DNA Ancestral Journey Continues
From: Ted Kandell <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:03:14 -0700 (PDT)
To: Yahoo Group G2c<[email protected]>
ReplyTo: [email protected]
Subject: [Y-DNA-G2c] An appeal: Last push to test for G2c origins and branching worldwide
We need to conduct a final round of testing to confirm the origins and branching of G2c worldwide. This involves about 9 haplotypes, and two Jewish families from Rome.
There are also about 8 academic samples that are potentially (or tested) G2c that need more thorough testing, but this is a separate issue entirely.
The internal history of the Syrian-Maronite G2c*s and the Pathan G2c1s seems to be rather clear. although a bit of additional complete testing of members of these clades is needed.
Again, I’m appealing to all of you:
First, any donations to the G2c Project Fund are welcome and needed to :
http://www.familytreedna.com/group-general-fund-contribution.aspx?g=G2c
I would like to thank Bennett Greenspan for a personal contribution to the G2c Project Fund (out of his own pocket).
These contributions will go toward complete testing of Syrian-Lebanese Maronite, Pathan, Italian G2c’s. We already have enough STR data from Ashkenazi Jewish G2c’s, thanks to the efforts of many of you in getting more “advanced testing”. I also thank everyone here for helping to contribute to the 67 STR testing of our South Italian G2c’s.
“Complete” testing means testing all the available STRs on a few (no more than 9) representative samples. We have no clue which STRs (besides DYS635 and DYS710) will prove useful to help clarify the branching. We need to check this thoroughly.
I also need volunteers to personally contact two families of Roman Jews and make sure they get tested. We ourselves need to pay for it. Just two samples, in fact. We need to check if these are G2c.
ZARFATI and ANAW.
Someone needs to contact them directly.
That means a phone call or even a personal visit.
Mailing a kit to people and expecting them to know what to do with it - without an adequate explanation - is just not good enough.
If one of these is G2c, then in fact we can document an origin of the Ashkenazi Jewish G2c cluster among Roman Jews as far back as 70 CE. If the other is G2c, then we can confirm the presence of G2c in Medieval France before 1306, and perhaps an earlier origin in the Rhineland and before that in Italy.
This in turn will connect Ashkenazi Jewish G2c* much more closely to South Italian, Pathan, and Syrian-Maronite G2c, by making the origin closer by 1000 years, which is about 30% of the age of all of G2c today. It “closes the gap” for all of G2c considerably.
Is everyone listening, and not fixated on “Lithuania”?
It’s 100% impossible that the common ancestor of the entire Ashkenazi Jewish G2c cluster lived in Lithuania. This is plain scientific fact and cannot be altered or wished away. There clearly were multiple lines that immigrated separately to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonweath. The common ancestor lived no later than about 1100, and in the range of 850-1100, and perhaps earlier.
Here is some concrete evidence that I generated several years ago. The G2c* haplotypes are all from the Ashkenazi Jewish G2c cluster:
http://www,archeogenetics.org/y-dna/G/G2c/Combined%20Clan%20Donald%20-%20G2c%20network.PNG
Essentially the results have not changed at all since then, in spite of the fact that we now have approximately 100 Ashkenazi Jewish G2c haplotypes.
There were multiple independent settlements of not-too-closely related (12th cousin?) Jewish men in Poland-Lithuania. Period.
The Ashkenazi Jewish G2c cluster apparently has close relatives within about the past 2000 years at least, anywhere on earth. Aside from any connections to Early Medieval French and Italian Jews, there is no evidence whatsoever of a later arrival in Europe than the year 70 CE.
We have about 9 relevant non-Ashkenazi G2c haplotypes available for testing.
We need to test all of these for all the STRs (or a smaller representative set). In lieu of new SNPs, we can use the STRs to find the exact worldwide branching of G2c.
There is a very very very strong “Italian Jewish” connection to Ashkenazi G2c.
I think that there are two critical Italian Jewish families that need to be tested to confirm this. One was sent a kit, and twice it came back with no usable DNA.
The FRANCISCO family has compelling evidence that they originated as the Italian (Sicilian) Jewish ZARFATI (“French”) family. A Jewish family with the name Zarfati (and variants) is documented as having lived in Sicily before 1493.
There may very well be more than one ZARFATI family. One could be the TREVES family from Troyes France (claiming descent from one of Rashi’s sons-in-law). A member from Rhodes tested and in fact matches the “Ashkenazi” family from Aleppo Syria, and are in one of the four quite separate major Ashkenazi J1c3d-L147 (“J1e”) clusters. My suspicion is that these are also connected to the Moroccan and Algerian Jewish ZARFATI family, but different from the Roman Jewish ZARFATI family:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=391&letter=B&search=Zarfati
The Italian ZARFATI family may also be the BASSOLA family originating from Basel Switzerland before 1350. This would be compatible with an origin in France before the first expulsion of the Jews in 1306.
My hypothesis is that G2c being so widespread, and yet so very specific to Ashkenazi Jews (and apparently absent from Iberia), means that a major founding lineage of Ashkenazi Jews from Italy had to have been G2c. These would have included Jews from Medieval France who originated in the Rhineland, who in turn came north from Italy before 955.
Please don’t forget that we do have a single non-Jewish French Huguenot G2c in the Ashkenazi cluster who may possibly (we aren’t 100% certain) be a remnant of a presence of G2c in Medieval France. The only problem is that this family has not quite been documented in France itself, but dated to an early 19th century French Protestant immigrant to Germany. It’s quite intriguing that this is the one place we find Ashkenazi Jewish G2c outside of people with claimed French Jewish origins from Southern Italy.
The ANAW (DEGLI MANSI / PIATELLI / CASADIO / BETHEL / DE SYNAGOGA / BOZECCO) family of Rome seems to me to be a possible candidate for an early European Jewish origin of G2c. They claimed to be among the few founding Jewish families of Rome, brought there as prisoners in the year 70 after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus in the First Jewish War. The name “Anav” (אנו) means “modest” in Hebrew. This is somewhat reminiscent of the widespread G2c tradition of being “Plain Jews”. They were documented from the 10th century onward. They are “Israelites”, not Cohanim or Levites, and did not claim any traditions of “Davidic descent”. The most interesting thing is that they had repeating given names that are vaguely similar to those we see in G2c:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1483&letter=A&search=Anaw
One of the main founding families of the Ashkenazi Jewish community in the Rhineland was the KALONYMOS family. The problem is that while “Kalman” is a relatively common Ashkenazi Jewish traditional given name, it doesn’t seem that any G2c’s at all were named “Kalman” or “Meshullam”.
Notice the names in the genealogies of the Medieval Jewish ANAW family of Rome:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/img_template.jsp?volume1/V01p566005.jpg&volume=volume1&imgid=208
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/img_template.jsp?volume1/V01p566006.jpg&volume=volume1&imgid=209
“Jekuthiel” (Yekutiel) is a rather distinctive recurring name that I have not seein in G2c, but some of the other names seem to be rather compatible with recurring G2c given names (Benjamin, Abraham, Moses, Issac, Solomon).
The Italian Jewish connection has come up repeatedly and independently in G2c families, in all parts of the Ashkenazi cluster of G2c. So far, absolutely zero Iberian or other Jews have turned out to be G2c.
Zarfati / di Francisci / Francisco, Kurtchik / Caretto, Toropani / Trapani, Ganley / Ganski, Gans / De Ganza, and perhaps even Bai / Baio. There may be others too. This cannot be ignored, or discounted as “romantic legends”. No one in Lithuania cared that their name would have been “Trapani” and no Jew in Ukraine cared that their name would have been “Caretto” and certainly no Irishman would care if their name was “De Ganza” from Italian Jews. Why would people from Appalachia claim to be “Mediterranean Jews from France”?
These people have nothing to gain from making up such “strange origins”.
Why do these stories keep coming up again and again and again, from people who have no clue at all what G2c is, and from well before the days of DNA testing?
The “big problem” with G2c, is that it branched off from the rest of G2* in the Upper Paleolithic, around 13,000 years ago, but so far all of G2c seems to have a common ancestor only around 1350 BCE or a bit earlier, in the Late Bronze Age. That’s a huge gap in time. (A “population bottleneck”.) It’s a big mystery, but it does make things much easier for us because we can pinpoint the recent origins of G2c to a very specific time and place, in fact right in the earliest historical era.
I don’t need to say that there were no “Jews” or “Israelites” yet at that time or place.
That came later. This doesn’t contradict any of the archeological or documentary sources, in fact this is precisely what all of them say.
Did I just say that G2c did not “originate” with “Jews”? Yes I did. Believe it.
That doesn’t mean that G2c wasn’t present among the earliest Jewish (or “Israelite”) population, it just means that these folks had extremely close relatives nearby who were never “Jews”. Yes, contrary to what everyone seems to think, Jews were closely related to local Levantine non-Jews, who never ever were Jews, even as late as the Early Iron Age (circa 1150 BCE). Quotes and archeological evidence are not needed here.
It seems from some preliminary evidence that the very first branch was the “Syrians” from around Damascus (later their descendants the “Maronites” from Lebanon as well), followed by the rest of G2c.
Let me say that another time, since it seems necessary to do so:
When I say “Syrians” needless to say I do not mean “Jews in Syria” or “Israelites” or “Hebrews”. These were “pre-Israelites”, “Canaanites”, “Amorites” or “Arameans” if you will, but rather close relatives of the “Israelites” who maintained close contact and alliances with them..
How about “Hivites” - an unusual and rather mysterious sort of Amorite found only in two places, near Jerusalem and up north near Damascus?
It seems like these “Hivites from Lebanon under Mt. Hermon” (west of Damascus, the Anti-Lebanon “White” Mountains), have some sort of extremely close connection to the “Benjaminites” from “Gibeon”.
Why do the Pathans and a certain family in Ashkenazi G2c* claim to be “Benjaminites” when in fact these were the flat-out majority in Jerusalem both before the Babylonian Exile and after the Return in the Second Temple Era?
(If anyone disagrees, I say “read the Bible in Hebrew” and then discuss the text from a critical perspective first before claiming otherwise.) Yes “admixture”. (“Their sons married their daughters”) and the archeological “Emergence of Israel from Canaan”. If the texts themselves don’t contradict this, why should you?
It doesn’t make the Lebanese or Syrian G2c’s “Jews”. It doesn’t make the “Jews” (whatever that is) in G2c “non-Jews”. In fact, as I show below, this may include a small number of Palestinians too.
What it does make all of G2c is “Native Paleolithic Levantines”.
Been there for a real long time!
How about 13,000 years?
Let’s say the mammoths were still around when G2c split from G2*.
The key value here that tells us the relative branching of G2c as a whole seems to be DYS635.
In all of G, DYS635 is only >=23 among non-Syrian G2c’s. This includes the Pathan G2c1s and the Ashkenazim, and the other unusual G2c’s. The Syrians have DYS635=22 or 21, which is the typical ancestral value for the rest of G. There are also other differences that set these Syrian G2c*s apart from the rest of G2c.
The date of the split of the Syrian G2c*s with the rest of G2c seems to be around 1350 BCE. “Amorite”.
The Pathan G2c1s seem to branch off very early, and in fact may have specifically Medieval Jewish merchant and trader origins from Ghor who arrived in the east around the year 800 CE during the Ghurid Empire, and later converted to Islam after 1150-1250, as their traditions say. They claim to be descendants of Judeans from the Babylonian Exile in 598 and 589 BCE.
http://malihabad.blogspot.com/2008/08/medieval-persian-references-to-putative.html
The date of the split between the Ashkenazi Jewish G2c*s and the Pathan G2c1s does in fact seem to be around 650-850 BCE. Why?
(If anyone says “Lost Tribes” I ask them to find the “Sambatyon River” which doesn’t flow on the Sabbath on the map first, then we’ll talk about that.)
We now know that Pathan G2c1, like the rest of G2c (including the Ashkenazi Jews) has DYS635=24 or 23. That probably means that the Pathan G2c1s share a common origin with the Ashkenazi Jewish G2c*s that is slightly later than the initial split with the Syrian G2c*s. Does that mean that the Pathans in particular do have Jewish (not “Israelite”, but Jewish) origins?
One of our three Italian G2c’s from Naples seems to be of specifically non-Jewish Syrian origin. The two Sicilians are questionable at this point, but are also extremely early branches. It’s hard to say what this means right now.
There are possibly only 6 G2c’s worldwide that don’t fall into the three major clusters, and three of these are from Italy. The others are from Egypt (who and where?), Jordan, and perhaps from a Tabassaran from Kaitag, Daghestan (a small area which historically had plenty of Jews). There is one confirmed G2c from Kars Turkey (of unspecified origin) but this seems at least superficially to be related to the Syrian cluster.
There may be a tiny number of additional G2c’s of an unusual sort, among Palestinians and a Sardinian, with DYS390=25 or 27. I’m not 100% sure about this, the only hint is that the Sardinian with DYS390=25 does not have a duplicated DYS19, and has DYS635=23. It seems that there are a very very tiny number of other extremely early G2c’s around worldwide.
There may be one or two other G2c’s around, like one of the Syrian variety from Athens, but we’ve gone so far in testing the Y DNA of the entire world that we’ve found “exotic G2c’s in the following places:
Ashkenazi G2c*:
1. an apparently considerable number of Mestizos from Merida Yucatan (and US “Hispanic” descendants)
2. a Khanty Siberian tribesman (a place where Russian Ashkenazi Jewish traders and draftees were active in the 19th century)
3. a Han Chinese from Liaoning in Manchuria (another place where Ashkenazi Jews settled in the late 19th century to escape the Czarist empire)
4. Frankist converts in County Mayo, Ireland
5. Italian Jewish “Swiss” descendants in Colonial Pennsylvania and their descendants Appalachia, Tennessee, and Missouri
6. As expected, a scattering of G2c’s in Poland and elsewhere of unknown origin
Pathan G2c1:
1. The Hunza Valley, where Medieval Pathan mercenaries settled
2. Northern Kyrzgystan, settled as a military outpost of the Khanate of Khiva in the early 19th century
3. Northeast Iran (and possibly Tehran) where Pathans settled as mercenaries under the Safavid Empire and as exiles under Nader Shah Afshari
4. A family from Saudi Arabia that originated in Medieval Afghanistan
5. I also fully expect to find some G2c1′s among the many Pathan mercenary descendants of the Mughal military forces of India
Syrian (“Maronite Lebanese”) G2c*:
1. (as I said) Athens Greece - the Byzantines settled Syrian Christians as colonists in Medieval Greece
2. Pozzuoli near Naples which was the major ancient Italian mainland port in the Classical Era
3. Kars Turkey on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, again Syrian Christians settled on the Byzantine frontiers as mercenaries
The point here is that we have such a thorough worldwide sampling, that we are even detecting the very rarest exotic “out of place” G2c’s. That’s a sign that there really are no more G2c’s to be found anywhere else on Earth. That means that we can conclusively say where G2c is not found. That includes “Greece” and Greeks in general.
Once we have the data about the major three clades, the Ashkenazi Jewish, Pathan and Syrian, and our three Italians, all we need is to somehow get complete testing on the remaining unusual potential G2c’s, the Jordanian, Egyptian, Daghestani, and possibly the tiny Palestinian-Sardinian cluster, and also confirm the status of the sample from Kars Turkey.
Short of obtaining full Y sequences, or SNPs that help further refine the branching, we’re on the verge of a complete answer for all of G2c. We can do most of the full STR testing ourselves, but there are just a few academic samples that need further testing as well.
What I think we can prove here is this:
1. The Syrian G2c*s were never Jews, but just the Syrian or “Canaanite” source population for the rest of G2c.
2. The Pathan G2c1s may indeed be a very early split from the Jews (pre-Babylonian Exile, circa 600 BCE, going to Afghanistan around 800 CE as merchants from somewhere much further west, as they claim)
3. Ashkenazi Jewish G2c* arrived in Southern Italy or Rome from Judea in 70 CE, went northward to the Rhineland around 900-950, over to France, and possibly back to Italy after 1306, then north after 1493.
The few other examples have an undefined position and origin, but ultimately come from the same place in one way or another, South Syria in the Late Bronze Age.
We’re very very close now.
Of course, I’ll ask for contributions to the Project Fund, yet again:
Contribute here:
http://www.familytreedna.com/group-general-fund-contribution.aspx?g=G2c
Thanks everyone,
-ted
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