Read reviews of science articles, new research and news reports on ancestry testing, ancient DNA and popular genetics
The Savannah, Ga. poet Conrad Aiken and his wife saw a freighter in the harbor on their morning walk. The name of the ship was “Cosmos Mariner.” Looking it up in the day’s Shipping News, they learned it was bound for “Destination Unknown.”
Childhood’s a time when curiosity flourishes, exploration consumes the waking hours, and sharing discoveries with friends and family brings eager delights.
One of our most common seafaring markers is the Odin Gene. The name Odin may be related to Odysseus. The Odin Gene is centered on Scandinavia and extends to the Sea People and Phoenicians of the East Mediterranean and travels of Wotan in the Americas and Pacific Rim. It contradicts the supposition of geneticists that early man moved only across landmasses and waterways were barriers.
Genetic analysis of Mal’ta Boy and his culture has contributed to a long debate about the origins of Native North Americans. It was found that these Ice Age Siberians had deep ancestry that connected them to Western Eurasians, while they were also ancestors of Native North Americans. More surprisingly, the Mal’ta people appeared to have no direct ancestry connecting them to present-day East Asians
The oldest of our seven new markers in the revised Rare Genes from History is The Goddess Gene. It dates back to Paleolithic times and is so ancient is has mutated into two forms. We check for both of these and report whether you have it if you take the Rare Genes from History test, which is based on your Autosomal DNA Profile, the same marker set used for our DNA Fingerprint Plus ancestry test.
The Invention of the Cherokee People (continued from previous blog post, concluding part of Chapter 8 in forthcoming book Cherokee DNA Studies Volume II: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong)
Government and university officials claim the Cherokee people are tens of thousands of years old. They deny the Cherokee include any original pre-Columbian strains but Asiatic and Amerindian. They assert that the tribal name Tsalagi (pronounced Tchah-lah-kee) is as old as their language, that it is descended from a Proto-Iroquoian language that preceded Mohawk by thousands of years. Their minds are closed to thinking that the tribe ever spoke any other language or lived in any other place in recent times but the Appalachian region, from which they were forcibly removed on a Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, leaving behind a remnant in North Carolina.
In the Kingdom of the Apalaches. The 1600s brought an almost unbelievable degree of admixture and population change to the Southern Highlands. In fact, little of what demonstrably occurred has been believed. Hang onto your colonial cap because it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
With a single turn of the page we are firmly in the domain of the written word. Everything now is about admixture. Our representative for this period is C. D. Brewington of a famous Lumbee family. He wrote The Five Civilized Indian Tribes of Eastern North Carolina in 1952. Brewington was a teacher and minister and served in the Croatan churches of Sampson and Robeson counties, the Lumbee heartland. Brewington was a strong original spokesman for American Indian heritage, but he was more. He happened to be an Indian himself. The moral imperative he felt is in keeping with our policy of privileging native sources, and allowing descendants to speak with their own voices and evidence.
This discussion paper is intended to become Chapter 5: The Wotan Gene in the report on Phase III of our Cherokee DNA Studies.
All generalities are false, including this one. –Voltaire
Wotan, or Odin, sometimes Voden, Woden, Votan or Wuotan, means “furious, inspired, mad” in its Indo-European derivation. Germanic kings traced their genealogy to the hero-god in a fashion called euhemeristic much as we say we are descendants of Adam or Achilles or Brutus. It is a claim of ethnicity, and presumably there is some historical as well as genetic substantiation. Could the Cherokee Paint Clan called Ani-Wodi and conventionally taken to designate the Phoenicians really mean Those Descended from Wotan? If so, Kutans are people from the East Mediterranean (Kittim) and the Paint Clan are Germanic interlopers. The distinction, however, is blurred if you believe, like Christine Pellech and others, that the Phoenicians were originally a North European people. Please read on…
