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Phyllis Starnes drew many threads of Melungeon research together when she delivered her presentation on autosomal DNA validation studies at the Fifteenth Melungeon Union, held atWarren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC July 15-16, 2011. Sponsored by the Melungeon Heritage Association of Kingsport, Tenn., the conference was appropriately titled, "Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry."

Starnes, who is administrator of DNA Consultants' Melungeon DNA Studies as well as an assistant investigator responsible for authoring reports, began her presentation by telling her own story. In 2002, she read an article about the occurrence of Familial Mediterranean Fever in Appalachia, where she grew up. "This article was the catalyst for me to address my own health and ancestry," she told participants.

She had met N. Brent Kennedy, author of the touchstone book The Melungeons:  The Resurrection of a Proud People, and soon became acquainted with both Elizabeth Hirschman (Melungeons:  The Last Lost Tribe in America) and Donald Panther-Yates, both speakers at Melungeon Fourth Union in Kingsport. The resources she needed for understanding her peculiar heritage were coming together.

Starnes summarized the Hirschman-Yates study of Melungeon DNA results published last December in Appalachian Journal and went on to reveal the results of a validation study of the Melungeon data in which the DNA profiles of the 40 participants were fed back into the database atDNA, expanded to reflect the world's only autosomal DNA Melungeon sample.

Astoundingly, many Melungeon DNA project participants had Melungeon as their No. 1 match, including Starnes.

In 1990, physical anthropologist and chemist James Guthrie analyzed blood sampled from 177 Southern Appalachian people identifying as Melungeon tested by Pollitzer and Brown in 1969. Guthrie's analysis was consistent to a remarkable degree with the Hirschman-Yates study.

All studies to date have verified and confirmed repeatedly that Melungeon descendants carry an unusual mix of Jewish, Mediterranean, Turkish, Iberian, Native American and African DNA. They also inherit genetic predispositions toward developing Familial Mediterranean Fever and other disorders.

This overarching thesis explaining what makes Melungeons different was advanced over twenty years ago by Brent Kennedy. It has now been re-examined, probed, tested and validated by unimpeachable followup studies, but little has turned up to change Kennedy's original thinking. It would be wrong to say that Melungeon origins today are controversial or mysterious. There is much we do not know about them, but their genetic and medical profiles are clear.

Starnes is enrolling people in Phase II of the Melungeon DNA Study. She has also inaugurated a password-secured blog where participants can freely share their experiences.

In a review of Chris Stringer's book The Origin of Our Species (Lane, 2011), Jean-Jacques Hublin sides with one of the first promoters of the 30-year old Recent African Origin hypothesis and supports the notion that modern humans out of Africa entirely replaced Neanderthals because they were, well, fitter and superior.

See "Palaeoanthropology:  African Origins" in Nature 476, 395 (August 25, 2011).

But could the true scenario have been that "we" were already hybridized with Neanderthals, and that's why "we" won out? Recent work has brought evidence that Neanderthals gave "us" our immunities to a wide range of disease and thus allowed "us" to survive. The question doesn't have to be an either/or dilemma.

Above:  Krapina Neanderthal Museum. N. Solic.

If the facts don't fit the evidence
change the facts . . .

We always suspected the genetics community of clinging to stale dogmas and being slow to acknowledge emerging new evidence about American Indians. But we did not dream that their officiousness extended to changing the information given by test subjects to bring it into conformity with preconceived conclusions.

Not until we heard Marcy's story.

"Over the years, I've heard complaints that [a DNA testing company] is not really responsive when you have questions about unexpected results," Marcy said. "They usually suggest further testing, which of course, means more revenue to them.

"I've had some major disagreements with [a DNA testing company] over how they list results for mitochondrial haplogroup ancestral origins . . . . I found out they were taking dozens of T2's who had listed their earliest known female ancestor as being from America or the United States, changing this and placing them in the 'unknown' category. They claimed that because our haplogroup was designated European, our ancestors couldn't be from the United States!

"Now this was nonsense, because at the same time, they allowed people to claim other similarly-colonized western countries, like Cuba. It's my opinion that if participants list a country of origin for their earliest known female relative, that should be what is on the web page, not something assigned by [a DNA testing company] because as they told me, it may 'confuse people,' or contradict current scientific data.

"As a consequence [the DNA testing company's] publicly reported ancestral origins has nothing to do with our haplogroup's ancient Cherokee clan mother. The chips should fall where they may."

Now this is not professional behavior on the part of a DNA testing company and it prevents new findings from coming to light.

In a study of 52 individuals claiming direct maternal descent from an American Indian woman, mostly Cherokee, we found that they were unmatched anywhere else except among other participants. Haplogroup T emerged as the largest lineage, followed by U, X, J and H. Similar proportions of these haplogroups were noted in the populations of Egypt, Israel and other parts of the East Mediterranean.

DNA testing companies do a disservice to their customers and to science by failing to call results as they appear without doctoring them. It is time geneticists stopped bringing all American Indians over the Bering Straits and forcing test subjects into the Procrustean bed of outmoded theory.

For more on "anomalous" American Indian haplotypes, visit our Cherokee DNA Studies, now in Phase II testing.

It used to be thought that the Sorbs, a medieval East German Slavic population, formed the core of a group of Jews who ended up as the dominant element of Ashkenaz, Eastern Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Silesia and Russia. No longer.

According to an article published in European Journal of Human Genetics (2011) 19, 995-1001, "Genetic Variation in the Sorbs of Eastern Germany in the Context of Broader European Genetic Diversity," by Veeramah et al., the Sorb "population isolate" is not that isolated but was "less than that observed for the Sardinians and French Basque," true isolates. Sorbs are in reality part of the larger population of West Slavs, including Poles and Czechs, and scarcely distinguishable from them.

Histories of Judaism will have to revise their accounts of the genesis of Ashkenazim accordingly. The story of European Jews is more diversified and dynamic than most history or coffee-table type books allow.

Abstract.

For an example of a research article on Ashkenazi roots overemphasizing Sorbs, see Behar et al. who theorizes they were a leading constituent of Levites.



Charlemagne subjugates pagans in Germany.

Her profession is her religion
Her sin her lifelessness

--Bob Dylan

Will the archeological establishment's obtuseness about prehistory and the religion of the Great Goddess ever falter? In an article titled "Pieces of a Bronze Age Puzzle" in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine (Sept/Oct 2011, p. 15), Jessica Woodard discusses the "enigma" of thousands of broken Cycladic figurines from the tiny, uninhabited island of Keros near Naxos. Summarizing the decades long work of Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew, she dates the site to 2800 to 2300 BCE and (are you ready for this) speculates there was a lot of "social activity as well as ritual activity...relating to beliefs about life, death, and perhaps the hereafter."

This is tantamount to saying that the deliberately broken figurines were broken by people, human beings who lived a long time ago, on purpose. But what kind of rituals and "beliefs"? The word "religion" is mentioned nowhere. Evidently, since archeologists profess no religion themselves they cannot detect it in any of the people whose graves and relics they dig up.

Greek mythology tells how Venus, the eldest of the Fates, was born at sea and stepped ashore on several islands, where her cult continued, notably at Cythera, Crete, Naxos and Cyprus. All the "enigmatic" broken figures clearly relate to the worship of the Mother Goddess. Marija Gimbutas covers the featureless face, arms crossed over breasts and other unmistakable signs of the Goddess or Magna Mater in her voluminous writings, including The Language of the Goddess. We suggest if Colin Renfrew cannot bring himself to read Gimbutas he at least dip into Pausanias, the second century CE author of a guidebook to Greece in ten volumes. There he will find many descriptions of these votive offerings to the Goddess.

Archeologists may also want to acquire at least a bowing acquaintance with Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. Both Gimbutas and Eisler describe three invasions of the warriors of the steppes with their male gods following the year 3000 BCE that spelled an end to the long period of female-based life-celebrating religion in the Middle East and Old Europe. Only the Minoans, Etruscans and certain other peoples from Asia Minor and the Greek Islands were able to retain the Mother Goddess in the new mostly male pantheon, which was focused more on death than rebirth.

The only puzzling part of the Keros Hoard is how archeologists could overlook its abundant testimony to the Mother Goddess religion.


Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" depicts the Goddess' first coming ashore. (No, this is not the famous original in the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence. This is a cheap reproduction hanging on the walls of a Rome pizzeria.)

We just returned from a long trip through Italy and were struck by Italians' apparent immunity to all the forces of aging that besiege Americans and other members of the First World. "Italian men," said Paolo, our driver, "smoke, drink, womanize and curse all day and live to a hundred." Maybe the answers why are in this new report on Italian longevity.

The genetic component of human longevity: analysis of the survival advantage of parents and siblings of Italian nonagenarians

Alberto Montesanto¹, Valeria Latorre¹, Marco Giordano¹, Cinzia Martino¹, Filippo Domma² and Giuseppe Passarino¹

Abstract

Many epidemiological studies have shown that parents, siblings and offspring of long-lived subjects have a significant survival advantage when compared with the general population. However, how much of this reported advantage is due to common genetic factors or to a shared environment remains to be resolved.

We reconstructed 202 families of nonagenarians from a population of southern Italy. To estimate the familiarity of human longevity, we compared survival data of parents and siblings of long-lived subjects to that of appropriate Italian birth cohorts. Then, to estimate the genetic component of longevity while minimizing the variability due to environment factors, we compared the survival functions of nonagenarians' siblings with those of their spouses (intrafamily control group).

We found that both parents and siblings of the probands had a significant survival advantage over their Italian birth cohort counterparts. On the other hand, although a substantial survival advantage was observed in male siblings of probands with respect to the male intrafamily control group, female siblings did not show a similar advantage. In addition, we observed that the presence of a male nonagenarians in a family significantly decreased the instant mortality rate throughout lifetime for all the siblings; in the case of a female nonagenarians such an advantage persisted only for her male siblings.

The methodological approach used here allowed us to distinguish the effects of environmental and genetic factors on human longevity. Our results suggest that genetic factors in males have a higher impact than in females on attaining longevity.

According to a professor of immunology and microbiology at Stanford University, humans were able to survive, spread and expand their populations once they left Africa because of immunities to disease they acquired from Neanderthals and Denisovans, who had lived in Europe and Asia already for hundreds of thousands of years.

A review of the new research appears in the online science magazine Discover under the date of June 20, 2011. The professor's name is Peter Parham.

Crux of the matter, according to Royal Society report

• Parham began by taking a close look at a family of genes called  human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which play a central role in our body’s immune responses. We are able to react to a wide array of diseases because our HLA genes are highly variable, each containing dozens of  alleles (forms of genes).
• Our ancestors in Africa, however, would have had a small number of HLA alleles because they likely traveled in small bands and had little contact with other groups. Moreover, their HLAs would have only protected them against African diseases.
• When Parham compared the HLAs of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans, he noticed some overlaps. In particular, he found that HLA-C*0702, an allele common in Europeans and Asians but nonexistent in Africans, was also present in the Neanderthal genome. Similarly, HLA-A*11, which is found in modern Asians but not in Africans, popped up in Denisovan DNA.
• Overall, about 50 percent of HLA Class I alleles in Europeans seemed to come from Neanderthals, 70 to 80 percent in East Asians from Denisovans, and 90 to 95 percent in Papuans from Denisovans, Parham said at a recent Royal Society meeting.

The latest revelation about the true nature of Neanderthals shows how fast current scientific and popular thinking is moving on the subject. Two years ago it was still debated whether "humans" could interbreed with Neanderthals, or whether Neanderthals were even a human species. Denisovans were only discovered in the last year.

DNA Consultants introduced its Neanderthal Index, a measure of affinity with archaic populations of Europe and the Middle East, one year ago this month.

Dr. Donald Yates says he is planning a visit to Vindija cave near Varazdin in Croatia this month to see firsthand the world's most important site for the discovery of Neanderthal bones and lifeways, dating to about 30,000 years ago.

Human history changed drastically with the 1974 Neanderthal discoveries at Vindija Cave. Photo Tomislav Kranjcic.

DNA Consultants' fourth Jewish marker, Tatar/Khazar, has been renamed Jewish IV, bringing it into line with European, Asian and Sub-Saharan African marker groups. All these populations have four markers in acknowledgment of their complexity, age and diversity.

Native American has only two markers.

Jewish IV can be expected to be more sensitive following the addition of Altai Turkic, Caucasus, Southern Russian and Khazak population data to the company's computer program atDNA.

The four Jewish markers may be described as follows:

JEWISH I. This is the most common of the three markers. It can occur without known Jewish ancestry for a variety of reasons including an ancestor’s conversion to Christianity during the centuries of persecutions against Jews in Europe. Its frequency is highest in Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Slavic peoples who intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. It also appears in Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan Jews (Sephardim).

JEWISH II. This marker is the strongest. It is found in Jewish families who have intermarried with other Jews down through the centuries. It is characteristic of Ashkenazi Jews.

JEWISH III.  This marker is an indication of Middle Eastern roots. Preserved by Jews, it is also borne by Kurds, Syrians, Arabs, Berbers, Basques, Turks, Greeks, Italians and other populations from the ancient world.

JEWISH IV. A marker indicative of Tatar or Khazar heritage. Khazars were a Central Asian people of Turkic, Hunnish and Iranian elements that arose in the Caucasus region. After converting to Judaism in the early Middle Ages, they moved westward into Russia and the Ukraine under pressure from Islam, eventually becoming a large component of Eastern and Central European Jewry. Many Ashkenazi Jews now find they have some Khazar (or intermingled Tatar) ancestry.

As can be seen, these divisions reflect the three major convert populations of Judaism, Sephardim, Ashkenazim and Khazars (often referred to as "the thirteenth tribe") in addition to the original Middle Eastern Israelites and related people of the Bible (Jewish III), which forms the core genetic element of solidarity.

Khazar rabbis.

"There are already many fine books on the history of the Jews in the Middle Ages," writes Theodore L. Steinberg, an English professor at State University of New York, in the preface to his Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages (Wesport:  Praeger, 2008). So why another one?

"All of those other studies, as excellent as they are, presume a certain degree of knowledge on the part of the reader--knowledge of Jewish customs and traditions and beliefs, as well as a general knowledge about the Middle Ages," he continues.

If you have never been to a synagogue service, don't know many observant Jews and perhaps just discovered an interest in Judaism after finding Jewish ancestry in your family tree, this is the book for you. Beginning with the first chapter, "Jews and Judaism, What Are They? and continuing with "Talmud and Midrash," Steinberg skilfully guides the reader through a crash course on Jewish history since the advent of Christianity. He introduces us to the rabbinical traditions of Judaism, Mishan, Gemara and all the flowering branches of halakah or Jewish law. We learn why Jews were blamed, and tolerated, by the Church. We learn about everyday life in cities where Jews, Christians and Muslims mixed, Jewish occupations, their literature, philosophy and the Cabala, all major areas of intersection with Christian society. 

Appendix I has a good chronology of important events, from the life of Rabbi Akiva, which overlapped with that of Saul/Paul to the infamous date of 1492.

Singular Figure of Joseph Jacobs

Another masterwork on Judaism intended primarily for non-Jewish readers is Joseph Jacobs' Jewish Contributions to Civilization. An Estimate (Philadelphia:  Jewish Publication Society of America, 1919). This began life as the Australian Judaic scholar's Studies in Jewish Statistics, published in an anthropology journal in 1891, at the height of his fame. It was to be the first volume in a trilogy, the second book devoted to individual, rather than collective, contributions to European culture, the third a philosophical answer to anti-Semites about the value of Jews in the modern secular state. Alas, Jacobs died in 1916, leaving only notes for the second book and nothing at all of the third.

For Jacobs the watchword is always "judicious." He never exaggerates Jewish influence, emphasizing again and again that the number of Jews at no time, probably, rose above one-half of one percent in Western Europe, outside of countries where Jews were tolerated such as Moorish Spain and Poland/Lithuania under the Jagellon dynasty.

Did Jewish thinkers transform medieval philosophy from the stale dogmas of the theologians into more modern ideologies? Maybe, but they were only part of the movement.

His considered assessment of the Jewish contribution to medieval fables and folklore, one of his academic specialties, is "about one-tenth" of the material. There are those today, however, who would go so far as to say all of troubadour poetry and half of courtly love romances were inspired by the Judeo-Arabic tradition of Spain and southern France, with deeper roots in Arabia, Egypt and Babylon.

Did the Radanite ("From Persian rah dan, knowing the way") merchants plying the Silk Road in the early Middle Ages introduce all the choice import goods and enlightened ideas we associate with the East?

Europe owes to the Jewish Radanites the introduction of oranges and apricots, sugar and rice, Jargonelle pears, and Gueldre roses, senna and borax, bdellium and asafoetida, sandalwood and aloes, cinnamon and galingale, mace and camphor, candy and julep, cubebs and tamarinds, slippers and tambours, mattress, sofa, and calabash, musk and jujube, jasmine and lilac " (p. 203)

But their influence was limited. Beginning in the twelfth century, Venice took away the monopoly on the Levantine trade, just as Lombard merchants replaced Jews as bankers and moneylenders throughout most of Europe. The transition to a moneyed economy, according to Jacobs, was not due to Jews.

On the subject of Jews and capitalism, including stock exchanges and paper money, Jacobs takes a Ciceronian position. He denies that any Jews were involved with the South Sea Bubble, Mississippi Scheme of John Law or other experimental business models of the day. He does not even think that Jews fostered acceptance of bills of exchange or letters of credit. He points out that even with the Dutch East India Company, Jews had only very moderate ownership (although we wonder if like the silent partner behind the usurious kings of medieval times the partners named Coen and Hendricks and the like chose rather to have their names out of it), while the Jewish presence was absent at the first exchanges in Antwerp and London, and later minimal.

We think he might be too circumspect here. The Jewish role in the discovery, exploration and development of the American colonies is set forth in detail in Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America (Jefferson:  McFarland, forthcoming this fall). 

Jacobs is particularly harsh toward his contemporary Werner Sombart, who wrote an enthusiastic and eulogistic apology for the Jews in economic history (Die Juden und das Wirschaftsleben, Leipzig, 1911, trans. by M. Epstein, 1913, The Jews and Modern Capitalism). Jacobs calls the European professor of economics' work a "farrago of fantasies about Jewish life and religion" (259). The dour Victorian explicitly rejects Sombart's equation of the American way of business with Jewish practice and influence ("what we call Americanism is nothing else than the Jewish spirit distilled"). Again, however, we think Jacobs is bending over backward not to appear partisan. His objections to Sombart's arguments seem academic and petty if Sombart was on the right track, as most people concede today.

Prudent or Prudish?

In the same way, we feel that Jacobs' inability to detect any Jewish influence in the Puritans, or indeed the entire Reformation, is willfully blind.  "It cannot be by chance," he writes, "that the three most prominent voices among the Politiques [advisors to French king Henri IV], who laid down the principles which were to result in the Edict [of Nantes, granting toleration to Protestants, 1598]-- Michel de l'Hopital, Jean Bodin and Michel de Montaigne--were all partly of Jewish race" (p. 281). But what he gives with one hand Jacobs takes away with the other, for he goes on to say that the influence of these men stopped with the borders of France, while "freethinkers" in other countries like Spinoza certainly did not meet with much success.

And of course, looking ahead to the eventual playing out of these policies, we cannot attribute either the American Bill of Rights or French Revolution to Jews, can we?  Jacobs has a bowdlerized version of Jewish influence. He is willing to take modest credit for the good things Jews introduced, while letting their Christian imitators line up in the limelight and get the glory, but he doesn't want to admit that Jews might have been responsible for or at least complicit in some evils in modern society, such as communism, the militaristic state and free love ("the sexual vagaries of Enfantin," p. 308).

By Donald N. Yates
 
Capt. John Cooper

Nancy J. Cooper et al. v. The Choctaw Nation is one of the classic botched cases in the annals of the Dawes Commission, the Federal government’s attempt to deal a death blow to tribal sovereignty at the close of the nineteenth century. I had heard rumors about my Cooper relatives and how they were kicked out of the Choctaw Nation. But I never knew the whole story until recently.

J. W. Howell mentions the case in a textbook studied today in law schools. John Cooper, our ancestor, was a Choctaw chief who owned a plantation near Linden, Tennessee. The family was seated at the dinner table one evening when a vigilante mob broke in. They were told at gunpoint to leave, their possessions forfeit.

The men swam their horses across the Mississippi River at Memphis and left the women encamped under the willows on the other side while they went back to try to recover some of their cattle. John and Nancy’s old mother, who was in her eighties, died before they returned, empty-handed. The party proceeded to Indian Territory.

In 1896, the family encouraged Nancy, blind, unmarried and no longer able to care for herself, to enroll with the Choctaw Nation. They and a large group of kinsmen won roll numbers. But they were all stricken from the rolls by an adverse decision of the Choctaw-Chickasaw citizenship court a couple of years later. More than a hundred of them joined in a class action suit.

“We’re still fighting it,” says Pam Kahler of Vian, Oklahoma. "My husband and I talked to the BIA in Muskogee and found out about the old ruling. They told us the reason it was overturned was because the people named in the court ruling were not living in the Choctaw area when they were added to the Dawes rolls.” They, in fact, were living in the Chickasaw area of Duncan, Comanche area, Stephens County.

Aunt Artie Meecie was told that the family was “too poor to be on the rolls.”

In February and March 1907 matters came to a head. The Attorney General of the United States declared the lower courts out of line and ordered that hundreds of Choctaw Coopers, Browns and others were, after all, entitled to enrollment.

The only trouble was that the Attorney General’s decision of March 4, 1907, did not reach the department until March 6, 1907, two days after the rolls were closed by operation of law. There was then no authority in the Secretary of the Interior, under the law, to enroll them.

Nancy Cooper was laid in a pauper’s grave. Not only was the family too poor to be Indian, it was two days too late.

Read more on the Choctaw Pages of Panther’s Lodge at http://www.pantherslodge.com/choctaw.html.