Jewish people, where they are from?

Exactly so.

Admixture, and PCAs for that matter, are very imperfect tools for figuring out how different clusters formed. Indeed, they are very imperfect even for discovering individual ethnicity. An adoptee searching for information about ancestry who plots in the Balkans could indeed have Balkan ancestry, or could be a product of a British and Ashkenazi union. I know it can happen, because I used to share with someone with that mix who did indeed plot, there.

Absent ancient dna, the best tool we have is IBD analysis, and to the best of my recollection, the most IBD sharing between Ashkenazim/Sephardim and gentile European populations is with Greeks, and secondarily and in a more minor way, with Eastern Europeans.


Indeed, the offspring of a British-Ashkenazi union will usually plot in a genetic no man's land in between Bulgarians, Romanians, North Italians & Tuscans.
As you said, the only useful tool in that case is IBD analysis.
 
The Spaniards show up because Ashkenazim & Sephardim stand in between Samaritans/Druze/Mizrahim and Spaniards/North Italians/Portuguese, typical overfit because the oracle is trying to cut your ancestry in neat halves or quarters... Which is idiosyncratic since this model isn't going to tell you much about Jewish genetic history.
So on a contemporary basis, yes it could work, that is to say that the offspring of a Lebanese/Druze/Samaritan & Iberian/North Italian person will end up plotting with Ashkenazim and Sephardim.
However such fits don't tell us anything about the model which lead to the emergence of the Western Jewish cluster... Unless you believe that Ashkenazi-Sephardic ancestry can be resumed as half-Iberian/Italian half-Levantine (which undermines the whole concept of course), I'd ignore that for the time being.

Long story short: Contemporary populations are no substitute for aDNA and shouldn't be used as proxies.

I see... Thanks for the answer. :)
 
There's been a number of autosomal studies on the DNA of Jews and I can't remember any that found any particular link between Iberians and any Jewish groups. Greeks and Italians are usually found to be genetically closer to them, but there could be several explanations for this, it does not necessarily have to be Jewish-to-gentile population gene flow. It could for example be the other way around (gentile-to-Jewish population influence), or also a product of both, or perhaps simply a matter of having some remote ancestors in common.
True, or perhaps all of the answers together. Thanks.
 
Exactly so.

Admixture, and PCAs for that matter, are very imperfect tools for figuring out how different clusters formed. Indeed, they are very imperfect even for discovering individual ethnicity. An adoptee searching for information about ancestry who plots in the Balkans could indeed have Balkan ancestry, or could be a product of a British and Ashkenazi union. I know it can happen, because I used to share with someone with that mix who did indeed plot, there.

Absent ancient dna, the best tool we have is IBD analysis, and to the best of my recollection, the most IBD sharing between Ashkenazim/Sephardim and gentile European populations is with Greeks, and secondarily and in a more minor way, with Eastern Europeans.

Thanks for the info. Again showing that there may have been some Greek like influence in the genetic creation of western Jewry. And as for the IBD sharing with east Europeans, I reckon it was mostly Jew to gentile, in the form of conversion to Christianity, rape by Cossacks, a long period of cohabitation etc.
 
Ashkenazi Jews seem to be a mix of original Middle Eastern Jews with Southern European converts to Judaism from Roman times.
 
Ashkenazi Jews seem to be a mix of original Middle Eastern Jews with Southern European converts to Judaism from Roman times.
The southern European component seems to be Greek like, considering the fact that there's IBD sharing between AJs and Greeks, and geneflow from Greeks to AJs and possibly the other way around, and the fact that there's no IBD sharing or gene flow with Italians.
 
Recent bottleneck of only 350 people formed the nucleus for theAshkenazi people:
Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population targeted personal genomics and illuminates
Jewish and European origins.

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/P39WXRWSQN7baFj2fb78/full/10.1146/annurev-genom-031714-125740

I'm not so sure about this conclusion:
Modelling of ancient histories for AJ and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines AJ to be an even admixture of European and likely Middle Eastern origins. We date the split between the two ancestral populations to ≈12–25 Kyr, suggesting a predominantly Near Eastern source for the repopulation of Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum.
 
Recent bottleneck of only 350 people formed the nucleus for theAshkenazi people:
Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population targeted personal genomics and illuminates
Jewish and European origins.

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/P39WXRWSQN7baFj2fb78/full/10.1146/annurev-genom-031714-125740

I'm not so sure about this conclusion:
Modelling of ancient histories for AJ and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines AJ to be an even admixture of European and likely Middle Eastern origins. We date the split between the two ancestral populations to ≈12–25 Kyr, suggesting a predominantly Near Eastern source for the repopulation of Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum.

The study suggests that the admixture happened around 600-800 years ago, AJs were in central Europe back then... And we know that Germans/Poles have VERY visible WHG ancestry outside of the EEF component... Well... That seems to contradict the 0 WHG ancestry outside the EEF component... I'm confused... :confused: If I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me. :cool-v: :)

Here are the links:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140909/ncomms5835/full/ncomms5835.html
http://www.natureasia.com/en/research/highlight/9440


Supplementary information Is at the bottom of the page.
 
I just watched a documentary about the very close relations between Canaan and the Aegean civilisations, expressed in trade, and settlers from the Aegean in Canaan and the other way around, perhaps that's partially where the geneflow from Greece to AJs and the other way around comes from?
 
As I posted upthread, I'm skeptical about some of the conclusions drawn by these authors. It seems to me akin to the kind of crude analysis you get with an Oracle result from running Admixture, where a Sicilian/British mix will plot in northern Italy, or an Ashkenazi/British mix will plot there or in the Balkans depending on the run, or a British/Chinese mix will come out Uigher. Substitute Uigher for Ashkenazi. Yes, they're about an even mix of west Eurasian and East Eurasian, but which specific groups created that mix, and when did it happen? It certainly didn't come about because a "British" population and a "Chinese" population, as we understand those terms today, mixed.

Studies like this also suffer from the biases, or, perhaps, lack of foresight of the authors. Who says that the Belgians (or any north/central group) are the proper population to serve as a proxy for "European". What if enough snps had been available from the 1000 genomes study? What if they had used Greeks as one pole of the study?

Also, I have to read the paper again to see if they've addressed these concerns, but the fact that the population bottlenecked around the time of the Black Death (which makes sense given both the results of the disease and the pogroms against the Jews at that time) doesn't mean that the admixture took place at that time or slightly before. From the analyses I've seen, most of these programs date continuous admixture to the time of the latest admixture, frustrating our attempts to track the results of specific gene flows. Then there are the disputes over the mutation rate to be used.

I guess I would say that the question is still unresolved...
 
^^ I said it in another forum, I'll reiterate: Who's to say what Europe looked like 1000 years ago from a genetic standpoint? I mean, we already had our fair share of surprises with prehistoric european samples (not to mention the Iron Age Thracian), so I'd be surprised if the pattern doesn't extend to the historical period.

And the Near East is unknown territory from an aDNA standpoint, so these are wild guesses if anything.
 
I just watched a documentary about the very close relations between Canaan and the Aegean civilisations, expressed in trade, and settlers from the Aegean in Canaan and the other way around, perhaps that's partially where the geneflow from Greece to AJs and the other way around comes from?

I finished reading Eric Cline's book (1117 B.C) a few days ago, it dumbs down the recent discoveries in Eastern Mediterranean archeology during the Middle Bronze Age until the Bronze Age Collapse.
Initially, this is why I think that the gene flow from Greece to the Levant was constant for a long time and that we might be looking at a continuous process in a sense.
 
^^ I said it in another forum, I'll reiterate: Who's to say what Europe looked like 1000 years ago from a genetic standpoint? I mean, we already had our fair share of surprises with prehistoric european samples (not to mention the Iron Age Thracian), so I'd be surprised if the pattern doesn't extend to the historical period.

And the Near East is unknown territory from an aDNA standpoint, so these are wild guesses if anything.
I suppose we can't say... And I suppose it is uncharted territory.
 
I finished reading Eric Cline's book (1117 B.C) a few days ago, it dumbs down the recent discoveries in Eastern Mediterranean archeology during the Middle Bronze Age until the Bronze Age Collapse.
Initially, this is why I think that the gene flow from Greece to the Levant was constant for a long time and that we might be looking at a continuous process in a sense.
This is beginning to make sense more and more. As you said this gene flow from Greece to the Levant was probably a gradual process which began during the late bronze age and went on through the Hellenistic age and at least until the Polytheistic Imperial Roman period.
 
As I posted upthread, I'm skeptical about some of the conclusions drawn by these authors. It seems to me akin to the kind of crude analysis you get with an Oracle result from running Admixture, where a Sicilian/British mix will plot in northern Italy, or an Ashkenazi/British mix will plot there or in the Balkans depending on the run, or a British/Chinese mix will come out Uigher. Substitute Uigher for Ashkenazi. Yes, they're about an even mix of west Eurasian and East Eurasian, but which specific groups created that mix, and when did it happen? It certainly didn't come about because a "British" population and a "Chinese" population, as we understand those terms today, mixed.

Studies like this also suffer from the biases, or, perhaps, lack of foresight of the authors. Who says that the Belgians (or any north/central group) are the proper population to serve as a proxy for "European". What if enough snps had been available from the 1000 genomes study? What if they had used Greeks as one pole of the study?

Also, I have to read the paper again to see if they've addressed these concerns, but the fact that the population bottlenecked around the time of the Black Death (which makes sense given both the results of the disease and the pogroms against the Jews at that time) doesn't mean that the admixture took place at that time or slightly before. From the analyses I've seen, most of these programs date continuous admixture to the time of the latest admixture, frustrating our attempts to track the results of specific gene flows. Then there are the disputes over the mutation rate to be used.

I guess I would say that the question is still unresolved...

I suppose it is still far from resolved, and that we still have technology to improve in order to break this wall of uncertainty.

P.S Are you M.A.B on 23andme?
 
There's a new Gedmatch calculator, here are my results:

Admix Results (sorted):

#PopulationPercent
1Caucasian37.34
2European_Early_Farmers22.63
3European_Hunters_Gatherers13.20
4Near_East10.51
5North_African6.86
6South_Central_Asian6.36


Finished reading population data. 554 populations found.
23 components mode.

--------------------------------

Least-squares method.

Using 1 population approximation:
1 Ashkenazi_Jew @ 2.931158
2 Sicilian_Siracusa @ 3.941213
3 Sicilian_West @ 5.178572
4 Romanian_Jew @ 5.470178
5 Maltese @ 6.144395
6 Sicilian_East @ 6.513960
7 Italian_South @ 6.639791
8 Sicilian_Center @ 6.911897
9 French_Jew @ 6.986766
10 Greek_Athens @ 7.272440
11 Greek @ 7.754566
12 Sicilian_Trapani @ 7.945374
13 Central_Greek @ 8.584060
14 Greek_Phokaia @ 8.734240
15 Italian_Abruzzo @ 9.113194
16 Sicilian_Agrigento @ 9.336509
17 Cretan @ 9.444021
18 Greek_Smyrna @ 9.668756
19 Italian_Jew @ 9.692818
20 Turk_Jew @ 9.764608

Using 2 populations approximation:
1 50% Greek_Thessaloniki +50% Sephardic_Jew @ 2.128314


Using 3 populations approximation:
1 50% Kosovar +25% Moroccan_Jew +25% Syrian_Jew @ 1.621377


Using 4 populations approximation:
1 French_Jew + Greek_Smyrna + Montenegrian + Moroccan_Jew @ 1.604190
2 Kosovar + Kosovar + Moroccan_Jew + Syrian_Jew @ 1.621377
3 Bulgarian + Greek_Smyrna + Maltese + Moroccan_Jew @ 1.643977
4 Bulgarian + Greek_Smyrna + Moroccan_Jew + Sicilian_West @ 1.659846
5 Bulgarian + Greek_Smyrna + Maltese + Sephardic_Jew @ 1.721271
6 1_LBK380 + Assyrian_Arzni + Tunisian_Jew + Ukrainian_West @ 1.728801
7 French_Jew + Serb_Serbia + Sicilian_Agrigento + Syrian_Jew @ 1.784296
8 1_LBK380 + Assyrian_Arzni + Tunisian_Jew + Ukrainian_Center @ 1.796626
9 Bulgarian + French_Jew + French_Jew + French_Jew @ 1.808106
10 French_Jew + Greek_Smyrna + Moroccan_Jew + Serb_Serbia @ 1.822686
11 1_LBK380 + Assyrian_Arzni + Don_cossack + Tunisian_Jew @ 1.827805
12 Greek_Smyrna + Macedonian + Maltese + Moroccan_Jew @ 1.827950
13 French_Jew + Montenegrian + Sicilian_Agrigento + Syrian_Jew @ 1.831383
14 Greek_Peloponnesos + Iraqi_Jew + Italian_South + Spanish_Canarias_IBS @ 1.833912
15 Assyrian_Arzni + Greek_Peloponnesos + Sicilian_Center + Spanish_Canarias_IBS @ 1.844918
16 Bulgarian + Greek_Smyrna + Moroccan_Jew + Sicilian_Siracusa @ 1.847783
17 French_Jew + French_Jew + French_Jew + Macedonian @ 1.848284
18 Bulgarian + French_Jew + Greek_Smyrna + Moroccan_Jew @ 1.852986
19 Bulgarian + Greek_Smyrna + Libyan_Jew + Sicilian_West @ 1.860120
20 Bulgarian + Sicilian_Agrigento + Sicilian_Siracusa + Syrian_Jew @ 1.862329

Now obviously it's not entirely accurate, since I'm probably supposed to have 0 WHG outside of the EEF. But look at the closest DNA match:
Using 4 populations approximation:
1 French_Jew + Greek_Smyrna + Montenegrian + Moroccan_Jew @ 1.604190

Smyrna was a Greek colony going back to the late bronze age, apparently there was a large Jewish population in the classical period, and it's even recorded that Jews and Pagans persecuted Christians together during the early period. Now Gedmatch is speculation and nothing can replace IBD sharing and aDNA, just thought it would be interesting though.

 
It's said that North African Berbers were jews after the arrival of Islam,It's said also that the North African Berbers lead Nordic/Scandinavian blood/origin,especially the Rif Berbers of northern Morocco, TRUE ???
 
It's said that North African Berbers were jews after the arrival of Islam,It's said also that the North African Berbers lead Nordic/Scandinavian blood/origin,especially the Rif Berbers of northern Morocco, TRUE ???

I doubt both the 1st and 2nd ones, while Jews were probably in northwest Africa since Roman or even Carthaginian times, and while it's true Berber Jews do have IBD sharing and geneflow from non Jewish Berbers, I highly doubt they all descend from pre exile Jews. As for the latter, unlikely, I doubt Berbers share high IBD sharing with Danes or Swedes, nor do they have significant gene flow from or to them.
 
I doubt both the 1st and 2nd ones, while Jews were probably in northwest Africa since Roman or even Carthaginian times, and while it's true Berber Jews do have IBD sharing and geneflow from non Jewish Berbers, I highly doubt they all descend from pre exile Jews. As for the latter, unlikely, I doubt Berbers share high IBD sharing with Danes or Swedes, nor do they have significant gene flow from or to them.

About Riffian people of northern Morocco ???

Distribution of hair and eye colors according to Carleton S. Coon’s Races of Europe. Northern Morocco is an area of mixed (dark and light) hair and eye colours, in a higher percertage than that found in Sicily, Sardinia or even southern Spain, despite having an warmerclimate. The Nordic presence in Morocco is contemporary, or even earlier, to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riffian_people
 

This thread has been viewed 372523 times.

Back
Top