Y-chromosome & mitochondrial DNA lineage drift, bottlenecks, and invasion-driven replacement.
This tool simulates the generational transmission of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups through a small, closed founding population. Each generation, individuals pair off and produce offspring; sons inherit their father's Y-haplogroup and daughters and sons alike inherit their mother's mtDNA haplogroup, so lineages can drift, merge, or die out purely by chance — a process known as genetic drift.
You can shape the population's trajectory over time with population waypoints (growth, bottlenecks, booms) and introduce invasion events that inject outside individuals carrying their own haplogroups and a fitness advantage, modeling scenarios like migration or conquest-driven replacement. The charts, node graph, and table let you explore how starting diversity, population size, and these events combine to produce the surviving lineage structure after many generations.