grandfather, Bernardo de Rueda Sarmiento (c.1646-1720)!
I've seen lots of people with colonial American roots have "last name studies," it's now cool to find a Latino example. It's amazing to think that Pedro and I can pinpoint the little genetic bit on our Y-chromosome that we've inherited from a man who died exactly 300 years ago!
Here is our paternal family tree (and keep in mind that Pedro's male ancestors had kids later in life than mine did, haha). (Click on the tree to see it full-size.)
We don't know a lot about Bernardo de Rueda Sarmiento's life. He was born around 1646 in Guane, which was called in those days Moncora. It was a frontier settlement that only a generation before had been an encomienda (roughly a cross between an Indian reservation and a plantation). Bernardo grew up to be a landowner and slaveowner like his father, and married his first cousin, Cecilia Sarmiento de Olvera (born c.1661). When you're a racist in a tiny town, your marriage prospects are very few.
Bernardo became a footnote to history in 1688, when he joined a group of local men in signing a petition to have his settlement be named a separate town. They chose the name "Santa Cruz y San Gil de la Nueva Baeza," or "San Gil" for short, and it didn't hurt that Gil was the viceroy's name. The petition reached Madrid in 1689, and King Carlos II "the Bewitched" (or at least, his handlers) approved it. Five years later, the king granted San Gil a court of arms, a distinction which San Gil used to fuel a feud with the neighboring town of Socorro. So Bernardo was born into a frontier settlement and died in an official Spanish colonial town.
The paper trail for our paternal line goes back a couple more generations. Bernardo's grandfather, Cristóbal de Rueda González, is the first Rueda who came to Colombia, from his hometown of Priego de Córdoba, Andalucía. His father, Alonso de Rueda, probably lived in this area as well.
Who was the first ancestor with the R-CTS4065 mutation on his Y-chromosome, and when did he live? I have no idea. He probably predates modern surnames, and probably even written records. A database of Y-chromosome data called The Big Tree shows men with the mutation R-CTS4065 and a variety of last names living in Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, France, the Netherlands, and other European countries. To me, it makes no sense to say that R-CTS4065 is from a particular "nationality." It was a man on the continent of Europe who after many generations had his direct-male descendants settle in mostly different parts of Western Europe.
(By the way, the "CTS" in R-CTS4065 refers to researcher Chris Tyler-Smith of England's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who has studied population growth among human males.)
We can infer a lot about this population movement of men, based on who has which Y-chromosome mutations. The guys with the R-CTS4065 mutation are part of the larger haplogroup R-Z220, of which at the top of this post you can see a distribution map. There are men with the R-Z220 mutation throughout western and southern Europe, but the highest concentration is in north-central Iberia.
R-Z220 in turn is part of the larger haplogroup R-DF27, which according to a 2017 study probably arose around 2200 BCE in northeast Iberia. So I can infer that my direct-male ancestors were living on Iberia for over 3,700 years before coming to Colombia.
How did my direct-male line come to Iberia? The R-DF27 haplogroup is part of the larger R1b haplogroup, which started to migrate from the Pontic Steppe (roughly now Ukraine, north of the Black Sea) around 3000 BCE. These men from the R1b haplogroup belonged to the Yamnaya herding culture, and they had several tools up their warm winter sleeves. They knew how to make metal tools, and they domesticated horses and oxen, with whom they shared an early form of the plague gene Yersinia pestis. They also used to use the oxen to pull wagons, which featured early forms of the wheel. These Yamnaya people spoke the proto-Indo-European language, and funny enough the reconstructed proto-Indo-European word for wheel, "hret," evolved into the Latin word "rota," which in turn became the Spanish word "Rueda" -- the last name that Pedro and I share!
The Yamnaya's cultural combination of wheeled transportation, animal transportation, plague, and metal weapons had a devastating impact on Iberia -- around 4,000 years ago a majority of male lineages in Spain were replaced with subhaplogroups of R1b. And "replaced" is a euphemism that scientists use to cover an unknown amount of death, war, disease, rape, servitude, and other forms of conflict. It's also strange to think that direct-male descendants of these Bronze Age invaders later did kind of the same thing in Latin America, using another conquest accompanied with domesticated animals, metal weapons, and disease to forever change the genetic makeup of the region.
We also know how the R1b haplogroup connects back to the humanity's most recent living common male ancestor. Each branch below represents a man who had a random genetic mutation that he passed on to his offspring. Over tens of thousands of years, the genetic markers pile up:
• Y-Chromosomal Adam - lived over 180,000 years ago in Africa.
• P305 branch - over 100,000 years ago in Africa.
• M42 branch - around 80,000 years ago in East Africa.
• M168 branch - around 70,000 years ago in East Afrca.
• P143 branch - around 60,000 years ago in Southwest Asia.
• M89 branch - around 55,000 years ago in Southwest Asia.
• M578 branch - around 50,000 years ago in Southwest Asia.
• P128 branch - around 45,000 years ago in South Asia.
• M526 branch - around 42,000 years ago in South or Southeast Asia.
• M45 branch - around 35,000 years ago in Central Asia or South Asia.
• M207 branch - around 30,000 years ago in Central Asia.
• P231 branch - around 30,000-25,000 years ago in Central Asia.
• M343 branch - around 22,000-17,000 years ago in probably West Asia. This is the same as the R1b haplogroup, of which one subset spread through the Yamnaya migration discussed above. The Genographic Project said about 55% of Western European men, 43% of Central Asian men, and 23% of men in Africa's central Sahel belong to this haplogroup and its many branches.
• M269 branch - around 15,000-6,500 years ago in West Asia.
• P310 branch - originated in West Asia in a still undetermined time.
• P312 branch - around 14,000-5,500 years ago in West Asia.
• Z40481 branch
• ZZ11 branch
• DF27 branch - originated c.2200 BC in northeast Iberia, according to a recent genetic study (Solé-Morata et. al, 2017).
• Z195 branch
• Z272 branch
• Z220 branch - originated c.1300 BC in north-central Iberia.
• Z295 branch
• S25783 branch
• R-CTS4065, from whom my direct-male ancestors descend.
And if you're a visual learner like me, here again is the Y-chromosomal family tree, from "The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA" by Mark Schultz, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon.
I love knowing these prehistoric migration stories, which we only learned from studying modern and ancient DNA. It's nice to have the estimate that I'm X% of an ethnicity, but I find this deep ancestral story that literally connects me to the rest of humanity to be much more profound.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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