Acadian Anomalies

Anomalous Native American Lineages

Now Identified Also among Micmac Indians

After posting “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee,” and after being interviewed on the subject by an Internet radio show host, I was contacted by participants in the Amerindian Ancestry out of Acadia Project who were struck by similarities in results for the two groups.

Established in 2006, the Amerindian Ancestry Out of Acadia DNA Project mission is to research and publish the mtDNA and Y chromosome genetic test results of site participants who descend from persons living in Nova Scotia and surrounding environs in the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing specifically upon the early population of l'Acadie. As part of the mission, the Project develops a database of published mtDNA and Y Chromosome test results and encourages the sharing of this information among other similarly focused studies for the purposes of comparison and the advancement of science and research.

According to Project Administrator Marie A. Rundquist, “We descend from both Amerindians (mostly Mi’kmaq) and the early French settlers who arrived in Port Royal in the 1600s, many of them single French men who married Amerindian wives, whose families would become pioneers of the New World. Our family lines have extended well-beyond the original boundaries of what was known to the French as Acadia, but to our AmerIndian ancestors as Mi’kma’ki, as our ancestors settled the outer-reaches of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. Our family lines continue to extend, traversing the entire North American continent and beyond.”

She adds, “Many who live in the United States trace their genealogies back to the first Acadian AmerIndian immigrants who arrived in Louisiana after being deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755 (in the "Grand Deportation') -- and belong to a ‘Cajun’ community known worldwide for its food, flair, fun, and love of all things French.

Several members belong, as it turns out, to rare haplogroups X, U, and other "anomalous types" as compiled by me for DNA Consultants customers and reported in the previous blog post.

Some highlights from the study of Cherokee descendants are:

H, the most common European type today, is virtually absent, demonstrating lack of inflow from recent Europeans
J present in lines explicitly recognized to be Cherokee
X the signature of a Canaanite people whose center of diffusion was the Hills of Galilee, hypothetically correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
U suggesting Eastern Mediterranean, specifically Greek
K also suggesting Eastern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, hypothetically correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
T reflecting Egyptian high frequencies found almost nowhere else

According to Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, the Cumberland Gap mtDNA Project with overlapping territory with the Cherokee and Melungeon homelands in the Southern Appalachian Mountains also shows elevated frequencies of T. Project administrator Roberta Estes recently published the results of a large study of Native American Eastern Seaboard mixed populations “in relation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke” in the online Journal of Genetic Genealogy, 5(2):96-130, 2009. Estes is a board member of the Melungeon Historical Society and has an introduction with links to the study and its data on the society’s blog, titled “Where Have All the Indians Gone?”

Harvard University professor Barry Fell in his book Saga America first published in 1980 presented historical, epigraphic, archeological and linguistic evidence suggesting links between Greeks and Egyptians and the Algonquian Indians of Nova Scotia, Acadia and surrounding regions around the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway, particularly the Abnaki ("White") and Micmac Indians. He noted as early as 1976 in his previous study America B.C. that the second century CE Greek historian Plutarch recorded “Greeks had settled among the barbarian peoples of the Western Epeiros (continent).” Fell inferred from Plutarch’s passage “these Greeks had intermarried with the barbarians, had adopted thier language, but had blended their own Greek language with it.” In an appendix, he assembled extensive word-lists comparing Abenaki and Micmac vocabulary in the areas of navigation, fishing, astronomy, meteorology, justice and administration, medicine, anatomy, and economy with virtually identical terms in Ptolemaic Greek. One example is Greek ap’aktes Abenaki/Micmac ab’akt English “a distant shore.”

Fell’s work was continued by John H. Cooper, “Ancient Greek Cultural and Linguistic Influences in Atlantic North America,” NEARA JOURNAL 35/2.

Acadia project’s website is: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/AcadianAmerIndian/default.aspx.

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