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From: "Phil Moody" <>
Subject: Re: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden? [Was: Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 21:30:51 -0500
References: <00dd01c422b5$d07303c0$0500a8c0@SAINTNINO>


"Carolyn Clark Campbell" wrote:

the Ossetians (now trying to be independent of Georgia in the
> south and Russia in the north), are more credibly claimed to be the
> descendants of the Scythians, who moved across Europe as the Goths; and
> years ago I remember reading in the National Geographic that the Celts
> also originated here and spread across Europe during the last millennium
> B.C. One linguist is trying to document a connection between Gaelic and
> the language of the remaining Udi people (less than 1,000 left) who were
> expelled by Stalin but have returned to their original homeland in East
> Georgia, where the Romans originally called them Albanians (no relation
> to current Albania) and they had a major civilization with its own
> writing system.

PLM: Perhaps, it would behoove this linguist to substantiate his research with
some Y DNA testing of the Udi male population. Here is an interesting study
online "Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural
transitions in the British Isles", at:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/9/5078

A few quotes to peak your interest:-)

"Basque Population History. To investigate the degree of paternal genetic
continuity in the British Isles through the Neolithic and the development of
Iron Age cultures, we compared the Welsh and Irish samples with 50 Basques
(28, 29). The Basques are widely believed to be descended from the Paleolithic
inhabitants of Europe for reasons including the following: ***(i) Basque is a
non-Indo-European language with some features suggesting a distant
relationship with the North Caucasian language family (30, 31).*** (ii)
Analyses of classical markers consistently place the Basques as genetic
outliers in Europe. For example, the Basques have the highest frequency in
Europe of the blood group O and of rhesus cde, which is thought to represent
the contribution of Paleolithic Europeans (32). (iii) An analysis of European
mtDNA estimates the Neolithic component in the Basques to be the lowest for
any region in Europe. Although the criteria used to identify Near Eastern
founder types are somewhat heuristic and involve many assumptions, the
relative number of types in different European populations should still be
informative, and the Basque component, estimated at 7%, clearly lies outside
the distribution for the rest of Europe, estimated to range between 9% and 21%
(33). We also sampled 68 and 72 unrelated, adult male Anatolian Turks and
Syrians, respectively. The former were representative of the source population
for the European Neolithic and the latter were representative of the Near East
more generally. If the pre-Anglo-Saxon British, therefore, trace genetically
to the European Paleolithic, we might expect a similarity between the Irish
and Welsh Y chromosomes and those of the Basques."

"Basque and Celtic Y Chromosomes. The Y chromosome complements of Basque- and
Celtic-speaking populations are strikingly similar (Fig. 1). Haplotype 1.15 is
also modal in the Basques and constitutes 41% of the sample, rising to 56% for
the cluster of one-step neighbors. We call this the Atlantic modal haplotype
(AMH). In each of the Basque, Welsh, and Irish populations, a total of 89-90%
of the chromosomes are in hg 1, which contains the M173-defined Eu18 hg in
Semino et al. (34), with the majority of the remainder in hg 2. The Turkish
sample, however, is much more diverse at the hg level (Fig. 1). The AMH and
one-step neighbors are present (15%) but only one chromosome from this group
is found in the Syrian sample (Fig. 1), and it is absent in India (unpublished
data) and Central Asia (35). There is no evidence, therefore, that incoming
Neolithics or later immigrants originating in the Near East carried the AMH at
frequencies as high as those characterizing the Atlantic populations."

"It should be noted that Basque-Celtic similarity not only implies that
Basque- and Celtic-speaking populations derive from common paternal ancestors,
but that genetic drift in these communities has not been sufficiently great to
differentiate them." End Quotes.

So, it would seem as though a comprehensive Y DNA study has already been done,
and it should not be to difficult to add the Y DNA analysis of the Udi, and
compare it with this data. If the Udi are linguistically similar to P and
Q-Celtic, then it is probable they share common Y DNA similarities as well.

Cheers,
Phil

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carolyn Clark Campbell" <>
To: <>
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 1:49 AM
Subject: RE: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden? [Was:
Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]




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