Genetics and Environment
Environmental Nakba Conference Proceedings, 2013
Of scorpions, settlers, soldiers, and springs 17/11/2010
Genetics of Palestinians, Ambassadors Magazine
Genetic Healthcare in the Middle East, Arab Students' Journal
Affidavit on Stew Leonard's An analysis by Qumsiyeh submitted to the town of Orange on environmental impact of the proposed development
Recent comment on DM Behar et al, 2006 "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event" Am. J. Hum. Genet., 78
From Abstract: "We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium."
From Discussion: "There are two fundamental questions with respect to the geographic origin of the Ashkenazi founding lineages. First, were these lineages a part of the mtDNA pool of a population ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews in the Near East, or were they established within the Ashkenazi Jews later in Europe, as a result of introgression from European or Eurasian groups? Second, where did these lineages expand? The observed global pattern of distribution renders very unlikely the possibility that the four aforementioned founder lineages entered the Ashkenazi mtDNA pool via gene flow from a European host population. For example, in databases of HVS-I sequences of British, Irish, German, French, or Italian subjects, these Ashkenazi sample founder lineage sequences were not observed (Baasner et al. 1998; Lutz et al. 1998; Pfeiffer et al. 2001). Furthermore, the non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations sharing the Ashkenazi mtDNA Hg K lineages turn out to be from Jewish communities that trace their origins to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Either a shared ancestral origin of the two groups or, alternatively, a postexile admixture between neighboring Ashkenazi and Spanish-exile Jewish populations may explain the sharing of these maternal lineages. However, the very presence of the Ashkenazi founding lineages, albeit at low frequencies, in North African, Near Eastern, and Caucasian Jews, supports a common Levantine ancestry."
My note: there is nothing in the data to link to any Middle Eastern/Near Eastern population. In the discussion part, they mention two possibilities and then claim one is very unlikely. Yet there is a third possibility: conversion/founder effect in Europe with no connection to any Near East origin. While they cite the Hg K patterns common in Ashkenazi and found rarely in Sephardic populations as evidence of commonality, this is obviously not neccessarily so. In fact the Sephardic Haplotypes taht are more common are Middle Eastern while those rare ones in Sephardi (common in Ashkenazi) show no mutational connections to Middle Eastern populations. They are more parsioniously explained by Sephardic Jewish families in Europe having some Ashkenazi interbreeding (the dominant Jewish culture).
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