DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

Yes, according to Bill Tiffee, whose article on Solutreans in America will appear in volume 29 of the series Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers. Titled "Were Ancient Egyptians the Solutreans Who First Settled America?" the new study, he says, "looks at the possibility that the Solutreans who first settled America were from Egypt, and that the genetic marker X is found in the highest concentrations among the Druze (who migrated from Egypt 1,000 years ago)and the descendants of the Moundbuilder Native groups including the Sioux and Algonquin and possibly the Cherokee."

We have previously suggested that the Cherokee incorporate both Greek and Egyptian DNA. Chapter 3 of Donald Yates' new book Old World Roots of the Cherokee is devoted to the DNA story of the so-called "anomalous" Cherokee lines, including haplogroups T and X. 

Several prominent scholars have argued that Europeans known to archeologists as the Solutreans of France and Spain around 18,000 years ago were the first to settle the Americas. Tiffee examines the similarities between Solutrean and Clovis or Paleo-Indian stone technology and reconstructs the Solutrean culture in Egypt beginning 24,000 years ago (p. 119). He links ancient Egyptians with genetic marker E-M78, mitochondrial haplogroup X, Tula and the Spiro Complex mounds in Oklahoma, among other North American sites. He also discusses the Great Flood of about 10,000 years ago, the legends surrounding Osiris and the rise of agriculture in southern Turkey (Gobekli Tepe). 

"Perhaps," he concludes, "Egyptologists need to rethink their paradigms of ancient Egypt. And perhaps modern Native American descendants of the Moundbuilders, the Algonquin groups, Sioux, Cherokee, Chickasaw (and other Native cultures closely related to mound-building) need to reconsider where their most ancient ancestors came from (129)."

In DNA Consultants' Cherokee DNA study, "Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee," as well as numerous blog posts since 2009, it was reported that haplogroups U, T, K, J, N, X and L are found in Cherokee descendants in frequencies mirroring those of Egypt. 

Genetics has transformed many of our notions of race, ethnicity and identity. How do you identify your ancestry when checking off ethnic options on an official form? How do you identify yourself informally with friends and family? Have you ever "changed" your ethnic self-identification because of a DNA test? These and related questions were the topics discussed at a 90-minute colloquium at the 12th Annual International Diversity Conference held on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, June 12. 

Photo:  Solomon Bibo is America's only recognized Jewish Indian Chief. 

The title of the public discussion was "Perspectives on Ethnic Identity:  Epigenetics, Marketing, DNA and Genealogy." It was organized by Donald Yates and moderated by Gregory Baskin. Presenters included:

Dr. Anne Marie Fine, Scottsdale, Ariz. naturopathic physician, who spoke on the emerging field of epigenetics, the multi-generational factors that "turn on and turn off" your genes.

Elizabeth Hirschman, Rutgers University, who addressed the history of anti-discrimination law in the United States, from 1790 to the present.

Wendy Roth, University of British Columbia, author of the just-published book Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race, who presented the results of ongoing surveys of consumers of DNA testing, with an emphasis on changing notions of ethnic identification.

Donald Yates, who presented a paper on overlapping ethnic identity in Bernard Malamud's The People, George Tabori's "Weisman and Copperface:  A Jewish Western" and three early twentieth-century poets writing in Modern Hebrew, Benjamin Nahun Silkiner, Israel Efros and Ephraim E. Lisitzky. Yates' paper was titled "Dying Campfires: Jews, Indians and Descendant Organizations" and included a comparison of Marranos (Sephardic crypto-Jews) with so-called Wannabe Indians (descendants of Indians who want to join a Federally recognized tribe but are barred from applying for membership for various reasons).

Both categories of ethnic belonging, Yates showed, are often rejected by official authorities like rabbinical courts and the Bureau of Indian Affairs because adherents are seen to be only selectively practicing the group's customs and traditions. 

Of the Marranos, for instance, Benzion Netanyahu wrote, "The Marranos ought to be treated realistically according to what they actually were -- not unwilling, but willing converts, and consequently traitors to the Jewish religion and enemies of the Jewish people." In other words, Conversos chose to practice some Jewish, some Christian customs, or to hide their true beliefs with an insincere profession of Christianity. 

In the same way, Cherokee and other Indian descendant organizations were criticized by William Quinn in an article that served as a sort of legal brief on the subject of Wannabe Indians published in 1989 in American Indian Quarterly. "Wannabe Indians are scorned by 'real' Indians because they pick and choose what customs they will adopt, because they have a 'distorted notion of the way in which Indians live and behave,'" Yates concluded. 

Read Yates' paper. 

We've known or suspected as much for a long time. American Indians and Turkic peoples of the Altai region of southern Siberia share common ancestors. American scientists Thomas Jefferson and Constantine Rafinesque were the first to demonstrate this genetic similarity, long before the days of DNA. Now an article in American Journal of Human Genetics has clenched the argument with mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA studies.

The groundbreaking citation is:  Matthew C. Dulik et al., Mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosome Variation Provides Evidence for a Recent Common Ancestry between Native Americans and Indigenous Altaians, AJHG 90/2, 229-246. The full article may read here.

From Old World Roots of the Cherokee, a book appearing June 15 by Donald N. Yates:

--Thomas Jefferson thought American Indians were Turks and Tartars coming across the Bering Sea from Asia, while his contemporary John Filson believed them to be Phoenicians. (See Boorstin, Daniel J. The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1993.)

--(quoting Rafinesque) "Many other empires having begun to rise in the vicinity of Aztlan, such as those of Bali [Indonesia, perhaps Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East?], Scythia [Russian steppes], Thibet, Oghuz [Lake Baikal area], the Iztacan were driven eastwards, north of China; but some fragments of the nation are still found in the Caucasus, &c. such as the Abians or Abassans, Alticezecs [Altai Turks], Cushazibs, Chunsags, Modjors, &c. 

--"The six Iztacan nations being still pressed upon by their neighbours the Oghuzians [Uigur Turks], Moguls [Mongols], &c. gradually retreated or sent colonies to Japan, and the islands of the Pacific ocean; having discovered America at the peninsula of Alasca [Alaska, a Chinese word], during their navigations, the bulk of the nation came over and spread from Alasca to Anahuac, establishing many states in the west of America, such as Tula [Toltec], Amaquemeca, Tehuajo [Tewa, Tiwa, Tawa], Nabajoa [Navajo], Teopantla, Huehue, and many others.

--"After crossing the mountains, they discovered and followed the Missouri and Arkanzas rivers, reaching thus the Mississippi and Kentucky (26-27)."

How long will it take American history books to catch up to this new proof? We predict:  never. The jingoistic Smithsonian has its own versions of things and these are ingrained into anthropological dogma as deeply as Manifest Destiny. Interestingly, Turkish and Muslim historians have already entered it as a basic fact of history. They have long claimed American Indians as their genetic cousins.

As you choose your summer reading, please take a moment to mourn the demise of several "ethnic" titles that have been taken off library shelves recently in several states, including Arizona. Among the incendiary books that are now taboo, thanks to the work of lobbyists in Washington, are Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (too foreign), Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (too liberal) and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (too hot).

Then there's also that sleeper on the bestseller list, which community college students are probably reading on their IPhones in radical cafes in Tucson as we speak, Critical Race Theory:  An Introduction (too racy).

"The anti-ethnic studies law passed by the state prohibits teachings that 'promote the overthrow of the United States government,' 'promote resentment toward a race or class of people [in this case, white people],' 'are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,' and/or 'advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.'" A full report on these shenanigans is in Patricia J. Williams' article in this week's The Nation, also on her blog Diary of a Mad Law Professor.

Among the books that were removed from the Tucson public school system are Isabel Allende (who is an American citizen and lives in California), Junot Diaz, Jonathan Kozol, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn (who wrote A People's History of the United States), Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and even Shakespeare's The Tempest (because Caliban was a person of color?).

Tucson School Board member Michael Hicks in explaining the move said he was proud that he had not visited any of the classrooms affected or read any of the materials being axed. He called out the culprit of multiculturalism weakening the country as "Rosa Clark" (not Rosa Parks).

A friend of ours in Tucson, after reading of these and similar acts of ignorance, has suggested we test the authors of such statements for the "Moron gene."

If you disagree with the far-sighted public servants behind this wave of ethnic censorship, you might trying writing them a letter, but we doubt if they can, or will, read it.

For more insight into the Tucson anti-intellectual movement we recommend Tom Zoellner's A Safeway in Arizona.

Photo:  Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende. (c) Lori Barra.