Which is the "Cohen marker"?

[firetown]

I have not had too much time to look more into it, but noticed lots of confusion and arguments over it.
I was under the impression that with 50 percent of the Cohens being J1c, that would be the marker identifying the line.
Which btw. is also the most common y-DNA for Bedouins of the Sinai peninsula.
Now I am reading more and more claims of E1b1b being the marker for the Cohens.
My understanding was that the high E1b1b in Ashkenazis came from the fact that Sephardics who wound up mixing with them stem from the Hebrews migrating via Northern Africa towards the Iberian peninsula.
Is there any evidence as to what the original y-DNA marker for the Cohens was?

 

[Rethel]

Is there any evidence as to what the original y-DNA marker for the Cohens was?

J1.

Definitely not E or R.

 

[Maciamo]

I explained on the J1 page that the Cohen marker corresponds to the J1-Z18271 clade (aka ZS227 or Y3088). Roughly half of all Cohanim belong to this clade, which is 5700 years old and has a TMRCA of 3200 years.

 

[firetown]

Got it. There have been discussions regarding Bedouin tribes carrying the same, or a closely related marker in terms of whether or not they could be descendants of the Cohens or Arabic groups. Do you have any thoughts on that?

 

[lyakh]

I think that J-Z18271 (aka J-Y3088) is not only the haplogroup of Aaron and Cohens, but also of biblical Jacob! I think that there is 90% chance that Jacob belonged to haplogroup Y3088. Lineages of Ishmael and Esau might not survive to modern times. Y3088 expands rapidly (there are eight sublineages of that haplogroup on YFull tree), YFull estimated its TMRCA as 2900 ybp, but it may be about 25% older.

There is bottleneck in main subclade of Y3088 (13 SNPs) - S12192 aka Y5400. 21 of 31 YFull samples of Y3088 belong to Y5400 subclade. I think that it is the lineage of Aaron, which was quite severely bottlenecked, common ancestor of those 21 men lived about 2000 - 2500 ybp in my opinion.

 

[brakeyawself]

"The presence of several founding lineages among the Cohanim of this survey--both shared between or specific to the Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi communities, as well as highly variable frequencies of these lineages among sub-populations within Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi communities...may lend support to a metapopulation model. Mutation alone does not provide an explanation for the multiplicity of Cohanim haplogroups, because the ages of most of these haplogroups predate the foundation of the Jewish people."

The CMH doesn't prove the biblical narrative, it doesn't prove descent from one man. It does suggest Kohen formed possibly around one large family. But they couldn't have been paternally descended from all other Levites either.

So maybe an Aaron existed, but he had his own lineage then , not the same as all Levites. And it appears not all original Kohen were of his lineage, just a larger proportion possibly.