Angela
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He did a nice job! Yes I read the thread before I even signed up here and its pretty interesting but is the "whg" in jews actual whg from a northern euro population or is it something that resembles it? What gets to me is that in the lazaridis study mentioned in that thread, jews have absolutely none of it, yet they supposedly mixed with Polish who have a ton of it? And the ibd with Poles could be from jews to poles and not vice versa, according to that thread. I'm not quite convinced that jews have actual ancestry from north or Eastern Europe but I'm open to any counter argument.
Precision is important when discussing these things, yes? It's true that in the Lazaridis et al three ancient population model, and in their graph based on f3 stats, the Ashkenazim, along with other populations, don't score any WHG. That's not the same as saying they don't have WHG, because they do, but it's included within the "farmer" percentage.
In terms of the IBD sharing, why would you assume that the gene flow was all from the Jews into Slavs? I don't see any evidence that was the case. If nothing else, with each pogrom there were reported rapes. Some of those no doubt resulted in pregnancies, much as I would prefer not to discuss it. They may not have happened specifically in Poland, but they were "Slavic" genes nonetheless. That's why ultra-orthodox Jewish women still have very short hair and wear wigs. The custom developed in the Pale, and was to make them less attractive to the surrounding goyim. At least that's what my Orthodox friends have told me.
Regardless, I don't see how the AJ failure to score any "additional" WHG means there wasn't a 3-5% influx of Slavic genes into the Ashkenazim. The Sicilians don't score any WHG, and yet we know that there was a large migration of northern Italians, who do score it (although not was much as in the Slavs), into Sicily in the Middle Ages.
In the last page of the Lazaridis et al paper, in Extended Data Table 3, they discuss the range of the possible WHG ancestry in all of their chosen populations. The Greek range is from .019 to .060 and yet we know there was a Slavic migration into Greece, although it was heavier in the Balkans. That's not very impressive. WHG scores are low all over southern Europe. Look at the Tuscans and the Spaniards: they score 12% as a mean, but the low end of the range for the Spaniards is .066. (A bit off topic, but you might want to take a look at the total EEF scores for some of these populations: Bergamo (72%), Tuscan (75%) , Spanish (76%) , Albanians (78%), Greek (79%), Sardinians 82%. Bulgarians are very close to Bergamo, with .718, but of course Cavalli Sforza proved that 30 years ago.)
https://genetics.med.harvard.edu/re...14_Nature_Lazaridis_EuropeThreeAncestries.pdf
When you're talking about flow into such a bottlenecked group as the Ashkenazim, it's very possible that just chance determined what alleles were passed on. Drift is very important in such groups.
At any rate, even if, for some reason, someone wanted to discount the many and excellently done research papers on the Ashkenazim and other Jewish groups which show such admixture, we now have ancient genomes from the Levant Bronze Age, of a population which is pretty close to being a proto-Canaanite one, as I've said before. The Ashkenazim are pulled away from them toward Europe. We likewise have Samaritan dna, people whom we know both from history and from comparisons to the Ashkenazim, are related to them, and we know where they plot. Again, they're pulled away from the Samaritans. '
So, the admixture happened; what remains to be discovered, only through ancient dna, in my opinion, is when, where, from whom, and precisely how much.