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From: "Carolyn Clark Campbell" <>
Subject: RE: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden? [Was: Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 16:49:18 +0500
In-Reply-To: <000a01c42424$03d91f00$d1e60d44@tu.ok.cox.net>


This potential Basque-Celtic connection is very interesting indeed.
When my husband and I first came to Georgia a few years ago, we were
told that the only hypothetical connections between the Georgian
language group (which includes Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan and Tsan, and
Georgian-Jewish [a dialect of Georgian as Yiddish is of German and
Ladino of Spanish] -- all languages restricted to the Caucasus region)
are Basque and Gaelic. Since then, we have heard that some linguists
have pooh-poohed the potential Gaelic and/or Basque connections with
Georgian -- now if they are connected with each other that adds to the
sense that there could be possible connections of Georgian with both.

The potential Basque connection with the Georgians is intriguing ...
we've always been puzzled as to why ancient East Georgia (which is where
the Udi live) was called Iberia, a term now used for Spain, although one
theory was that the Romans simply used the term for "a far-away place,"
which, of course, both Georgia and Spain were vis-à-vis ancient Rome. It
would make sense that people from the Caucasus might want to settle in
the Pyrenees, just as my Scottish ancestors were attracted to the
mountains of North Carolina (many places in Georgia remind me of both
Scotland and North Carolina).

My friend who's been working with the Udi people here actually started
with Irish voyage origin legends and worked his way back through 10
locations in the early ballads to the Caucasus. It will make an
interesting study when he finally gets a chance to write it.

At present, all we have is interesting speculation, so it would be
exciting to get some kind of scientific studies (DNA & linguistic) of
the people here. Of course, because of all the foreign invasions the
genetics of the people here are undoubtedly a vast hodge-podge. I'm told
a significant number of newborns here in Georgia carry the "Mongol spot"
-- which is common among Hungarians as well -- a large blue bruise-like
birthmark in the "small" of the backside below the waist -- an
indication of Asian genetic heritage -- I've noticed most Korean babies
have the same marking, which disappears when they get older. The Mongol
invasion of Georgia was so devastating that something like 90% of the
people were killed during that period, and the population has never
fully recovered in numbers.

My husband, who is of Jewish descent (except through the
paternal-paternal-paternal line, which is Prussian -- hence no Y DNA
connection with early Jews, though one culturally inherits "being
Jewish" through one's mother), and I, who am largely of Celtic descent
(both the Clarks and the Campbells came from Scotland), though lots of
my lineage is English, both feel absolutely "at home" in this culture --
an odd experience in a land with such an alien language. We've traveled
to many countries where we've loved the people and their culture, but
never before had the "feeling" of almost having re-discovered "home". I
keep eerily running into men who look remarkably like they could be my
father's brothers, while my husband finds it an extraordinary experience
to be warmly welcomed for his Jewish heritage by people who consider
"their" Jews to be an important and treasured part of their own culture
and history.

Europeans who come here immediately identify Georgia as obviously
European -- the appearance, the demeanor, the intellectual history is so
evidently European. Italians write about how Italian the culture seems,
but French see how closely it is allied to French culture, and the
Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians feel a warm sense of brotherhood
with the people. Yet having lived as a part of an Asian family in my
early years (my first husband was Korean) I see so many parallels with
Asian culture -- a Korean would feel very much at home in Georgian
family life ... What is it about this place that we all feel such an
affinity?

(Undoubtedly totally irrelevant: a Malagasque friend of mine who spent
some time with the Basques, upon seeing photos of my grandchildren who
are 1/2 Irish, through their father, and 1/4 Korean, through my
daughter, exclaimed -- oh, my! They look exactly like Basque children!)

Carolyn Clark Campbell


-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Moody [mailto:]
Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 7:31 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [Gen-Ancient] Georgia & the Caucasus - Garden of Eden?
[Was: Edessa, Judea, and Armenia]

"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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