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From: ellen Levy <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Jewish E1b1b
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:41:58 -0700 (PDT)


Listers:

I see that Anatole has decided not to answer the questions I posed. Too bad. I would have liked to have heard the answers.

I have been slowly plodding through his paper. It will take me some time to process it all as it is many, many pages long. There is a whole separate, lengthy paper on Jewish DNA which is very slow going.

However, there are some relevant bits of information that I'd like to share with you for the list to begin to process. Some of these will be direct quotes, some paraphrased, but all citations are to Anatole's paper.

His paper allegedly aims at studying the "origin of the Jews." This just isn't the case, though. This is a study of Ashkenazi Jews. Anatole used almost exclusively the postings from Ysearch, which when they involve listings from Jews, are overwhelming from Ashkenazi Jews (whom he determined from "Jewish" sounding surnames). Thus, there aren't Yemeni Jews or Iraqi Jews or even any significant Sephardic Jews included in this study. To therefore make claim to have found common ancestors for all the Jews is grossly inaccurate, in my view.

Anatole has divided all peoples of the world into "tribes" based on their haplogroup designation. According to Anatole, there are some fifteen "tribes" to which Jews (not Ashkenazim apparently, but all Jews, though he has no real samples of other Jewish populations) commonly belong. According to Anatole, there are more than forty "Jewish" lineages that he has identified, some allegedly as ancient as 13-14 thousand years BP.

Let's remember here that "Jews" as a ethnic nationality (ie, ancient Israelites) did not come into being until the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age. That is literally ten thousand years or more after these ancient lineages originally came into being.

Apparently, Anatole considers the ancient Israelites to be composed primarily of two "tribes" - J1 and J2. According to the author, 1/3 of Jews belong to tribes not commonly associated with bearers of Jewish traditions - R1a1, R1b, R2, Q, G, K, I, etc. Apparently these groups "penetrated" into tribes that were the bearers of Jewish traditions.

Don't jump to quick onto this assertion, though, because later on Anatole also makes the claim that R1b was an ancient Judean tribe as well as was clearly part of the Exodus out of Egypt, though they were an "invasive" tribe to the earlier tribes.

The time spans related to these "Jewish tribes" are, apparently, unrelated to the common ancestors of non-Jewish "tribes." How this is possible, given that the Ashkenazi subjects carry the same SNP's as non-Ashkenazi Europeans, remains a mystery to me, even after skimming this paper. For instance, the time span to the most common recent ancestor within J1 for everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike, is 17,500 +/- 1000 years BP (again for everyone). Yet for Jews, the TMRCA is 15,500, give or take 4000 years or so.

There is some controversial information about R1b in here. Apparently, all Ashkenazi R1b, including all sub-clades (I refuse to call this "Jewish" R1b until Anatole presents evidence that he used anything but Ashkenazi samples) is derived from a common ancestor that lived approx. 5000 years BP, give or take 400 years.

Anatole also believes that the ancient haplogroup R1b* was wiped out in Euorpe about 4000 years BP (ie, during the Bronze Age) when the continent was then repopulated with R1b bearers from Asia, Armenia or "elsewhere." According to Anatole, that is why Armenian and Jewish R1b is notiably older than compared to Western R1b (with Armenian R1b being 11,400 BP and European R1b dating only to 3,100-3,900 BP). In reality, Anatole asserts that the earliest Asian R1b ancestor lived 13,700 BP. "The above data follow from mutation difference between various base (ancestral) European R1b and haplotypes, which is maximum 10 mutations per 25 marker haplotypes (about 7000 years between respective ancestors and 3900 years BP to oldest common ancestor of R1b* in Europe). " Thus, he finds that the difference between the oldest European base R1b* haplotype and ASian haplotype is 21 mutations per 25 marker haplotype , leading to the conclusion of 21,600 years between
common ancestors.

This, despite the fact that Anatole acknowledges that at 12 markers, despite exactly matching "classical Western European R1b model" (ie, AMH) does not originate from it, but rather originates from a common ancestor 5,000 years ago - thus, we can safely say he was an Israelite and participated in the Exodus. According to Anatole, it was an "invasion" of R1b into a people "who some 1500 years later formed." He postulates that the haplotype might have been brought from Europe to the Jews by slaves, warriors, merchants, etc.

I can't see any discussion at all in Anatole's paper concerning the possibility (reality?) of differing mutation rates among various markers. Perhaps I missed it?

Also, some very cursory discussion about bottlenecks (only half-way through it though. Maybe something more substantial will pop up as I continue to read it), but no discussion about the impact of genetic drift.

Phew, that's all for now. I haven't even hit the haplogroup R1a1, Q, etc. sections yet.

Hope this gives you all some more to chew on.

Ellen Coffman






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