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.It's nice to finally see some ancient Jewish genotypes on the way, but there's a bit of a problem with this preprint. The fact that the authors are using modern-day Russians to model Eastern European-related ancestry in these Ashkenazi ancients from Central Europe tells me that they're somewhat confused. They did this because some of the Jews harbor significant Slavic ancestry and minor but perceptible East Asian ancestry, and Russians are Slavs who carry some Siberian ancestry, which is closely related to East Asian ancestry. Thus, broadly speaking, in terms of the right mix of DNA, Russians do the job. However, as per the preprint, based on historical data, these Jews probably sourced their Slavic ancestry from Bohemia, Moravia and/or Silesia, and the Slavic speakers in these regions carry very little, if any, East Asian or Siberian ancestry. I'm sure the authors can verify this claim without too much trouble. Ergo, it's likely that the Erfurt Jews received their Slavic and East Asian admixtures from different sources, and possibly at different times. I'd like to see Waldman et al. tackle this issue properly. I suspect that if they do, they might discover something interesting and perhaps unexpected about the ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jews. See also... My take on the Erfurt Jews Mediterranean PCA update
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews (Waldman et al. 2022 preprint)
Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Here's the abstract:
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If someone can explain to me why Waldman et al. claimed that these Jews got their Slavic ancestry from Bohemia/Moravia/Silesia, and then went ahead and used Uralic-admixed northern Russians in their models I would be very grateful.
Great paper. Reichlab also seems to admit that the popular Northern Italian + Levantine model should no longer be favored without more evidence. They echo Erik's theory that the Southern European mixture in Ashkenazi Jews can be modelled as East Med (Southern Italian) in origin, conceding that this complicates determining out how much Judaean ancestry Jews actually have (given the Levantine ancestry that already exists in East Meds).
It is strange to use Uralic-mixed groups here. I remember Reichlab also used Mordvins or the like to model the Slavic ancestry in Greeks in the Danubian limes preprint. Weird.
Maybe these are the only high-enough quality reference genomes they could find for qpAdm? I doubt that, though; maybe one of the authors could explain through email.
I don't share your enthusiasm.
They could do better in figuring out why they're seeing this East Asian ancestry in people supposedly with ancestry from Czechia, Slovakia and western Poland.
What's the explanation for it if West Slavs don't have this specific type of eastern ancestry?
I guess it remains an open question. I've been talking about it with some of our Jewish friends. They suggested that EA admixture came via the Silk Road. Maybe so. I brainstormed the possibility of a minor Avar (or the like) contribution surviving in whatever Slavic group Erfurt EU ancestors mixed with as they made their way up the Danube. The obvious problem with this idea is that an East Asian-rich steppe contribution didn't survive in later Slavic Gentile populations so it seems unlikely it would only survive in Knaanim. Some might suggest a small Khazar contribution could have done the trick, too. Maybe uniparental evidence could help here.
We'll take a look at it when they publish the Erfurt data.
It seems like some of the Erfurt Jews have quite a bit more of this East Asian admixture than modern Ashkenazi Jews, so that might help.
If it comes out that Khazar Jews are actually a thing and they provided ancestry to AJ, I would be really surprised. I was sure Khazar Jews after the fall of the Khaganate are just a myth.
Another even weirder possibility is a Jewish subgroup among early Hungarians intermixing with Central European Jews. But I would not bet money on this either.
Maybe it's Avar
The solution lies in the uniparentals-Some few may be Levantine (J1a), other Africans (E1b, mtDNA-L2), Italians (mtDNA-H1aj/1a, HapY-Z2103, U152), and the rest-Estonia, Poland (Wielbark culture), Czechia, even Ukraine (mtDNA-H11b1-Scythians) and Mongolia (mtDNA-H3p).
There was this paper earlier:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep08377.pdf?proof=t%3B+see+alsowww.sussex.ac.uk
"Reichlab also seems to admit that the popular Northern Italian + Levantine model should no longer be favored without more evidence. They echo Erik's theory that the Southern European mixture in Ashkenazi Jews can be modelled as East Med (Southern Italian) in origin, conceding that this complicates determining out how much Judaean ancestry Jews actually have (given the Levantine ancestry that already exists in East Meds)."
I've been noticing that in phylogenetic terms, Ashkenazi Jews often form a clade specifically with Maltese. I was considering whether this could be caused just by some conceptual similarity in ancestral makeup (Italian mixed with Middle Eastern).
However, per certain phylogenetically analyses (depending on statistical indices and the overall data being used): even within an Ashkenazi/Maltese clade, German Ashkenazi will sometimes form a subclade together with Maltese separated from another subclade that includes other Ashkenazi groups from Poland, Ukraine, Russia.
I read somewhere once that some pagan Slavs during the Northern Crusades, when given the choice between being Christianized or choosing Judaism, chose the latter, because they perceived there were more personal freedoms as in choices. Years ago, before there was deep y-dna testing with SNPs, I remember I had a "close" STR match with a person whose family had a quite recognizable Jewish name.
can mt N9a3 be an indication of Central / East Asian origins?
I analyze the paper and the conclusions in this blog post at length at http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2022/05/ancient-dna-insight-into-ashkenazi.html
After looking at their data and the Human Origins database at greater depth, I'm convinced that the East Asian origin is mediated through an Eastern European population in which it is present. The Human Origins database doesn't have a Polish population, but does have Estonian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Russian and Finnish populations, and while Russian and Finnish populations have more of this East Asian-like ancestry than Estonian, Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian populations do, these populations which are near Poland have only about 20% less East Asian-like ancestry than the Russian population does (possibly suggesting that the East European admixture is a bit higher than estimated using the Russian proxy for East European ancestry).
The data is broken into two subgroups Erfurt-EU (which has East European ancestry and East Asian ancestry and is represented by recent migrants (late 14th century) from Central and Eastern Europe - proximately from the locations identified but possibly as part of a multi-generational westward bsck migration from Eastern Europe and Russia where Jews arrived from the 10th to 12th centuries) and Erfurt-ME (which has far less of these ancestries) which appears to be the older Erfurt Jewish subpopulation dating to the late 11th century. This suggests that the East European and East Asian ancestry did not come at different times or in different places.
There are some interesting insights on Ashkenazi origins that can be drawn from the paper and its supplements, although not, I think, the one that Davidski identifies in his commentary in this post.
* There is a much strong affinity of these ancestors of modern Jews to Lebanon, and secondarily to Syria (the story of Bedouin B in the Negev desert to which they have affinity is one of recent admixture with a variety of groups), while the affinity modern Jews to Palestinians, Jordanians, Druze, Egyptians, and the more endogamous and ancient Bedouin A clan of the Negev desert, suggests that the Bible is on point in identifying Lebanon as the ultimate homeland of the Jewish people, but also suggests that Jews left little or no demographic mark in Egypt where Exodus places them for a prolonged period, and little or no demographic trace in Israel pre-20th century, suggesting that the Jews in this kingdom may have been a ruling caste with little demographic impact on the common people before going into exile from Israel in ca. 70 CE and in earlier Jewish exiles from Israel, leaving a mass of common people with whom the Jews did not admix behind to become the Palestinians and Bedouin A people.
* There is a strong preference supported by historical evidence for a Southern Italian as opposed to Northern Italian origin, which complicates ancestry analysis as Southern Italians have significant Middle Eastern admixture pre-Jewish admixture.
* There is a strong preference for Eastern European over German or other non-Southern types of European ancestry, despite the fact that the Ashkenazi Jews started out in Germany and France where they were welcomed in the 11th century prior to the First Crusade, and despite the fact that Yiddish is at core a Germanic language. There is no discernible Western European admixture.
After the 11th century there were massacres (starting in 1096 all along the Rhine) and flight from Western Europe to Moorish Spain's Sephardi Jewish community, a time that corresponds to the AJ population genetic bottleneck, and ultimately expulsion (in the 13th to 15th centuries) from most of Western Europe.
This suggests that modern AJ are largely descended from small number of Jews that already migrated east prior to 1096. It favors the possibility that rather than fleeing east and contributing to the future AJ gene pool, Jews still in the West in 1096 and beyond were either slaughtered or fled to Spain, rather than fleeing to Eastern Europe.
Alternately high levels of endogamy in Western European Jews could also help explain this datapoint. Perhaps Jewish migration from the 5th to 11th centuries to Western Europe was gender balanced, while Jewish migration to Eastern Europe starting in the 10th century was disproportionately male, which caused them to take local wives and pick up Eastern European ancestry.
"If someone can explain to me why Waldman et al. claimed that these Jews got their Slavic ancestry from Bohemia/Moravia/Silesia, and then went ahead and used Uralic-admixed northern Russians in their models I would be very grateful."
They used the Human Origins dataset for their reference genomes. It has no Polish dataset, and is also thin otherwise. Ukraine and Belorussia aren't horrible proxies and have lots of East Asian ancestry.
Also, Waldman did not claim that "claimed that these Jews got their Slavic ancestry from Bohemia/Moravia/Silesia". What he claimed is that these were the previous addresses of lots of the members of the European cluster of this population as disclosed in their lease applications that somehow survived in the historical record. A claim that this is their most recent address before moving to a German town is not a claim that this is the source of East European ancestry. Jews were in Lithuania and Poland since the 900s and Russia since the 1100s, may have gotten their Eastern European and East Asian ancestry there, and then may have subsequently migrated back to Germany via these places.
Several quick conclusions from this so far:
1. Central German Jews in the 1300s had two subgroups, one which is very similar to modern day Rhineland Jews (97% Western Jewish + 3% German), called Erfurt-ME and one, mainly originating from more Eastern regions (Poland, Bohamia etc.) who were around 66% Western Jewish + 33% Slavic on average, called Erfurt-EU.
2. Modern day Ashkenazi Jews are much closer to Erfurt-ME than to Erfurt-EU, but I believe once the samples would be out could be estimated as 70% Erfurt-ME vs. 30% Erfurt-EU (if one is to remove the Erfurt-EU outliers).
3. Many major subclades found among Ashkenazi Jews today were already similarly widespread among these Medieval Jews - among them the famous K1a1b1a1.
4. For the first time, a big study such as this suggests S. Italy as a more likely source for South European admixture in the ancestors of Modern Ashkenazi Jews, than N. Italy (!). This is something a lot of us have been debating here for 4 years.
5. Erfurt-EU had almost double the amount of East Asian admix than modern AJs do - still in the very low single digits, but that's interesting. One of the carriers of N9a3 (one of the more famous East Asian matrilineal lineages among AJs) is modeled in this study as half Slavic.
6. Because of their additional extra Slavic admixture, Erfurt-EU Jews seem to overlap with modern day Greeks. Are we looking at a potential source of where they came to Central Europe from (Danube from the Byzantine Empire? just a thought).
7. What I've found very annoying on this paper is that they completely neglected the North African component (which, for instance, theoretically could be one of the sources for Jewish K1a1b1a1, although personally I believe in entered our gene pool from Roman-era Gaul, aka France). This could also explain why they got such lousy fits when they tried to use ancient samples to model the Erfurt samples with.
8. Another issue with their ancient models for the Erfurt samples, is that their choice of Levantine ancient proxy was Canaanite - why? We have much more suitable samples such as Roman-era Levantines.
@Davidski wrote: the Erfurt Jews received their Slavic and East Asian admixtures from different sources, and possibly at different times. I'd like to see Waldman et al. tackle this issue. I suspect that if they do, they might discover something interesting and perhaps unexpected about the ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jews.
The puzzle is now solved, if it is known how the basic AJ lineage came about: Ashkenazi levites-kohanim: R1a-CTS6> Y2619.
R1a-Z93 (? the prefields of Carpathian) > Z94 >Z2124 > Z2122 F1345 >(Poland > Baltic > Fatjanovo > Ural > Central Asia > Uzbekistan > R1a-CTS6 Iran > R1a-Y2619 Palestina > Levi, the patriarch Jacob presumed / adopted son.
(The European lineage Y2619 see: 27. Behar DM, Saag L, Karmin M, Gover MG, Wexler JD, Sanchez LF, Greenspan E, Kushniarevich A, Davydenko O, Sahakyan H, et al: The genetic variation in the R1a clade among the Ashkenazi Levites' Y chromosome. Sci Rep 2017, 7:14969.)
http://www.tropie.tarnow.opoka.org.pl/images/trzy-ie-rody.jpg
@andrew
There are Poles in the Human Origins dataset. They appeared there a couple of years after the original was released.
These Polish samples were used in some of the analyses in this preprint.
But anyway, there should be ancient Slavic samples available for this sort of thing by now.
@MOCKBA
Yeah, the Ashkenazi N9a3 lineage is from East Asia.
My guess is that it arrived in Europe with Asian Jews, and moved into the Ashkenazi gene pool possibly in Bohemia/Moravia.
@Erik
One of the carriers of N9a3 (one of the more famous East Asian matrilineal lineages among AJs) is modeled in this study as half Slavic.
Half Slavic seems unlikely, although half Eastern European might be right.
The N9a3 and East Asian admix aren't from Slavs, or at least any Slavs that are still around today.
@Davidski,
I agree, could be half "East European" (closer to ~40%) or what the study named as "Russian"-like. I don't know how much it's East Asian admixture is (as the study didn't say, just mentioned the total average for all samples), but it's the only one with an East Asian subclade (that is, N9a3).
I don't know if it's a matter of correlation or a matter of coincidence, but it just might be that their East European and East Asian ancestry are related.
The problem here is that most East Asian incursions into Europe started after the 13th century (Mongols, Tatars etc.) and these samples are from the 14th century - so it's unlikely N9a3 is related to those later Medieval East Asian incursions into Eastern Europe.
So we're left, IMO with several interesting historical possibilities:
1. These Erfurt-EU descend partially from Jews migrating from the East, perhaps North Balkan Romaniote Jews from the Byzantine Empire, and they absorbed their East European admix quite early during the Slavic incursions in the 7th century, or later from Avars. Or they even got their East Asian via Byzantine ties to the Silk Road. They then arrived to Central Europe via the Danube. It sounds to me a bit too far fetched and over complicated, but it's remotely plausible.
2. They partially descend from Khazars which disappeared 400 years prior to these samples' dating, and perhaps gave very minimal genetic contribution to some pre-Ashkenazi (Knaanic) East European Jews which these Erfurt-EU represent then.
All in all, when you look at the other East Asian subclade AJs usually get, M33c, things get much more complicated, as that subclade is mostly associated with South China.
BAM files from the "Stable population structure in Europe since the Iron Age, despite high mobility" study should be available now. Can we get those to G25 David?
My suspicion has always been that the East Asian ancestry in AJ was mediated through silk road contacts. From what I have seen the subclades and autosomal ancestry is quite definitely China associated.
We know there were communities of Jews in China. It stands to reason that if we take into account the Jewish long distance trade activity that was known to exist in the early medieval period stretching from Europe to China, some back admixture is not unexpected, and could easily have been heterogeneously distributed between different communities.
@Gaska
Considering that R1b-Z2103 is fairly ubiquitous in the northern Middle East, and a lesser extent in the Levant, there is no reason to assume the Z2103 samples happen to be from southern Italian or Greek men for example, yet none of the J2/E1b arrived from these same areas. I think that the male parentals could all be of Levantine, or northern Middle Eastern origin, but something like K1a1b1a might be of Italian or some European origin. What is clear, is that no exclusively north or north-central European male lineages are present which demonstrates a degree of isolation. What is also fascinating is how the most inbred group are the K1a1b1a families. In the 14th century there seems to be a degree of separation between the Jewish groups here in Germany. The T1, E1b, and R1b families don't have nearly the same high ROH.
@André Rodrigues
I need the genotype data.
The East Asian ancestry in Jews comes from the importation of Chinese women to Eastern Europe during the Yuan Dynasty era.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4323646/
"Contemporary Jews retain a genetic imprint from their Near Eastern ancestry, but obtained substantial genetic components from their neighboring populations during their history. Whether they received any genetic contribution from the Far East remains unknown, but frequent communication with the Chinese has been observed since the Silk Road period. To address this issue, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation from 55,595 Eurasians are analyzed. The existence of some eastern Eurasian haplotypes in eastern Ashkenazi Jews supports an East Asian genetic contribution, likely from Chinese. Further evidence indicates that this connection can be attributed to a gene flow event that occurred less than 1.4 kilo-years ago (kya), which falls within the time frame of the Silk Road scenario and fits well with historical records and archaeological discoveries. This observed genetic contribution from Chinese to Ashkenazi Jews demonstrates that the historical exchange between Ashkenazim and the Far East was not confined to the cultural sphere but also extended to an exchange of genes."
@Alfred
Yep, I ran into that paper in my Googling of this issue.
I think M3cc2 needs to be put aside when we're looking into the East Asian component, that now in Erfurt-EU seem to be even higher than it is today among East European Ashkenazi Jews. It is a South Chinese subclade and as such it throws us away from the possibility of more obvious origin for this admixture. M3cc2 could be explained away by even a single Jewish family from Kaifeng travelling West during the Mongol Empire period (which merged all of Northern Eurasia into a single political entity at a time) and married a family of early Ashkenazim or East Knaanic (pre-Ashkenazi) family.
I think though we need to consider that perhaps most of the East Asian admixture in Erfurt-EU and presumably what is left today in some East European Ashkenazi Jews, could be from Khazars (which were extremely East Asian, so perhaps after centuries the very miniscule contribution they had still played out in the 14th century as ~2.7%).
@Erik186
Ashkenazi and Ashkenazi-levites in East Central Europe (80% of all Jews living today) line R1a- Z93> ... CTS6> Y2619 come from Palestine, via Malta, Italia and Bavaria-Germany.
See D. Behar et al. 2017
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5668307/
In the second millennium BC, they came to Palestine as an offshoot of migrants from East Central Europe via East Central Asia (with the Indo-Iranian Aryans) R1a-Z93> Z94> Z2124> Z2122> F1345
On this East Central Asia route, they had many chances to "infect" with East Asian DNA
@Erikl86
Khazars weren't "extremely east Asian". They were largely West Eurasian, both genetically and phenotypically. But that doesn't matter, since Khazars aren't the origin of East Asian ancestry in Europeans or Jews.
All of the East Asian haplogroups in Jews are typically East Asian, specifically Chinese, Japanese or Korean, not the broadly "East Eurasian" lineages you see in Turkic group. This is also true of the East Asian haplogroups in Western Europeans. They're not central Asian or Siberian, they're East Asian, and most are dated to have introgressed several centuries after the demise of the Khazars.
This is true not just of haplogroup M33, but also N9a, and the other distinctly East Asian haplogroups in Jews and Western Europeans, including Western European Jews like Scottish Sara Sheridan, who had mtDNA N9a.
These clades tend to be of relatively recent arrival, are all distinctly Sinitic, which points to the recent importation of women along the last silk road, rather than a Khazarian or early medieval origin. We would be seeing more of haplogroups C or D if these contributions were coming from Turkic speakers. Instead we see the lineages that are more common among Sinitic, Koreanic or Japonic groups.
@StP
For your theory to work, Levites in Europe and especially the middle east would need to have above average East Asian DNA since they have so much R1a.
They don't. European Levites don't have any more East Asian ancestry than regular eastern European Jews, and the middle eastern Levites have less East Asian ancestry than the European Levites.
This, again, points to the fundamental importance of the movement of Sinitic women across the silk road some time after the year 1200, as the source of the East Asian ancestry in European Jews, rather than the debunked Khazar hypothesis.
@Alfred Meyer Wins said...
The East Asian ancestry in Jews comes from the importation of Chinese women to Eastern Europe during the Yuan Dynasty era. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4323646/
Ah yes! If you distinguish the patriarchal lineage among Ashkenazi Jews (especially their leaders and ideologues: Levites and kohanim/priests, who display the European R1a-Z93 lineage, from maternal mitochondrial lines that may have been "imported" as you write - then we agree!
These women may even have been descendants of those who had emigrated to China earlier from the R1a-Z93 lineage. I counted about 40 ancient families, whose descendants still live in China today!!
@Alfred,
In fact, this is the problem when one focuses solely on uniparental bread crumbs, especially with such a genetically endogenous population as Ashkenazi Jews. While M3cc2 is undoubtedly Chinese, N9a3 isn't, and found for instance among Bashkirs and few other Central Asian populations. In fact, it could well be, considering the severe bottleneck Ashkenazi Jews experienced in their history, that M3cc2 came from just a single Chinese woman who happened to find her way via the Silk Road or any other way (maybe Chinese Jews during the Mongol Empire's period which bordered the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth on the west. However, most of the East-Asian like admixture could indeed come from Khazars (again, we're talking about a very small amount of East Asian anyhow).
And while I'm can't really go into too much details at the moment, few of us have heard rumors about how the Khazar samples from the Mikhayev et al. 2019 study look like (you can read the pre-print here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.15.876912v1.full.pdf), and they are indeed ~40% Siberian/North East Asian like. The rest indeed is mostly West Eurasian and some minor East European.
You are correct about one point though - one should expect to see more haplogroups C and D as pointing towards a Turkic origin.
@Erikl86
You are speaking a lotta BS. Haplogroup N9a is a Sinitic East Asian haplogroup and has nothing to do with central Asians. It's most common in Japan, China and Korea. In Jews it represents descent from women from those cultures.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0032179
"Haplogroup N9a is characteristic of eastern Asian populations, where it is detected at a highest frequencies in Japan (4.6%), China (2.8%), Mongolia (2.1%) and Korea (3.9%) [8], [21], [32], [34]. Haplogroup N9a is rare in Taiwan (1.2%) and Island southeastern Asia (1.1%) [22], [30], but appears at greater frequencies in Mainland southeastern Asia (1.5–4.5%) [24], [33]. With the comparable frequencies this haplogroup is detected in several populations of northern (0.9%–4.6%) and central Asia (1.2–2.5%), but it is virtually absent in western and southern Asia [8], [32], [35], [36]. Interestingly, haplogroup N9a is rarely found in the Volga-Ural region Tatars (∼1%) and Bashkirs (1.5%) as well as in some eastern Europeans, like Russians from southwestern Russia (1.5%) and Czechs (0.6%) [37]–[40]."
No, the m33 in Jews doesn't come from a single Chinese woman and these weren't Jewish Chinese. I don't care about rumors about shit pre-prints. I only care about the stuff that actually made it past peer review. 40% is not "extremely East Asian".
@Alfred,
It's hard to argue with someone who can't even see his own self-contradicting arguments, but I'll try my best.
Your own quote re-iterates exactly what I said:
"With the comparable frequencies this haplogroup is detected in several populations of northern (0.9%–4.6%) and central Asia (1.2–2.5%)"
and:
"Interestingly, haplogroup N9a is rarely found in the Volga-Ural region Tatars (∼1%) and Bashkirs (1.5%) as well as in some eastern Europeans, like Russians from southwestern Russia (1.5%) and Czechs (0.6%)"
Of course originally both N9a3 AND M3cc2 did originate from Neolithic China, but as I mentioned, N9a3 exists elsewhere, also among Central Asians.
Your argument about N9a3 reminds me the idiotic argument that Ashkenazi Q-M242 is directly from Central Asia (as Elhaik argues) because it originated from there 13,000 years ago, ignoring the fact that all Ashkenazi Q-M242 fall under it's downstream subclade Q-M378 which exists all over the Near East.
Next to your other arguments...
You said:
"Haplogroup N9a is a Sinitic East Asian haplogroup and has nothing to do with central Asians. It's most common in Japan, China and Korea. In Jews it represents descent from women from those cultures." How do you know it didn't enter through any of those North Asian or Central Asian via Khazar converts? Or Bukharan Jews?
You also said:
"No, the m33 in Jews doesn't come from a single Chinese woman and these weren't Jewish Chinese." how the hell do you know that? And how do you know it doesn't exist among any historical Jewish community in China? Ashkenazi Jews are extremely endogenous genetically and it's more than possible that few of our matrilineal lineage did in fact enter our heritage via one single woman, M3cc2 included.
And last but not least, you said:
"40% is not 'extremely East Asian'."
Well considering all sorts of (now defunct) ideas about who were the Khazars, some even argued they already were mostly Iranic or completely West Asian, having some much East Asian ancestry does in fact change the picture and:
1. makes the possibility that Ashkenazim are mostly descended from them even more absurd.
2. makes the small East Asian component modern East European Ashkenazim have (about half of that of Erfurt-EU it seems) quite plausible to have originated from Khazars, even if some of it could have come directly from China (like the woman/women responsible on contributing M3cc2).
Erikl86:
40% East Asian ancestry isn't "out of the ordinary" for the Iranians of the distant past. The Pazyryk Iranian people for example were over 50% Nganasan & East Asian. Those people who argue for Iranian Khazars are doing so based on cultural, rather than genetic arguments. If Khazars were Iranian it's because they descend from Pazyryk-like Iranians from Siberia, not the people of modern day Iran. Your Khazar sample would appear to be less East Eurasian than the Iranians from Siberia.
From Carmai tweet of May 18:
"Erfurt Jews could be modeled (by qpAdm) as having three sources of ancestry:
South-Italian (~70%)
Middle Eastern (~15%)
Eastern European (~15%)"
I question the implication that a) the 14th Century Ashkenazi population as a whole was only ~15% Middle Eastern, and/or b) that this group of Erfurt remains adequately represents the Ashkenazic population at that time.
How these data are interpreted depends on one's definitions of Southern and Eastern Europe, and Middle Eastern, and what one considers to be reference populations for each of these regions.
In sum, I am grateful for the reporting of these samples, but I believe the interpretation phase has only just begun.
Does anyone have the software to convert BAM to genotype (if still needed by Davidski) so those of us who care about this may take a closer look?
@Hannibal:
"40% East Asian ancestry isn't "out of the ordinary" for the Iranians of the distant past. The Pazyryk Iranian people for example were over 50% Nganasan & East Asian. Those people who argue for Iranian Khazars are doing so based on cultural, rather than genetic arguments. If Khazars were Iranian it's because they descend from Pazyryk-like Iranians from Siberia, not the people of modern day Iran. Your Khazar sample would appear to be less East Eurasian than the Iranians from Siberia."
My Iranian Azeri father-in-law's mtDNA haplogroup originally fell under the A5b umbrella that was found primarily in China (based on haplotree calculations and stats from some years ago). Since I uploaded his mtDNA to YFull, he has completely changed the structure of A (at various snapshots having "Russian Far East" tree siblings in the interim) and now is one of the few A* samples. He has near-zero East Asian/Siberian admixture, by the way, so this is an interesting purely maternal artefact...
My mother-in-law from the very same mountain-top village far northwest of Iran, has her majority mtDNA relatives as Mountain Jews from Derbent, Dagestan, Georgia...
We don't even need to resort to Khazar theories to understand that Iran-Caucasus border has been an interaction zone of diverse populations for a really long time. At the same time, obviously, the clearly recorded Jewish Khazar peoples did not just dissipate into thin air.
The extent to which some folks (*cough* Alfred *cough*) will go to distance themselves from the "barbaric" Turko-Mongol-Huns by claiming that the ancestry of a geographically European people must have "bypassed" every parsimonious explanation via the far rarer instances of ancient "Han Chinese mail order brides" (noble HAN *not* barbaric HUN mind you!) is laughable.... As if the Hans themselves -- the literally most populous peoples on earth today -- never married any women with a drop of Siberio-Turko-Mongol blood. Jeesh...
This is not directly related to this thread but is in a very tangential way (which I won't go into for the sake of brevity):
I'm interested to know if anyone has been able to assess more accurately the 18 P312 individuals reported in "Genomic transformation and social organization during
the Copper Age–Bronze Age transition in southern Iberia" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi7038.
According to the paper's supplement: "The exact phylogenetic position on the Y haplogroup tree could be resolved further in 41 out of 49 males, who carry the derived variant at Y-SNP P312, and Y-SNP Z195 in 23 out of 41 males." From what I understand then there are 18 males from the Almoloya site resolved only as far as P312, while all the rest (23/41) were Z195.
I'm hoping some kind person with access to the BAM info may be able to drill deeper into haplogroup assessments for the 18 so far called as P312. I'm reluctant to believe that every single male reported from this site is Z195, although stranger things have happened I suppose.
Never mind the prior post. After reading through the Anthrogenica thread on this paper, I can only conclude that the 18 sample cannot be called beyond P132. So I will have to wait.
Hello! Southern Italian here. The website mytrueancestry.com has the Erfurt Ashkenazi Cemetery genome as a reference group and I match it quite highly. Thought I'd mention that as it was brought up a few times that AJs are close to Southern Italians genetically.
Hello davidski , i will be happy to share with you my autosomal results from family tree dna company+big y test and full mtdna if that is intresting you, replay me and i will write you my email.
Forgot to mention 100% ashkenazi autosomal by family tree dna
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