Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews - Ashkenazi founder event pre-14th century

Archetype0ne

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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.13.491805v1

Abstract

We report genome-wide data for 33 Ashkenazi Jews (AJ), dated to the 14th century, following a salvage excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt, Germany. The Erfurt individuals are genetically similar to modern AJ and have substantial Southern European ancestry, but they show more variability in Eastern European-related ancestry than modern AJ. A third of the Erfurt individuals carried the same nearly-AJ-specific mitochondrial haplogroup and eight carried pathogenic variants known to affect AJ today. These observations, together with high levels of runs of homozygosity, suggest that the Erfurt community had already experienced the major reduction in size that affected modern AJ. However, the Erfurt bottleneck was more severe, implying substructure in medieval AJ. Together, our results suggest that the AJ founder event and the acquisition of the main sources of ancestry pre-dated the 14th century and highlight late medieval genetic heterogeneity no longer present in modern AJ.




From what I gather there was two clusters of Ashkenazi Jews predating the 14th century, with the Erfurt community having had a larger contribution to modern day Ashkenazi population. The bottleneck also seems to have predated the 14th century.

Edit: Duplicate thread, feel free to delete this one.
 

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