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Serbs, Croats “have most similar DNA”

Source: Blic

SKOPJE -- A six-year long DNA research of the Balkan peoples conducted by Skopje Forensics Medicine Institute has showed remarkable resemblance among them.

The Macedonian scientists received samples and data from most of the Balkan countries, except from Greece, who refused to take part in the project. All the other countries sent DNA analyses of the victims who had died in their territory to Skopje.

“By using sophisticated computer technology we have compared the data from Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Kosovo,” Jakovski explained.

The research has been published in the leading world forensics magazines and the results will be used in criminal investigations in cases when victims are from the Balkans.

Jakovski pointed out that the research represented a very useful scientific work and that it had nothing to do with daily politics.


Photo:  A Serb. 

New Science/AAAS Webinar - Next Tuesday

The Hunt for Missing Heritability: Challenges and Opportunities for Novel Locus Discovery in Non-European Populations
Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 12 noon U.S. Eastern Time (5 p.m. GMT)

A growing number of investigators are looking beyond European cohorts to study common and rare variants in populations around the world in the hunt for novel susceptibility genes. Join our expert panel to hear about how population genetics integrates with the genetics of complex disease to reveal novel disease genes and population-specific rare variants.
Ask your questions live during the event!
Register TODAY: www.sciencemag.org/webinar
Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by Affymetrix

Whence the Little Ice Age?

Julia Fahrenkamp-Uppenbrink

In the second half of the past millennium, glaciers advanced and temperatures fell in many regions around the world, although the timings and durations of the cold spells differed widely between regions. Numerous causes for this Little Ice Age have been proposed, including cyclical reductions in solar irradiance, changes in ocean circulation, and increases in volcanic activity, but the direct radiative effects of these processes are either weak or short-lived and require substantial feedbacks within the climate system. Miller et al. now exploit the fact that small ice caps in Arctic Canada are retreating, exposing vegetation that was entombed when the ice caps were advancing. By radiocarbon-dating these plants, the authors can accurately determine the time of glacial advance. They identify abrupt summer temperature decreases in the late 13th century and between 1430 and 1455 CE; subsequently, most ice caps remained in an expanded state until the 20th century. Comparison with varved sediments recording ice-cap growth from Iceland provides support for these dates, which coincide with periods of enhanced volcanic activity. Climate model results suggest that short-lived volcanic eruptions, reinforced by weak solar irradiance changes, can cause a sea-ice/ocean feedback that yields a centuries-long reduction in summer air temperature across the Arctic.

Geophys. Res. Lett. 10.1029/2011GL050168 (2012).

Will explore theme of official and unofficial ethnic self-identification from perspectives of genetics, marketing and other disciplines

A team of professors has just submitted a proposal for a 90 minute panel discussion at the 12th International Diversity Conference in Vancouver, B.C., June 11-13, 2012.

We'll use this blog to announce updates and you may place comments here and link to it.

Title:
Perspectives on Ethnic Identity: Epigenetics, Marketing, DNA and Genealogy

Panelists:
Donald N. Yates, DNA Spectrum
Dr. Anne Marie Fine, Fine Natural Medicine
Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, Rutgers Business School
Teresa A. Panther-Yates, Paradise Valley Community College, Phoenix
Wendy D. Roth, University of British Columbia
Phyllis E. Starnes, DNA Consultants

Description
Genetics has transformed many of our notions of race, ethnicity and identity. How do people in North America's melting pot of emigrants admixed with indigenous and African slave descendants self-identify when naming their primary and ancillary ancestries for official and unofficial purposes? The fundamental question of who you are and what you claim to be will be raised from the perspectives of marketing and consumer studies, sociology and direct-to-the-consumer DNA testing, genealogy (with a focus on the ethnic group known as Melungeons), epigenetics and medical marketing, and the special case of American Indian Descendants and Partial Descendants.

Stream: Identity and Belonging; the Politics of Diversity; Globalisation
Presentation Type: 90 minute Colloquium in English

Do You Have the DNA of Roman-British-Thracian Soldiers in Your Male Line?
Probably Not.

A member of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) wrote an article online five years ago. Now a substantial number of listers on the discussion board DNA-Genealogy-L believe their male lines may go back to a Balkan legionnaire in Roman Britain. This theory has been enshrined in popular belief, thanks to ISOGG members, who contribute most of the material on Y chromosome DNA to Wikipedia articles.

Read our review from an appendix on Jewish DNA hot spots in England and Wales in our book-in-progress, New Jerusalem:  The Story of Britain's Earliest Jews and Muslims.

Steven Bird in “Haplogroup E3b1a2 as a Possible Indicator of Settlement in Roman Britain by Soldiers of Balkan Origin,” is, as the title makes clear, most interested in proving a Roman Balkan origin for the haplotype he investigates, now known as Elblbla, the most common type of the haplogroup Elblb (formerly denominated E3b) in Europe. The structure and subclades of this very ancient North African Caucasian lineage have only recently been resolved and overhauled, and the ink is not yet quite dry. But the data used by Bird with the sometimes confused or outdated nomenclature of older reports can still provide valuable clues for our purposes, although one must proceed with caution in making too many differentiations in the tangled branches of the E tree. We must bear in mind that the target haplotype E1b1b1a2 (also called E-V13) represents 85% of the parent haplogroup E1b1b (also denoted as the E-M78 clade) and keep simple E before us without being distracted.

            Bird’s study appeared in one of the first publications of the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, an online journal of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG), founded in 2005 by DNA project administrators of the commercial DNA testing company Family Tree DNA based in Houston, Texas, “who share the common vision of the promotion and education of genetic genealogy.” It is an ambitious work with a very small goal. It uses arguments not only from genetics and statistics but also archeology, geography, history, anthropology and linguistics, often involving such fine points as the epigraphy of a Spanish soldier’s diploma from the British Museum issued in 103 CE and the detailed movements of Thracian cohors II and VII in the Roman army. Where angels fear to thread. Bird’s theory about the origins of Elblb have been enshrined in popular belief. We do not wish to appear ungrateful but there are problems.

            Bird’s first mistake occurs in his review of the literature. He misreads Stephen Oppenheimer and represents the author of The Origins of the British as having British E “originating from the Balkan peninsula (26).” If we open Oppenheimer’s book to the page cited (207) we see a map illustrating “Near Eastern [British English for American English ‘Middle Eastern’] Neolithic male migrations via the Mediterranean of E3b [i.e. E1b1b] and J.” The vector standing for the migration of these types launches forth from the Peloponnese in Greece at the cropped lower right corner, obviously intending to suggest origins from that general direction, not “the Balkan peninsula.”  There is no mention of Balkan DNA in Oppenheimer except as part of the bigger picture. The archeological sites Bird adduces as evidence for E settlements in the Bronze Age are not necessarily associated “directly” or solely or chiefly with “proto-Thracian culture,” whatever that term may mean. Nova Zagora in Bulgaria is a Stone Age multi-site. Ezero Culture occupied most of Bulgaria and extended far north into the Danube region of Romania. Yunatsite, Dubene-Sarovka and the other “proto-Thracian culture” examples Bird mentions date to before the Thracians or even the Greeks. They cannot tell us anything about haplogroup E. If anything, all these sites vindicate Oppenheimer’s theory of the demic spread of Middle Eastern (read Anatolian) agriculture, which Bird calls “flawed fundamentally” (27). The center for the diffusion of E in the Balkans is not in Bulgaria or Thrace but northwestern Greece, Albania and Kosovo. The Balkan Peninsula does not have to be the only place from which Bird can manage to derive E and get it to Britain in time to become part of the historical record. It is also strong throughout Greece, Cyprus, the Greek parts of southern Italy, North Africa and even parts of Spain. In fact, its presence in many of those locations is acknowledged to be “due to a founder effect, i.e. the migration of a small group of settlers carrying mostly this lineage (but also a small amount of other North-East African lineages, notably E-M123 and T.” (See http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_E1b1b_Y-DNA.shtml.)

            Despite these failings relating to statement of thesis and validity of arguments, Bird’s work is based on useful data. Three population surveys with frequencies for E in Britain were available to him, the data sets of Capelli, Weale and Sykes. Notwithstanding the nomenclature confusion, only the Sykes data set has true shortcomings, as the Oxford Genetic Atlas Project at the time contained only forty E haplotypes, too small for a valid sample. There are problems comparing them, as Bird realizes, but trends and general conclusions are certainly possible. Before attempting to analyze the haplogroup E variation in Britain, though, we must address the matter of time depth.

            We have no quarrel with geneticists’ and genetic genealogists’ methods of gauging coalescence times. Thus, Bird reiterates that the “time to most recent common ancestor” or TMRCA of Cruciani and others led to the “important finding . . . that E-V13 [read 85% of E] and J-M12 [read J] had essentially identical population coalescence times (27).” E and J are companion types that expanded from their Middle Eastern homelands together in the same fashion and probably reinforced each other in multiple phases of gene flow. But who is to say in any specific case of a haplotype that it arrived in Britain 4,000 years ago (TMRCA) or at any subsequent time, including the time when our grandfathers lived. The TMRCA sets a haplotype’s time of origin but not its place of origin, except by inference. We hypothesize that from a host of other factors, chiefly present-day clusters, genetic distance between types and high concentration of haplotype diversity.  Using TMRCA, Bird argues that a specific form of E “could not have arrived in Britain during the Neolithic era (6.5-5.5 kya) if it had not yet expanded from the southern Balkans (27).” We prefer to believe that it came to the British Isles at several critical times, first in Neolithic times but later with the Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, Iberians and related peoples.    

            Bird cherry-picks the data to support his Roman Balkan or what might be called Diocletian thesis, but data are data; these are amenable not only to bearing out the general storyline we present but also to supporting, within the same historical context, the existence of certain hot spots for Jewish and Middle Eastern DNA in England and Wales.  We agree somewhat with Bird the Welsh cluster for E is “underestimated by an arbitrary division by Sykes into two geographic regions (‘Wales’ and ‘Northern England’) . . . [creating] an impression of a large number of ‘Eshu’ haplotypes located throughout Northern England, when in fact the Northern English cluster is linked to Welsh cluster geographically (29).” Only, we would see in that Northern English cluster the remains of the historical Welsh Old North (chapters 1 and 7). We would not necessarily see in the Wales-to-Nottingham cluster the fading footprints of “the Ordovices, the Deceangi, the Cornovii, the Brigantes and the Coritani tribes (30),” about whom little is known in any event, but a belt of pre-existing Mediterranean culture reinforced by Roman occupation and somewhat resistant to Anglo-Saxon and Viking intrusions. Another shrinking pocket of the old British culture is shown in the elevated frequencies for both E and J in Strathclyde and Cumbria, part of the Welsh Old North.

            Bird has an informative map of Britain illustrating E1b1b distribution according to the Kringing method (34). In this we can trace all the major pockets of Mediterranean and Jewish DNA. Leaving aside Scotland, and aside from the Midlands pocket already mentioned, our eye is drawn to North Wales (along with a clear wall of high incidence surrounding it as though beating back the forces of history on all sides), Dorset, London and East Anglia. It cannot be coincidence that these are the very regions where we have diagnosed the presence of Jews and picked up their trail through the chapters of our book.

            As a final note, a 2005 paper by Robert Tarín provides phylogenetic analyses of E1b1b haplotypes that cast serious doubt on Bird’s assertions and confirm our reading of the evidence. Tarín used 290 individual Y chromosome results to characterize “a separate cluster of mostly Iberian haplotypes which seem to represent a North African entry into Iberia distinct from the E3b [E1b1b] in Europe that may have arisen from Neolithic or other migratory events.” He wrote that “it is unknown whether this finding reflects relatively recent gene flow from the Islamic rule of Spain or an older influx possibly from the Phoenicians”—the same quandary about time frame and coalescence we see above. Utilizing the Y Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database (YHRD), Tarín found levels of the Iberian E haplotype as high as 61% in one Tunisian population (Zriba, near ancient Carthage), while Andalusian Arabs and Tunisian Berbers both showed frequencies of about 7%. We believe this Iberian haplotype is a small, but important Jewish lineage that expanded from Tunisia to the Iberian Peninsula with the Berbers who aided Arab armies in conquering Spain. Interestingly, it accompanied Spanish Jews to Mexico and other places in the diaspora following the events of 1492.  Its distribution in Britain should reveal an implantation originally under the Phoenicians reinforced by periodic migrations of North African and Spanish or French Jews throughout the medieval and early modern periods of British history.

The Peopling of the Aleutians
Michael Balter
Few Aleuts still live in their ancestral homeland, but their genetics and archaeology offer a rare glimpse into one of humanity's last great migrations-and into the mysterious peopling of the Americas.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/335/6065/158

2011 has gone down as the year of faked scholarship, but what if sound (if undaring) research is the victim of scientists' golden dreams of glory?

The prestigious journal Human Immunology first published the article "The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations," then yanked it, instructing their subscribers to rip out the offending pages because they showed that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical. As of today, we still found the article online along with the editor's retraction and protests, but you'd better hurry if you want to read it. The censors who guard the scientific fables about Jewish DNA may discover a way to rewrite World Wide Web history as well as world history.

In the meantime, you can read about the whole lamentable mess in The Guardian in a story by Robin McKie, "Journal Axes Gene Research on Jews and Palestinians."