VK541 Izyaslav Ingvarevich 23andme format raw genome

Have you ever wondered if royal bloodlines were as pure as medieval chroniclers claimed? The mighty Rurikid dynasty, founders of early Rus’, prided themselves on an unbroken line of descent from Rurik himself. But what if that story wasn’t as clean as it seemed?

Recent DNA evidence from the study Population Genomics of the Viking World raises a stunning question about royal fidelity. Two princes, Gleb Svyatoslavich and Izyaslav Ingvarevich, both grandsons of Yaroslav the Wise, should share the same Y-chromosome, inherited through the male line of the Rurikid dynasty.

But they don’t.

Izyaslav carried haplogroup R1a, while Gleb carried I2a — completely different paternal lineages.

This contradiction has fueled a scandalous theory: that one of their fathers, Svyatoslav or Ingvar, may not have been Yaroslav’s biological son. Perhaps an affair by their mother or grandmother introduced a new bloodline into the dynasty, forcing chroniclers to maintain the illusion of continuity for political reasons.

However, DNA evidence also helps debunk the idea that they were secretly related through the female line. The two princes share only 36 centimorgans of DNA in total, far too low to suggest any close kinship. In other words, they weren’t related at all in a recent genealogical sense.

For this video, I’ve gathered the raw DNA of both Izyaslav and Gleb and analyzed their raw genomes using my tools, such as betacalc and trait predictor, and harvard tools - such as admixtools 1 and 2.