SW Asia and Near East R-M269?

[Mikewww]

I always hear of the great diversity and probable old age (in geography) of R-M269 variants in Southwest Asian and the Near East.   I believe this is a general reference to modern day Turkey, Armenia, Northern Iran and Iraq, Georgia, Romania, Ukraine, Southern Russia, Azerbaijan, Western Kazakhstan.

I know that "ht35" is an old and not necessarily correct reference to a set of probable sub-clades that seem to fall outside of the R-P312 and U106 umbrellas.  I have heard that Vincent V. has started mapping available haplotypes from this region.  Whatever the correct terminology, what information do we really have on R-M269 and downstream clades in Southwest Asia and the Near East?

[rms2]

I don't think we know a whole lot yet, and there is certainly extremely little or no information from there on anything downstream of M269.

Cinnioglu's 2004 paper, Excavating Y Chromosome Haplotype Strata in Anatolia, remains the most comprehensive work on the subject, I believe.

In the last year or so word has come out of Russia from the university at Ufa in Bashkortostan of the work of Khusnutdinova and Yunusbaev and others among the Bashkirs that reveals that the Bashkirs of the Volga-Ural region have a high frequency of R-M269. Overall the average is 50%, and in someplaces it is as high as 82%.

But we don't know about anything downstream of M269.

A couple of Bashkirs are suppsoed to have submitted kits to FTDNA, but I haven't received any word of their results yet.