Joe's discovery about similar allele frequencies in some markers between Ashkenazi Jews and Italians is quite interesting in terms of my theory about the origin of the European component in the Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool.
Some early studies on AJ, using Y-chromosomes (pdf) overestimated their Near Eastern component by considering them a mix between Levantine and north/central European populations. But, this made the assumption that Jewish ancestors took a Lufthansa flight to Germany rather than spend 1,000+ years in the territory of the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic world where there might also have been introgression of European elements into their gene pool.
Thus, it may very well be that Ashkenazi Jews are distinctive with respect to NW Europeans both in terms to an ancient Near Eastern ancestry (shared with Arabs and "discovered" in my re-analysis) and with respect to Southern European ancestry corresponding to particular populations they interacted with during their sojourn in the Roman Empire.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Do Ashkenazi Jews have Italian ancestry?
From Dienekes:
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3 comments:
I think it's more correct to say Italians have some Ashkenazi ancestry.
It may be even more correct to say that both Italians and Ashkenazi Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry.
The Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews are inbred Romans. Italians are not them, they are Italians. Diskin in his 2010 paper shows just how Roman Eastern Europeans Jews are. He's an Israel researcher and he showed that they are basically, for the most part, inbred Romans.
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