Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 101 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Thu 17 Jul 2008 12:34 Post subject: "Mediterranean" EuroDNA scores in England
Hi,
So far, wandering around the company website has not been very helpful so I'm hoping someone here might comment. I've been perplexed for some time by the fact that my Eurasian DNA 1.0 scores were 57% Northern European, 35% Mediterranean, 8% South Asian. The latter can be taken as background noise from deep ancestry, but the Mediterranean is hard to reconcile with known facts. Of 375 European ancestors I've identified the breakdown is: England 362; 3 each for Scotland, Wales, Germany, and France; 1 Holland. My Y DNA matches "recent ancestral origins" are similarly very Anglocentric.
Even if we allow all the various theories about Spaniards, Portuguese, Turks, etc. in the New World, I don't see any way for those elements to account for more than a third of my European markers being Mediterranean. Likewise, Lisa Alther's MED score was 42 and her father's far higher; yet again the known ancestry is overwhelmingly British. This suggests to me that some or many of our ancestors arrived here from England with a lot of Mediterranean DNA already. But I don't find statistics about the UK in the EuroDNA information at the DNAPrint website:
Ireland does appear with a very low MED level, but it has a far less admixed population than England. The average MED level in the US is 22%, which would include people with known Mediterranean ancestry. For people with no known Mediterranean ancestry to be coming up with much higher MED scores suggests two possibilities. The most romantic possibility, and perhaps widely discussed, is Iberian settlers in America as "lost colonists." But I suspect that ultimately it will be established that some regions of England have far more Mediterranean markers than others. The maps of hair and eye color recently posted show a diagonal line running across Great Britain dividing the predominantly dark south and the predominantly blond north. Is this the genetic footprint of the Roman army? BTW when I broke down my known English ancestry by county, I found them strongly concentrated in the south.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1053 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Thu 17 Jul 2008 14:40 Post subject:
Hello, Paul; nice to see you here again.
Some of the earliest settlers in the British Isles, according to most sources, were Mediterraneans -- Iberians, to be exact. Genetics (at least HLA genetics) supports this. While the Romans certainly introduced more of a Mediterranean strain (amongst many other strains, since to be a Roman meant to merely be a citizen of the Empire, and since the Romans used slaves and servants of all known nations and "races," as Coon put it), the bulk of the Mediterranean ancestry in the British Isles probably dates to the early settlement of the region.
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 360 } Location: Īle-de-France
Posted: Thu 17 Jul 2008 15:15 Post subject:
I think there is a different explanation. If theses categories are correctly and precisely defined, and you take two people whose scores are both A50-B25-C13-D12, the range of possiblities for their children is large. It would be possible for any one marker to be completely bred out in one generation. A57-B35-C0-D8 is completely within the realm of possibilities. Add this over multiple generations, and the possiblities are endless.
Look at the range of possibilites for any one ethnicity. Turkish is particularly eye catching.
I think that in the genetic shuffle you probably got more of one kind of card and less of another. Any ancestors that you have that came from the mediterranean to England even as recently as roman times are certaintly the ancestors of most other English as well.
I think the following statement from Ancestry by DNA is telling:
Quote:
If the NOR, MED, MIDEAS and SA genetic groupings are of legitimate anthropological base, and if there is an association between anthropology and physical appearance (which we know there is), then there should be a correlation between admixture for certain genetic groupings and the expression of physical traits.
Notice their interesting use of the modifier in parentheses. They only confirm the second "if." That to me means that they are admitting that they do not know if ther groupings are of legitimate anthropological base. Which further says to me that even they don't know what the results of the test actually mean with respect to admixutre or ancestry from different groups.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1053 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Thu 17 Jul 2008 15:29 Post subject:
MisterLawyer wrote:
I think that in the genetic shuffle you probably got more of one kind of card and less of another. Any ancestors that you have that came from the mediterranean to England even as recently as roman times are certaintly the ancestors of most other English as well.
Yes, of course. I was merely addressing the "Is this the genetic footprint of the Roman army?" question.
The Turkish grouping is indeed interesting, and confirms the historical and anthropological records that show that Anatolia was a major conduit for the flow of various peoples between Asia and Europe.
The diagonal line across Britain in this map corresponds fairly well to the diagonal line in the map of eye color on the same site. Even though there have been many centuries of mixture, this suggests that present day England still shows some geographical differences in appearance. I will ask an English friend if it is generally understood that people in some parts of the UK have darker eyes, hair and/or skin than other parts. From this map it would seem that people in Wales and Cornwall would have higher Iberian percentages on the new EuroDNA test than other parts of the UK.
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