Need help on identifying m17 marker

[Dimaggio1103]

So i have using the best of my abilities to narrow down my ancestry autosomal ethnicity anyways. I have a strong incling I am scottish (besides my red beard) I come up on 23andme as british/Irish and 2 % scandanavian, the rest all non specific northern european.

When i run gedmatch calculators it has me as Orcadian (orkney islands in scottland) when I did the third party cmd line program (forgot what it was called) it also put me as scottish.

So here is the root of my question most men from Orkney islands have the m17 marker without necessarily belonging to that haplogroup. they are R1b but test positive for the viking marker m17. When I look up that SNP it shows up in my raw data but has an "I" instead of A or G. Does this mean I have the marker in my genes but its just not derived? Or does it showing up mean nothing?

[VinceT]

M17 is a G deletion (GGGG>GGG), first mentioned in Underhill et al 1997, found in men belonging to men in haplogroup R1a1a. If you show an I, you probably are not in haplogroup R1a1a. It can be spurious however, so you'd want to also check other markers equivalent and immediately upstream of where M17 is positioned on the Y-tree to make sure. See http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_HapgrpR.html

Labeling M17 as a "Viking" marker is rather silly, as it tends to be found in higher frequencies towards North-Eastern Europe and North-Western Asia.

Also, take Orcadian associations with a large grain of salt, as the Orcadian population was used as a proxy for the Atlantic / north-western European gene pool at large.