My own personal theory is that the Melungeons are descendants of men held as POWs at the Spanish POW camp in what is now South Carolina back in the 1500s. For the most part, the POWs were Eastern Orthodox, or Hindu, or anything but Moslem. I think the Spanish regularly tossed Islamic prisoners overboard.
At the same time there'd been a regular traffic of folks leaving Europe for America and winding up out in the woods in Virginia, etc. One estimate I ran across had about 20,000 such people running around what is now Maryland when Jamestown was founded. What were those folks doing and just where did they come from?
Compounding the problem of figuring out who and what the Melungeons were, there was a really serious drought on the East Coast from about 1575 to 1610. Simultaneously the Indian settlements at Angel Mounds, Cahokia and Terre Haute broke up, and you had all sorts of Indians traveling East, West, North and South, creating all sorts of mayhem and disruption. The Cherokee, who'd been West of the Mississippi, somehow ended up in the Appalachians. The "Eastern Cheyenne" were created. The Sioux obtained the horse and a whole new culture was created ~ but this time one that used what are clearly Sheng Dynasty Chinese characters as the basis for their sign language ~ which probably demonstrates that more than one Chinese cook on a Spanish ship checked out in South Carolina and ran as far as he could to escape those people.
America in the immediate post-Columbus period was exciting and disastrous. No doubt the Melungeon people came into being in those days.
Both of your posts are interesting and enlightening.
The story of the Melungeons is intriquing. There's a lot of theories out there also, probably more than actual forensics evidence of who they are.
I live up here where they pretty much settled and bred, and the purest form of that unexplained race is concentrated.
The University of Tennessee has one of the top (if not the top) forensics school in the U.S., so maybe there is some research/ evidence of this race of people available.