Line L1 among Chechens: which teips have it and where it came from
What links Hakkoy, Chermoy and Zogoy, three teips from three different tukkhums? The paternal line L1 and one man who lived 1,200 years ago.
Of the Chechen carriers of L1, 46% descend from him. Today his descendants belong to teips from 4 tukkhums.
Four branches and the teips on them
From this man the line splits into four branches, each with its own group of teips.
The first, the Shatoy branch, is 900 years old: Pkhamtoy, Varandoy, Hakkoy, Ghattoy and Vashandaroy. All five belong to the Shatoy union. The Ghattoy keep a tradition that they are the closest kin of the Hakkoy and lived where the village of Shatoy stands today. The Halgoy stand on a neighbouring branch.
The second branch is 650 years old: Key, Yalkharoy and part of the Akkhiy tukkhum.
The third is 800 years old: Zogoy, Ovshroy and Belkharoy.
The fourth, the eastern branch, is 1,100 years old: Dishniy, Chermoy, Elistanzhoy, Kharachoy, Chungaroy, Belgatoy and Bagacharoy.
In 1869 the traditions of five of these teips were written down in Ichkeria. The Elistanzhoy and Dishniy descend from two brothers who came out of Nashkha in the distant past. The elder, Elsan, settled by the glade where the village of Elistanzhi later arose. The younger, Dishni, settled in Vedeno.
The Belgatoy and Kharachoy traced their origins to Nashkha. The ancestor of the Belgatoy, Khour, came to Ichkeria, and his son Khasay founded the village of Belgatoy. The ancestor of the Kharachoy, Biki, proposed a horse race to fix the pasture boundary with the Andi of Dagestan. The boundary was drawn where the two riders met.
The ancestor of the Chermoy, the hunter Charmi, once killed a Caucasian tur and spent the night by a campfire in the forest. In the morning he saw that a swallow had built a nest on his gun, took it as a good omen and settled there.
The teips' own branches
On this line 12 teips each have a branch of their own, with no other teips on it.
Further back in time the branches converge: Dishniy's own branch splits off from a branch 600 years old, on which part of Belgatoy also stands.
Where the line came from
Deeper in time, 3,300 years ago, most Chechen carriers of L1 converge in a single node with branches from Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Armenia and Georgia.
Deeper still, 7,700 years ago, the Chechens converge with branches from Arabia, Anatolia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where the Kalash live.
Chechens also have an entirely different branch of L1, 12,600 years old. Almost all the Chechens on it come from five teips: Kezanoy, Melardoy, Achaloy, Makazhoy and Boskhoy. Four of them belong to Cheberloy. In the Caucasus it is also found among the Mingrelians.
The common ancestor of the whole L1 line lived 18,100 years ago. Most of its carriers today live in South Asia — in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan — while its oldest branches are in West Asia. In the Caucasus it is almost absent outside the Chechens: among their neighbours it is a few percent.
| People | Line share |
|---|---|
| Druze | 30% |
| Kalash | 22% |
| Sindhis | 20% |
| Baloch | 20% |
| Tamils | 18% |
| Chechens | 16% |
| Pashtuns | 12% |
| Tsakhurs | 6% |
| Azerbaijanis | 4% |
Teips on line L1
L1 is the third largest paternal line among Chechens, after J2 and J1. It prevails in 15 teips and is notable in 10 more.
| Teip | Line share |
|---|---|
| Hakkoy | 100% |
| Ghattoy | 100% |
| Zogoy | 100% |
| Halgoy | 100% |
| Kezanoy | 100% |
| Chermoy | 91% |
| Varandoy | 89% |
| Chungaroy | 86% |
| Pkhamtoy | 85% |
| Kharachoy | 77% |
| Yalkharoy | 75% |
| Elistanzhoy | 67% |
| Dishniy | 60% |
| Key | 54% |
| Melardoy | 50% |
Notable: Vashandaroy 33%, Bagacharoy 30%, Saloy 25%, Marshloy 20%, Nikarkhoy 17%, Belgatoy 15%, Galoy 11%, Rigakhoy 10%, Hildekharoy 9%, Makazhoy 6%.
Sources
Pathak et al., “Human Y chromosome haplogroup L1-M22 traces Neolithic expansion in West Asia…”, iScience, 2024, doi 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110016; Schurr et al., “Genetic Analysis of Mingrelians Reveals Long-Term Continuity of Populations in Western Georgia (Caucasus)”, Genome Biology and Evolution, 2023, doi 10.1093/gbe/evad198 (L-M317 among the Mingrelians); the tradition of the brothers Elsan and Dishni — I. Popov, “Ichkeriya (istoriko-topograficheskiy ocherk)”, Sbornik svedeniy o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol. IV, Tiflis, 1870, p. 2 (recorded in Vedeno in 1869), the traditions of the Kharachoy, Belgatoy and Chermoy about their ancestors — ibid.; Ghattoy — Z. Musaev, checheninfo.ru, 2019; the composition of the Shatoy union — Ya. Z. Akhmadov, “Ocherk istoricheskoy geografii i etnopoliticheskogo razvitiya Chechni v XVI–XVIII vekakh”, Moscow, 2009, p. 156.
Which teips is your teip linked to, and how closely?
The full tree of a line, with the ages of all its branches, the gars and nekye within each teip, and a comparison of teips — in the app.