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Gene surfing is a process in population expansion whereby certain variations become prominent and dominant in a short time, appearing to skip the slow, steady, uniform accumulation of variegation and diversification. According to a study of the population structure and genealogies of Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean in Quebec, this type of drastic change accompanied the immigrant wave front that spread over the area in the 17th century. "Deep Human Genealogies Reveal a Selective Advantage to Be on an Expanding Wave Front" in Science magazine describes the resulting demographics.

Abstract
Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than one million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.

So gene surfing in an expanding colonization phase can produce a genetic revolution whose effects will be felt for hundreds or thousands of years downstream in history.

We wonder if the same wave front demographics might explain some of the following population phenomena:

• Large scale triumph of Norman male lineages following the conquest of England in 1066.
• Selective expansion of Middle Eastern genes in Tennessee (including Cherokee families, Jewish male and female lines and Melungeons)
• Relatedness among Jews and "Jewish diseases"
• Diversity-within-uniformity of Polynesians
• Population replacement of Old European (U, N) by Middle Eastern genes (T, J)  in Europe as a result of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution

Many students of history are puzzled why old populations have the allele frequencies and heterozygosity clines they have. Genetic drift is only part of the answer. Gene surfing and selection in deep history are the rest of it.

San Diego State University professor D. Emily Hicks has traced some common ancestry with President Barack Obama. According to the professor of Chicana/o Studies, she and the President share Melungeon roots. Obama is a descendant of Mary Collins of Orange County, Virginia as well as of Nathaniel Bunch of Louisa County and John Bunch of New Kent--well known "feeder" counties for what became the Melungeon settlement described in Brent Kennedy's book, The Melungeons, The Resurrection of a Proud People.

Obama's Bunch line was found to carry E1b1a haplogroup, a sub-Saharan African male lineage. He is also supposed to have Cherokee ancestry in his mother's colonial genealogies.

Read the whole story at PRLOG.

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.

Surely Not "Ancestry Painting and Global Similarity"

We were surprised to see what DNA testing companies are calling their autosomal products these days. Ours is the DNA Fingerprint family of products, but 23&me calls their entry "Ancestry Painting and Global Similarity" and "Personal Genome Service." Others offer "Genetic Ancestry Analysis," "Family Finders," and "Ancestral Origins."

Before the introduction of DNA fingerprinting for ancestry purposes, DNA testing was limited to the father’s male line or mother’s mitochondrial lineage. Newer autosomal tests can be taken by a male or female. They analyze all your lines at once, not just the two traditional ones of genetic genealogy. Autosomal DNA is the great equalizer, but it's not being marketed very adroitly.

A beginner’s class titled "Ancestry Tracing with an Autosomal DNA Test:  Conceptions and Misconceptions" will be presented by DNA Consultants principal investigator Donald N. Yates, Ph.D., at the upcoming Arizona Family History Expos. It will provide an overview of autosomal DNA tests that are capable of yielding a more complete picture of your family tree and its roots. Covered are the science and history of DNA fingerprinting, what markers are delineated, the databases used for finding matches, and methods and strategies for interpreting your results, including follow-up websites, social networking and readings.

The event takes place at the Arizona Family History Expo 2011, Lecture 73, Conference Theater, 11:00 a.m., Saturday, Jan. 22, 2011, Mesa Convention Center, 263 North Center Street, Mesa, Arizona 85201. For information on attending, visit Family History Expos or contact Holly T. Hansen at info@fhexpos.com.

After more than eight years in development, a book contract was awarded to Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald N. Yates for their collaborative study of Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Muslims in the settlement of British North America. Titled Star, Crescent and Cross:  Jews and Muslims in Colonial America, the work will be published next year by McFarland, a leading U.S. publisher of scholarly, reference and academic books.

Among original investigations by the authors are genealogical studies of the West Country Gentlemen and others who proposed and promoted England's first colonies. From Sir John Hawkins (Sephardic Jewish surname Haquines, "physician" in Arabic) and Sir Francis Drake (whose family coat of arms bore a six-pointed star until it was air-brushed out by later historians) to Stephen Parmenius (a Jew from Turkish-held Hungary) and Captain John Smith, the principal players in England's colonization efforts are revealed to be far different from the white Anglo-Saxon Christian buccaneers American schoolchildren are taught about.

"England's reliance on Iberian Jews to promote its interests abroad goes back as far as the Tudors," according to Star, Crescent and Cross. "Henry VIII used Spanish Jewish lawyers to justify his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. One of them, an Italian banker tapped for his shrewdness and knowledge of international law, was the ancestor of Oliver Cromwell, Protector of the Commonwealth."

The book presents a series of colonial documents, contemporary firsthand accounts, records, portraits, family genealogies and ethnic DNA test results which fundamentally challenge the national storyline depicting America’s first settlers as white, British and Christian. The authors postulate that many of the initial colonists were of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish ancestry, usually arriving as crypto-Jews or crypto-Muslims.

Names Ordinary and Illustrious

The footnotes in the study document origins and meanings of over 5,000 surnames previously assumed to be sturdy English ones of ancient bearing. The authors' research casts a sidelight on celebrated Jewish Americans who can trace back to colonial forebears. These range from the Massachusetts Kennedys to the Byrds of Virginia, from actors Johnny Depp and Adrien Brody to actresses Roseanne Barr and Gwyneth Paltrow, from writers Louise Glück and Neil Simon to politicians Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders and jurists Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

"We hope that the remarkable stories of the men, women and families in Star, Crescent and Cross will serve as a reminder of America’s early diversity and stimulus for rewriting some of the inaccurate and injudicious portions in the country's history," said Yates.

Among the famous colonial figures discussed (and usually illustrated with a portrait) are William Byrd II, Patrick Henry, William Bradford, William Penn, George Mason, George Washington, Richard Lee II, Thomas Paine, Paul Revere, Peter Stuyvesant, Luis Gomez, Jacob Troxell, Anthony Ashley Cooper Lord Shaftesbury, Tench Tilghman, Christopher Gist, John Skeen, Sir Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, Virginia Dare, Don Luis de Carvajal, Daniel Boone, William Cooper, the Salem Witches, Christopher Gist, Lord Saye and Sele, and various Lowells, Cabots, Lodges, Livingstones, Delanceys and Roosevelts.

Chapter 2, "Sephardim in the New World" is a survey of Crypto-Jews in North America, especially the Caribbean and Atlantic Islands. It includes autosomal DNA data proving the Melungeons are probably descended from Jews mixed with American Indians, Africans and Gypsies/Romani, as recently reported in this blog. 

There are chapters and name-lists devoted to each of the original colonies. The book will contain over 50 illustrations.

English navigators and explorers included many West Country gentlemen. Most were from intermarried Crypto-Jewish families. New York Public Library.

Early experiments with our new Melungeon Match product show that members of the original research study score extremely high for a match to the population Melungeon (n=40) recently added to the database atDNA (Beta Version).

A sample of forty self-identifying Melungeons was assembled for a study by Donald N. Yates and Elizabeth C. Hirschman that should appear in the fall issue of Appalachian Journal. Their autosomal profiles formed the first population to be added to our new computer program atDNA, which contains the database used for the DNA Fingerprint Test. 

As an example, one of the participants, with known Melungeon ancestry including Ramey descent through her father, elicited the following top five matches in the new database, with Melungeon as her No. 3 match:

In the participant's father's results (Floyd Milton Grimwood, deceased), Melungeon was higher, occupying the No. 1 spot:

Such results tend to confirm the representativeness of the original sample, which contained closely and distantly related people of declared Melungeon ancestry, and validate its conclusions.

Melungeon DNA Project Administrator, Phyllis Starnes, who is also a moderator for the Melungeon Forum on DNA Communities, is coordinating the check for Melungeon ranking for the 40 participants. She will have a summary statement ready soon.

Statistically, the results are nothing short of astounding. They show Melungeon autosomal DNA reflects a well-defined population isolate with multiple interrelatedness. Melungeon is a valid historical and scientific label, not an arbitrary or adventitious designation or construct.

Pictured above:  four generations of the Tennessee Melungeon Ramey family.

List Proven to Work in Part Also for Melungeon, Cherokee Family History

As part of our series on Jewish ancestry, we reproduce below an appendix from the forthcoming book, Star, Crescent and Cross:  Jews and Muslims in Colonial America, by Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates.

Rituals and Practices of the Secret Jews of Portugal

The following is an incomplete list of practices that may be indicative of Jewish origin among Anusim or secret Jews or former Jewish families in the New World today.

Told one is Jewish explicitly by parents, grandparents, or other relatives, a boy when he turns 13, a girl at 12.

Having Jewish family names: Duran, Lopez, etc.

Secret synagogues; secret prayer groups.

 New Mexico Crypto-Jews. Newsweek.

Avoiding church.

Churches without icons.

Lighting candles on Friday night when the first star appears.

Clean house and clothes for Shabbat.

Not allowed to do anything Friday night (not even wash hair).

El Dia Puro (Yom Kippur).

Celebrating a spring holiday.

Fasts: three days of Tanit Esther; every Monday and Thursday, fast of Gedalia.

Venerating Jewish saints, with celebrations:  Santa Esterika, Santo Moises, etc.

Eight candles for Christmas.

Circumcision; consecration on eighth day (avoiding circumcision because that would bind child to the laws of Moses.

Biblical first names, like Esther.

Women taught Tanakh and ruled on questions.

Married under huppah/canopy.

Rending of garments; burial within one day; covering mirrors; spigots in cemeteries.

Seven days, then one year, of mourning.

Tombstones bearing Hebrew names, designations such as “daughter of Israel,” and Jewish symbols (hand pointing to a star, open book of life, torah, star of David).

Possessing talit and tefillin, mezuzot, Tanakh, siddurim other Jewish objects.

Sweeping the floor away from the door (to avoid defiling mezuzah).

Having Cabalistic knowledge and practices.

Ritual slaughter (special knives, tested on hair or nails); covering blood with sand; removing sinew.

Purging, soaking, salting, boiling meat.

Avoiding pork and shellfish and other non-kosher foods (squirrel, rabbit).

Avoiding blood; throwing out eggs with bloodspots.

Avoiding red meat in general.

Waiting between meat and milk.

Eating only food prepared by mother or maternal grandmother.

Adapted from Professor Eduardo Mayone Dias

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Los Angeles, California

Birth Rituals

To place a rooster’s head over the door of the room where the birth will occur.

After the birth the mother must not uncover herself or change clothes for 30 days.

To throw a silver coin into the baby’s first bath water, especially a son’s.

To say a prayer eight days after birth in which the baby’s name is included.

Belief that the fairies (hadas) preside over a naming ceremony at birth

Wedding Rituals

Only home weddings.

To fast on the wedding day (both bride and groom, as well as two male friends of the groom and two female friends of the bride).

To bind the bride and groom’s hands with a white cloth while a prayer is said.

To follow the wedding ceremony with a light meal consisting of a glass of wine, salt, bitter herbs, honey, an apple and unleavened bread.

At the wedding ceremony bride and groom eat and drink out of the same plate and glass.

Marrying your brother’s widow (Levirate law).

Funeral Rituals

To have ritual meals to which a beggar is invited and serve the food the deceased liked best.

To throw away all water in the home of the deceased.

To leave furniture overturned to show how a relative’s death has upset the family.

To appear disheveled and careless about your own appearance during mourning.

To go to the deceased’s room for eight days and say: May God give you a good night.  You were once like us, we will be like you.

Not to shave for 30 days after the death of a relative.

Not to eat meat for one week after a death in the family, then fast on the anniversary.

Naming Rituals

Having two names, a private one in Hebrew (kinnui, e.g. Moses) and public one in the vernacular (Morris). Others:  Jacob/James, Raphael/Ralph, Hannah/Johannah, Adina/Adelaide.

Allusions to mascots of Hebrew tribes like deer (Naphthali) and wolf (Levi).

Belief in being descended from the Biblical King David.

Naming after religious objects:  Paschal, Menorah.

Translating Hebrew names, especially girls’:  Hannah into Grace, Esther into Myrtle, Peninah into Pearl, Roda into Rose, Shoshannah into Lillian, Lily. Simchah into Joy, Tikvah into Hope, Tzirrah into Jewel, Golda into Goldie.

Allusions to Jacob’s blessing of his sons and grandsons, e.g. Fishel for Ephraim because he was to multiply like the fish of the sea.

Use of Hebrew, but non-biblical names (e.g., Meir, Hayyim, Omar, Tamarah/Demarice).

Use of names from Jewish legend and folklore (e.g. Adinah, Edna, Adel, progenitress of the tribe of Levi).

Use of hypocoristic or pet names within the family alluding to Hebrew ones, for instance Zack or Ike for Isaac, Robin (Rueben) instead of Robert.

Adding the theophoric suffix -el to surnames, e.g., Lovell, Riddell, Tunnel.

Naming after a living relative, preferably the eldest born after the grandfather or grandmother, the next born after uncles and aunts and only after the father when these names are exhausted (Sephardic) or naming only after dead relatives (Ashkenazic).

Use of double names like Edward Charles and James Robert.

Changing the name of a child who becomes ill to foil the angel of death.

Giving a child an amuletic name like Vetula (“old woman”) to bring long life.

Favoring names that begin with Lu- to remind the child that the family was once Portuguese (Lusitanian):  Louise, Luanne, etc.

Belief in gematria (numerology of names, determined by Hebrew alphabet)

Avoiding saint’s names (Paul, Peter, Barbara) and using Marianne or Mariah instead of Mary.

Jokes about the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary

Using names like Christopher or Christina to dispel doubts about conversion to Christianity.

Knowing whether your family belongs to the Kohanim (priestly caste), Levite (House of David) or Israelite (all the rest) division of Jews.

Other

Swearing an oath with your hat on.

Not mentioning the name of God. Writing it G*d.

Washing your hands before prayer.

A father blessing a son in public.

Saying grace after the meal.

Bowing and bobbing during religious service.

Jokes about the central tenets of Christianity (Immaculate Conception of Mary, rising from the dead of Jesus, etc.).

Deriding idolatry of saints and ornate decor of churches.

Hatred of the pope.

Preparing Saturday’s meal (often a slow-cooking stew, for instance of eggplant) on Friday afternoon so no work is performed on the Sabbath.

Eating preferably fruits that grow in the land of Israel (dates, olives, oranges, grapes, peaches etc.).

Spreading sand from Israel on a grave or in a sanctuary.

Eating tongue on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize head of the year.

Having Bibles containing only the Old Testament and prayer books consisting only of the Psalms.

Having pictures of rabbis and scholars rather than saints in the sanctuary.

Performing tashlich, letting old clothes float away in running stream to mark a new year.

Forgiving a debt on Yom Kippur.

Facing Jerusalem during rituals.

Uttering brief blessings when you see lightning, mountains and other natural wonders.

Using only percussion instruments like the tambourine and hand clapping in services.

Silent prayer by congregation after prayers made out loud.

Worship services in the home.

Having 11 elders in a place of worship (minyam).