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Archiver > Melungeon > 2002-06 > 1024578136


From: Celia Millington-Wyckoff <>
Subject: Re: [Melungeon] Melungeon DNA Study Results
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 09:02:16 -0400
References: <F191iyP6UR6g8STijsC0000635e@hotmail.com><002201c217f6$f15ea2e0$799a6444@nv.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <002201c217f6$f15ea2e0$799a6444@nv.cox.net>


I have yet to put aside the time to read everything more thoroughly,
but it appears--at first glance--that all of us were "right"--those
who believe the Melungeons are tri-racial (white, Black, Indian), as
well as those who believe there is additional Mediterranean (Turkish)
and other eastern (Indian, as in from India) ancestry!

I don't know about anyone else, but I find this all quite exciting! :-)

This weekend we are going canoeing with a couple whose son is a good
friend of our son's. The wife is Turkish--born and raised in
Istanbul (but got her M.S. and Ph.D. in the U.S.) I will have to
tell her about these developments--I think she'll be fascinated (BTW,
this woman is fair-skinned, grey-eyed, and black-haired--could easily
pass as "full-blooded American.")

Celia in PA



At 9:07 PM -0400 6/19/02, Dennis Maggard wrote:
>The Associated Press having mistakenly released a story about the
>Melungeon DNA study results a day early, I have received permission
>to go ahead and post the results of the study here, see below, preceded
>by a statement correcting the Associated Press story.
>
>Dennis Maggard
>
>
>Statement by Wayne Winkler,
>President of the Melungeon Heritage Association................
>
>The Associated Press mistakenly released the story of the DNA study a day
>early. We regret that, after two years of hard work, Dr. Kevin Jones was not
>permitted to break the news of his study himself. The story by Chris Kahn
>also
>contained a few inaccuracies. First, the hair samples taken to study
>mitochondrial DNA, tracing the maternal lines, were taken from men as well
>as
>women, contrary to the statement in the story. Secondly, Brent Kennedy was
>quoted out of context in saying that Melungeons weren't much different from
>other Americans. In context, he was saying that ALL Americans are mixed to
>some
>degree, although not necessarily as much as are Melungeons. And finally, I
>think the story missed the important news: that women were a part of the
>original Turkish, Mediterranean, and northern Indian population that came to
>America. We've always heard the stories about shipwrecked sailors or
>explorers
>being the source of our overseas genes; it's now obvious that these genes
>came,
>at least in part, from family units of men and women who were attempting to
>establish themselves in a new land. As the DNA study shows, they succeeded.
>
>
>Press release of the Melungeon Heritage Association..................
>
>Kingsport, Tennessee, June 20, 2002 - Some of the veil of mystery
>surrounding the "mysterious" Melungeons was lifted today when the results of
>a two-year DNA study were announced. New questions have been raised,
>however, concerning females potentially from Turkey and northern India who
>are a part of the Melungeon ancestry.
>
>The Melungeons are a group of people of unknown origin first documented in
>the mountains of Appalachia in the early 19th century. Many believed they
>were of mixed racial ancestry and the Melungeons faced legal and social
>discrimination. As a result, they tended to live in remote areas, most
>notably Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. In the 1940's and 1950'
>s, sociologists and anthropologists labeled the Melungeons and other similar
>groups as "tri-racial isolates."
>
>Over the years, numerous myths, legends, and theories evolved to explain
>the Melungeons' mysterious origins. These legends often involved sailors and
>explorers from Spain, Portugal, Carthage, or Phoenicia who were stranded on
>the American continent and intermarried with Indians. The Melungeons
>themselves often claimed to be "Portyghee." Most researchers believed they
>were a product of intermarriage between English and Scots-Irish settlers,
>Indians, and free African-Americans, and discounted their claims of
>Mediterranean origin.
>
>The DNA results announced today confirmed that the Melungeons have
>European, African, and Native American ancestry, as well as genetic
>similarities with populations in Turkey and northern India. More surprising,
>however, is the fact that some of these Turkish- and northern Indian- like
>sequences have been passed through the Melungeons' maternal lines,
>indicating that their overseas ancestors included not only male sailors and
>explorers, but females as well.
>
>The results were announced today at Fourth Union, a Melungeon conference in
>Kingsport, Tennessee sponsored by the Melungeon Heritage Association (MHA).
>MHA is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting research and
>understanding about Melungeons and other multi-racial groups in the United
>States. Dr. Kevin Jones, a biologist at the University of Virginia's College
>at Wise, conducted the study.
>
>The presence of Turkish and northern Indian haplotypes within the
>mitochondrial DNA samples taken from modern-day Melungeons indicates that
>women of European/Asian origin were a part of the original mixture that made
>
>up the Melungeon ancestry. Mitochondrial DNA comes from the female side of
>an individual's ancestry. Previous researchers had assumed that European
>males intermarried with Native Americans and African-Americans to produce
>the Melungeons. Although Native and African genes are definitely a part of
>the Melungeon genetic mix, women were among the overseas settlers who
>contributed to the Melungeon gene pool.
>
>Dr. N. Brent Kennedy speculated that the Melungeons were of Mediterranean
>and Middle Eastern ancestry and published his theories in a book entitled
>The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, published in 1994 by
>Mercer University Press.
>
>Dr. Jones, a native of London, England, studied at the University of
>Reading, and did post-doctoral research at Louisiana State University. He is
>currently a professor of biology at UVA-Wise, teaching courses including
>cell biology and genetics. Dr. Jones undertook this DNA study in 2000 at the
>suggestion of Dr. Kennedy, then vice-chancellor at the University of
>Virginia's College at Wise. Kennedy asked Jones to analyze DNA samples taken
>from members of known Melungeon families. Such a study would utilize
>technology not available to earlier researchers.
>
>"Brent Kennedy... explained the controversy that surrounded the origins of
>the Melungeons [and] realized that I had the DNA expertise to look at that,"
>Jones related in an interview with Wayne Winkler, president of the Melungeon
>Heritage Association and author of an upcoming book about the Melungeons.
>"The subjects were largely chosen by Brent Kennedy on the basis of pursuing
>as many of the known Melungeon lineages that existed in the area and taking
>advantage of his genealogical expertise. People were then asked to donate
>samples to the study, and in the majority of cases they kindly did so."
>Single hairs were taken to study the mitochondrial DNA which traces the
>maternal lines of the subject. In other words, the samples represented DNA,
>which could be traced to the subject's mother, grandmother,
>great-grandmother, and so on. "We also have a smaller number of samples
>which are cheek cells for looking at male inheritance," said Jones.
>"What we get from those is a DNA sequence which we can think of as being
>about an 600-long letter code, and we can take that string of 600 letters
>and compare those to what now is literally thousands of samples from around
>the world. We're interested both in the number of different sequences that
>we get from the population and also how they appear to relate to other
>samples worldwide."
>
>About 100 hair samples were studied for mitochondrial, or maternal, DNA,
>and about 30 samples of cheek cells were taken to study the Y-chromosome, or
>male, DNA. While more samples might have been taken, Jones said, "That's the
>beauty of science: one can always subsequently refine and extend the
>analyses." The technology available to Jones allowed him to study only the
>mitochondrial DNA samples; the Y-chromosome samples were sent to University
>College in London, England, for study. "The 'Y' is technically far harder to
>do, and indeed, relies on expertise in some other labs in the world to do
>it, so we're partly dependent on their cooperation and collaboration."
>Such testing is not perfect, of course, and does not tell researchers
>everything about an individual's inheritance. For example, neither test will
>give genetic information about a subject's paternal grandmother. However,
>the study was not particularly concerned with individual genealogies. "We're
>looking for patterns that exist in the population as a whole," according to
>Jones. "Now, obviously, each individual sample contributes to that, but I
>think that for an individual you can say relatively little. Looking at the
>patterns that occur throughout the population becomes important. And that
>means the number of samples that are looked at is also significant, and
>we've tried to do as many as is reasonably possible."
>
>Jones compared these samples to the thousands available through GenBank, an
>international genetics database, published scientific literature and the
>Mitochondrial DNA Concordance, databases containing DNA sequence
>information. Looking at the maternal lines of the Melungeons who were
>tested, Jones found considerable variation in ethnicity among the samples.
>"It's comparatively straightforward to link particular sequences to
>particular ethnic groups and different Continental areas of the world," he
>noted, "and the majority of those Melungeon-derived sequences were European
>in origin. Within those European samples, though, there is significant
>diversity, and some seem to reflect areas outside the traditional northern
>European sphere.
>
>"The ability to tie a sequence to a particular area is dependent upon the
>historical occurrence of any given haplotype somewhere, and the places that
>are easy to track are where we've had populations existing for a long time,
>and not being affected by a lot of different people coming in. So some,
>perhaps more isolated, areas of Europe are easier to track than more
>cosmopolitan [areas]."
>
>While the Melungeons are predominantly European in their genetic
>backgrounds, they are indeed tri-racial. "The appears to be a small
>percentage of both Native American and African-American sequences in there,
>too," Jones stated, "although they are certainly both in the minority. They'
>re both in there in about equal levels of representation as well."
>The long-held belief that the Melungeons originated in Portugal is neither
>borne out nor negated by Jones' research. "To date we've found no sequences
>that can be definitively traced back to uniquely Portuguese sequences. That
>doesn't mean that they don't exist. A large number of the European sequences
>are now widely spread throughout Europe, and if one of those genetic
>sequences happened to come from Portugal we would not detect that. We can't
>dismiss that theory at the moment, but we can't provide additional support
>for it."
>
>Jones finds a stronger possibility for a Turkish or Middle Eastern ancestry
>for the Melungeons. "The relatively unusual European -type sequences seem to
>reflect, perhaps, areas around northern India. It's very hard to say, back
>in time, what that would have been classified as, and I think one of the
>problems here is that we tend to think of 'Turkish' in terms of the
>dimensions of modern Turkey, not of the original scale of people of Turkish
>origin who, in essence, were spread throughout the European world. Perhaps
>the best I can say is that some of those sequences are a little more 'exotic
>' than Anglo-Irish sequences, and some of those could reflect, perhaps,
>populations that were associated with or moved through Turkey."
>
>The Portuguese and Spanish explorers and early American settlers may well
>be the key to discovering how these people wound up in America. The
>Portuguese, in particular, were involved in wide-ranging trade in the 15th
>and 16th centuries, and had many interests in places such as northern India
>and the area occupied by present-day Turkey. Both Spain and Portugal had
>very cosmopolitan populations, with large numbers of people from many parts
>of the world living within their borders. And Dr. Kennedy and others have
>suggested the Spanish and Portuguese fort at Santa Elena (in present-day
>South Carolina), along with a series of frontier outposts, as a possible
>source for Melungeon ancestry.
>
>With regard to the male lineage's investigated, the Y chromosome data also
>suggests a multiracial origin, including Sub-Saharan African and European
>components. Of particular interest are Y haplotypes of established Melungeon
>male lines that possibly reflect Mediterranean and/or Near Eastern
>populations. This finding indicates that the overseas ancestors of the
>Melungeons may have come to these shores as part of a male-female family
>unit, or formed such family units shortly after arrival. Such family units
>came to America as part of a Spanish/Portuguese colony at Santa Elena in
>present-day South Carolina.
>
>Theories about when people with this genetic background first came to
>America are speculative at this point. "Dr. Jones' work has answered many
>questions," said Wayne Winkler, president of MHA, "but those answers have
>raised many more questions. These questions will keep historians busy for
>some time to come, and we may never have definite answers. The Melungeons
>may remain one of the mysteries of history."
>
>
>
>
>
>==== Melungeon Mailing List ====
>Melungeon Health Information
>Check it out!!!!
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Celia Millington-Wyckoff, M.A.
Instructional Materials Designer
Department of Distance Education/The World Campus
Penn State University
210 Rider II Building
University Park, PA
16802
814-863-8293


http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/c/a/caw6/

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