Joseph Livni and Karl Skorecki have teamed up for Distinguishing between founder and host population mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazi population
. The argument here is that our ancestors did not form from Levantine men marrying Italians.
The mtDNA from nonLevantines is still there; I got some myself. The authors account for this by later admixture. We are after all talking about many centuries. The point is that our founders had already founded the foundation. Presently they can ascertain 54 Levantine female lines: not all direct (so again, not mine), but still in the genome overall. M33c (say) got there later but, by the luck of the draw, persisted a direct line. We introgressed Jews number under 15% of the Ashkenaz population, before modern intermarriage of course.
Khazaria sees such Asian intrusions as Khazar-mediated. Khazaria stresses that ancestrally M33c is not Khazar; it is southeast Asian, where Khazars were Turks from northeast/central. M33c rides with N9a3 which this website likewise cannot pin to the Khazars, although doing its best so to do. Isn't N more western?
The most common Ashkenazic maternal lineage, K1a1b1a, has not reliably been found in any ancient or modern Levantines who aren't Jewish. Nor has the 4th most common one, K2a2a1.
ReplyDeleteK2a2a1 actually does look Italian now. Below are portions of my article "Ashkenazi mtDNA: Newly Revealed Connections to Israel, Italy, and Spain" from volume 36, number 3 of Quest, the digital magazine of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Connecticut:
"The most important piece of the puzzle emerged in the late fall of 2023 when YFull customer YF125278 joined MTree. He lists his matrilineal ancestry as coming from Aosta, a city in northwestern Italy, and his haplogroup qualifies as K2a2a according to Phylotree. His mtDNA sequence includes two of K2a2a1's defining mutations - A512C and G11914A! - but lacks its third defining mutation, A9254G. This makes his variety of K2a2a the immediate ancestor of the Ashkenazic branch. [...] K2a2a1 itself is found among some European non-Jews, including people with matrilineal heritages from Portugal and Italy who are listed on Family Tree DNA's "mtDNA Haplotree". Considering how K2a2a1's immediate ancestor exists among Italians, the Portuguese, Italian, and Cuban carriers of K2a2a1 are not necessarily descendants of Jews who converted to Catholicism."
K2a2a on the whole is quite European. I mentioned "Germany K2a2a lineage (GenBank sample HQ154135), an ethnic Ukrainian K2a2a lineage (GenBank sample MZ294947), and a Romania K2a2a lineage (YFull customer YF130348)". I also mentioned "Sample LAZ020, a baby girl from southern Greece from the January 16, 2023 study "Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric Aegean", belonged to the root level of K2a2a [...] Leo Cooper also confirmed that LAZ020 was autosomally similar to other inhabitants of the Aegean Islands in the Late Bronze Age."
Statistical analysis doesn't trump phylogenetic analysis, and there are definitely fewer than 54 mtDNA lineages of Levantine origin in today's Ashkenazic population.
As a reminder, the Ashkenazic branch of N9a3 is N9a3a1b1 on YFull MTree and N9a3c on FTDNA's MitoTree. This is a very East Eurasian zone of the haplotrees, not very western. Its distant ancestor N9a3a1 has been found in some Han Chinese people but that does not appear to be the case for its immediate ancestor N9a3a1b. However, we don't know the ethnicity of the new N9a3a1b tester YF133496 on YFull MTree.
Eastern Sephardic Jews (Turkish Jews and Serbian Jews) probably received N9a3a1b1 from Ashkenazic ancestors.
We don't give basic assignments like N or N1b because we need more precision.