We predicted as much: anthropologists are beginning to have a more positive attitude toward the role of Neanderthals in human prehistory. According to an article in today’s Washington Post, “Scientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past.”
DNA Found to Extend in a Radius of 50 Miles around You
According to an Anishnabe elder, DNA has a well-known non-physical or spiritual dimension. George Starr-Bresette sent us recently the following three write-ups on some experiments measuring the effect of DNA in the environment.
After many years in development, the results of a DNA ancestry project enrolling 40 Melungeons were published and made public, marking the end of an attempt to solve the mystery of a Southern U.S. ethnic group with autosomal DNA.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is interested in their namesake’s Jewish ancestry. Do a Google Search and you’ll get numerous hits under “Abraham Lincoln Jewish Ancestry.” They can all be traced back to the work of Rutgers University professor Elizabeth C. Hirschman, who published her findings in The Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America in 2005 (Mercer University Press). Melungeons.com immediately reported the news in an article on Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, in March 2005.
Customs and Beliefs of the Roma and Sinti
Some of our customers have been surprised to get Gypsy/Romani population matches in their results for the DNA Fingerprint Test. Typically, these are combined with Middle Eastern and Indian matches due to the Gypsies’ historical migrations. Other customers were not surprised at all and called to tell us about the fortuneteller great-grandmother or mysterious ancestor who traveled with the circus. Gypsy heritage is not unheard of among Melungeons. So for those who think they may have Roma/Sinti or Romechal (the term used in the British Isles), we have compiled the following list of customs and beliefs taken from an excellent authority.
Ashkenazi Jews May Have Founded Israel
But Hebrew-Speaking Khazars Created Ashkenaz
Yes, the Khazars spoke Hebrew. It was the official language of the medieval kingdom, just as it is today in Israel. That is one of the surprising revelations of a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv history professor Shlomo Sand, who devotes half a chapter to the “strange empire in the East” (London: Verso, 2009).
Only His Geneticist Knows for Sure
A visit to the temple by a Canadian doctor and one-page letter to the journal Nature in 1997 started it all, a frenzied hunt for the multi-study, double-blind, placebo-controlled proof that Jewish men of the surname Cohen carried the same genes as the biblical patriarch Aaron, the mystical Cohen Modal Haplotype (Skorecki et al., 1997).
This blog posting attempts to summarize this important article and translate its technical results into layman’s language for the sake of our customers. From the genetic evidence, we hope to glean some useful information about Jewish history and genealogy, especially for those who find they have “some” Jewish ancestry in their family tree but who are non-Jewish in the way they identify.
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.
Since the spate of Jewish genetic studies appearing this summer, reports in the media have announced that nearly all Ashkenazi Jews descend from only four women, and that if you are Ashkenazi you are likely to be no farther distant in kinship than fifth or sixth cousins from any other Ashkenazi Jew (for instance, your spouse).
