The Odin Gene Can Indicate Your Reaction to Stress

Carriers of the Odin Gene have always been apparently cool dudes or level-headed chicks.

A variant on the forensic locus THO1 can reveal how you react to sudden or chronic stress. One value gives you the Odin Gene, another the Sundaland Gene.

Odin, sometimes Voden, Woden, Wotan, Votan or Wuotan, means “furious, inspired, mad” according to its Indo-European root [1]. Germanic and Anglo-Saxon kings often traced their genealogy to this warrior-god. Odin may also have been the namesake for Homer’s well-traveled, wizardly hero Odysseus. It was a claim of ethnicity.

The Odin Gene is clearly a marker from the extreme north of Europe. It is minimally present in Africa, rare in Asia. In South Africa, 40.3% of whites have it, but only 1.0% of blacks. In Norway it has a frequency of 34.7% and in Sweden 35.9%. Asians and Africans have very low frequencies of the Odin Gene. At the bottom is Taiwanese Aboriginals, with 0.6%. That is quite a spread!

The Odin Gene is demonstrably seaborne in its spread, for it is found as far away as the Caribbean, South America and Polynesia. The incidence in Scandinavian countries is about the same as Cherokees (33.3% for Enrolled, 36.3% for Admixed), Melungeons (35.0%) and the U.S. white population at large (36.8%). Among American Indian groups, it occurs in California’s Miwok Indians at the rate of 34.9%, in Creek or Muskogean Indians at 25% and in Mexico’s Nahuatl-speaking Huichols at about the same percentage. Its high incidence in Miwok Indians could stem from their tribal land on San Francisco Bay having beaconed as a haven for European and other voyagers to resupply their water, repair ships and enjoy shore leave with the local women.

In Europe the leading populations carrying the Odin Gene are: Austrians, Belgians and Swedes (36%), Northern Irish (36%), Scots (34-35%) and English/Welsh (33%).

Though STR markers are primarily just a range of numbers that permits us to uniquely identify persons and populations, the Odin Gene has a deeper side. Its locus on the tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) enzyme involves it in production of dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine (the pleasure and fight-or-flight responses). THO1=10 has been linked to impulsive male aggression (the Sundaland Gene). The Odin Gene is adjacent to this rare gene on the ladder of haplotypes. The double or bi-allelic values of 6, 9.3 are very, very common, especially in Europe, Eurasia and North and South America.  Studies have been done on these “normal” haplotypes, too.

In the words of one researcher,

The results of this study indicate that the 6 and 9.3 TH01 alleles are associated with a decrease in the hemodynamic responses to stress, offering a protective effect to individuals carrying those alleles. Carriers of the TH01-6 allele displayed a lower heart rate reactivity when exposed to stressors with increasing age than those without the TH01-6 allele. Furthermore, individuals carrying TH01-9.3 showed no increase in systolic blood pressure in response to stress, whereas those not possessing the TH01-9.3 allele demonstrated a significant increase in systolic blood pressure reactivity with increasing age.[2]

Translation: People with these markers (THO1=6, 9.3) do not overreact to stress. Ostensibly, they make good warriors, decision makers and leaders. It is in a way the opposite side of the Sundaland Gene, which is tied to a different value on the same locus.

One must emphasize that no THO1 value is directly causative of disease. Most of the traits reported (such as reaction to stress) are multifactorial, that is, affected by both genes and the environment.[3] Ancestry plays a large role, too.

In terms of autosomal DNA, distribution of ancient European hunter-gatherer genes surviving today can be studied in a map of what we call the Odin Gene. This well-traveled marker is defined by an STR value at the locus THO1. Leading populations reporting the Odin Gene are Swedish, Belarusian, Flemish, Dutch, Melungeon, Norwegian, Maltese, Slovakians, Caucasus, Polish and German.

All Rare Genes from History are rare considering their occurrence around the world, but they are comparatively common in certain populations. If you match those populations on your DNA Fingerprint report, you can infer that you probably got the rare gene from the population where it is relatively common. For example, if you got the Odin Gene in your Rare Genes from History results and Swedish in the no. 1 position in your DNA Fingerprint test, you may take it that your protection against stress is genetically linked to Swedish ancestry. This is an oversimplified example of interpreting and correlating the two tests. You may actually have gotten your copy of the Odin Gene from any of the other world populations, even from one where it is exceedingly scarce, but the odds favor a Scandinavian source, not Chinese inheritance.

You must put all witnesses together to arrive at solid conclusions—DNA, family traditions, medical history, the word of elders and many more pieces of evidence. No single one of them entirely rules.

And remember: no population is pure; all are mixed. And even if you got a gene—say the gene for level-headedness or a “Viking gene”—human beings do not necessarily obey their nature in a deterministic way. The Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin did not believe ancestry determined much at all, even though he had an illustrious background and became president of a prestigious New England genealogical society. He was far from being an essentialist in his philosophy.

Sea Peoples

Long distance seafaring is older than most people realize. Deep-water navigation goes back to Mesolithic times. Ships were always under the protection of the Mother Goddess, a sign that the Goddess religion held sway rather than patriarchal systems. When the argonauts are cast away on the sands of North Africa, they turn to their ship as their “Mother” and carry its timbers with them to the next body of water (Apollonius of Rhodes, 4.1327ff.). Even today, ships around the world “are generally considered as feminine.”[4]

No vessel sailed in classical times without a religious festival celebrated by the entire community, and no ship was without a protector goddess.

In a previous book, we raised the possibility that the Cherokee Paint Clan, the Ani-Wodi, really meant Those Descended from Woden. Wodi (pronounced Woe-tee), we argued, was not an element that made sense in the Cherokee language. On the contrary, asuhwisga and disuhwisdi are the Cherokee words for “paint.” Wodi is obviously foreign. It means, approximately, Sea Peoples.

Is it even conceivable that the Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptians called the Tamahu (White People), were in America? These are the invaders who threatened the very survival of the Egyptian empire under Ramesses III (1188-1165 BCE), were repulsed, withdrew to settle in Libya, but returned in force to rule as pharaohs and independent kings during the Libyan Dynasty. They also settled in other places around the Mediterranean. 

Sketch of one of the Sea Peoples by Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology (left). They were depicted as defeated prisoners on the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, about 1155 BCE. Notice the “Viking” horns, flowing beard and long hair, earring and sun disk on top of the helmet.

 

One finds shared culture and genetics among Scandinavians, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians and white people of the Far North. The latter were known to the Greeks and Romans as Hyperboreans, Those Who Live Behind the North Wind. Proof of a common origin is seen in the concentric circles or sun-symbols, the sun-wagon with horses and spoked wheels depicted in overview perspective, swastikas, horsemen, chariots, men with circular object in hand, distinctively shaped lurer or marching trumpets, Nordic rayed crowns, horses, hounds and, of course, the Tifinagh and Ogam scripts. “On the color friezes of the ancient Egyptians,” remarks Viennese ethnologist Christine Pellech, “the Tamahu are represented with fair skin, reddish-blond hair and blue eyes.”

There is a great deal of corroboration, maintains Pellech, that these white-skinned, blond and blue-eyed Tamahu and Lebu (Libyans) have survived the millennia right down to our own times:

Skylax, the Greek geographer and navigator (around 520 BC) says, “All Libyans are blond, of gigantic growth and the most handsome of men.” Callimachus, a Greek poet from Cyrene in Libya (around 300 BC), praises the beauty of blond Libyan women. Furthermore, there are countless reports from travelers down to our own day who have encountered blond and blue-eyed Berbers in the valleys of the Atlas Mountains. The ethnologist Leo Frobenius investigated the “blond Berber races” in the Atlas Range and recorded their legends about how their forefathers came across the sea from the north at a very early time. He also spoke of a “deep-seated correspondence” between Berbers and Europeans in their repertory of fairy-tales.[5]

Recall that the Egyptian term for the Sea People is Tamahu.[6] This name could refer to “North Sea Peoples” or “White People” or Libyans (whose country-name, like Lebanon, is rendered in many languages as “white”). They are evidently identical with the Tamahitans mentioned in Cherokee traditions as Trade People or Merchants.[7]

The Helen Gene was one of 26 Rare Genes from History introduced by DNA Consultants in 2012. “These rare but robust signals of deep history,” the company said in a press release, “can act as powerful ancestral probes into the tangled past of the human race as well as unique touchstones for the surprising stories of individuals.”[8] The Thuya, Akhenaten and King Tut genes were actually based on ancient Egyptian DNA alleles and named for the mummies whose autopsies were conducted by Zahi Hawass’s team in 2010.[9] But the rest were marketing names invented by the company.  The Odin Gene was the first of a second tranche of Rare Genes from History, unveiled in 2020.[10] That made 33 in total.

 

[1] John T. Koch, “Rock Art and Celto-Germanic Vocabulary: Shared Iconography and Words as Reflections of Bronze Age Contact”: https://www.academia.edu /39623231/Rock_art_and_Celto_Germanic_vocabulary_Shared_iconography_and_words_as_reflections_of_Bronze_Age_contact.

[2] P. Barbeau  et al,  “A Tyrosine Hydroxylase Microsatellite and Hemodynamic Response to Stress in a Multiethnic Sample of Youth,” Ethnicity and Disease 13 (2003), pp. 186–92.

[3] See Nicole Wyner, Mark Barash and Dennis McNevin, “Forensic Autosomal Short Tandem Repeats and Their Potential Association with Phenotype,” Frontiers in Genetics 6/11 (2020), 884,  doi: 10.3389/fgene.2020.00884. PMID: 32849844; PMCID: PMC7425049. , pp. 3-4.

[4] James Hornell, Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), p. 275

[5] Our own translation from the German of Christine Pellech, Die Odyssee: Eine antike Weltumsegelung, 3^rd, expanded and corrected ed. (Greiz: König, 2011), pp. 76-77.

[6] TmH in Beinlich’s Ancient Egyptian word-list, p. 742.

[7] See Nancy K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Peoples and Places, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). See also Ioannis Voskos & Arthur Knapp, “Cyprus at the End of the Late Bronze Age: Crisis and Colonization or Continuity and Hybridization?” American Journal of Archaeology 112 (2008), pp. 659-84, 10.3764/aja.112.4.659. Barry Fell, Bronze Age America, “Who Were the Sea Peoples,” pp. 278-81. F. C. Woudhuizen, The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples, Rotterdam, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2006.

[8] “Rare Genes from History: New Autosomal Ancestry Markers” (blog post, Sept. 30, 2012). Available at https://dnaconsultants.com/rare-genes-history-new-autosomal-ancestry-markers-dna-consultants/.

[9]Z. Hawass et al,  “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,” JAMA 303/7 (2010), pp. 638-47.

[10] “The Odin Gene Tracks Ancient Seafarers (blog post, July 2, 2020). Available at: https://dnaconsultants.com/the-odin-gene-tracks-ancient-seafarers/.

 

Read More

The Odin Gene (product)

The Sundaland Gene (product)

Chapter 5: The Wotan [Odin] Gene (discussion paper)