Posted on 03/27/2008 6:29:52 PM PDT by blam
Crusaders 'left genetic legacy'
The genetic signature can be traced to Europe
Scientists have detected the faint genetic traces left by medieval crusaders in the Middle East. The team says it found a particular DNA signature which recently appeared in Lebanon and is probably linked to the crusades.
The finding comes from the Genographic Project, a major effort to track human migrations through DNA.
Details of the research have been published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
The researchers found that some Christian men in Lebanon carry a DNA signature hailing from Western Europe.
The scientists also found that Lebanese Muslim men were more likely than Christians to carry a particular genetic signature. But this one is linked to expansions from the Arabian Peninsula which brought Islam to the area in the 7th and 8th Centuries.
But they emphasise that the differences between the two communities are minor, and that Christians and Muslim Arabs in Lebanon overwhelmingly share a common heritage.
Genetic 'surname'
The legacy of the Muslim expansion has been demonstrated in other studies which looked at the genetics of Middle Eastern and North African populations. But signs of recent European migration to the region is more unusual.
The study focused on the Y, or male, chromosome, a package of genetic material carried only by men that is passed down from father to son more or less unchanged, just like a surname.
But over many generations, the chromosome accumulates small changes, or copying errors, in its DNA sequence.
So Y chromosomes can be classified into different groups (called haplogroups) which, to some extent, reflect a person's geographical ancestry.
The team analysed the Y chromosomes of 926 Lebanese males and found that patterns of male genetic variation in Lebanon fell more along religious lines than along geographical lines.
A genetic signature on the male chromosome called WES1, which is usually only found in European populations, was found among the Lebanese men included in the study.
Science and history
"It seems to have come in from Europe and is found mostly in the Christian population," said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project.
"This is odd because typically we don't see this sort of stratification by religion when we are looking at the relative proportions of these lineages - and particularly immigration events."
He told BBC News: "Looking at the same data set, we saw a similar enrichment of lineages coming in from the Arabian Peninsula in the Muslim population which we didn't see [as often] in the Christian population."
Lebanese Muslim men were found to have high frequencies of a Y chromosome grouping known as J1. This is typical of populations originating from the Arabian Peninsula, who were involved in the Muslim expansion.
"The goal of the study was to put some science to the history of this country - which is very rich," said Pierre Zalloua, a co-author on the paper, from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
He added: "To have these great civilisations - with the Islamic expansion and the migration from Europe - coming to Lebanon, leaving not only their genes but also some of their culture and way of life, it can only make us feel richer."
The Genographic Project was launched by National Geographic in 2005 to help piece together a picture of how the Earth was colonised.
The consortium has sold 250,000 DNA test kits and regional centres have taken samples of genetic material from 31,000 indigeous people.
Cool.
My own approach has been more haphazard, following authors, subjects, or ‘slices of history’.
Harold Lamb's books on Genghis Khan, Hannibal Barca, and the Crusades were amazing.
‘Slices of history’ books are like “The Ancient Engineers” by L. Sprague Decamp which is all about the history of engineering in the ancient world; or “A History of Pi” about famous mathematicians in history and their approximation of the ratio.
Snorre Sturlason is amazing. Amazingly unreadable, but Snorre did talk about the Viking discovery of America a few hundred years before Columbus sailed, as well as the history of the Norwegian kings, the founding of Normandy, and the colonization of Iceland.
“Crusaders ‘Left Genetic Legacy’”
Although I only saw a couple of episodes of the “Cadfael” series on PBS,
IIRC, in one episode the ex-Crusader-turned-monk discovered a young
visitor from the Holy Land is likely his son.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108717/
My screen name is from my last name, Lamb.
No & No.
His Crusade books were “Of Iron Men and Saints” and “The Flame of Islam” usually combined in one volume entitled “The Crusades”.
Being the knowledgeable fellow you are, I thought you must.
Syke's book is sitting on my desk and is next on my reading list.
For the last couple of years I've been focusing on Indo-European languages, their relationships, and what they can tell us about migrations/relations. I'm just now getting into genetics. As Oppenheimer and others have pointed out, that can be more of a cultural shift rather than a population migration, e.g. the Frisian/English relationship (by the way, I find that it is actually easier to read old Frisian than Old English).
I am wondering, however, how much of the genetic patterns are affected by particular migrations and how much might be affected by disease resistance in particular groups. I'm sure over 50k years you can have several pandemics that can wipe out a population, or nearly so. Perhaps some of these groups have a slightly higher resistance than others and that can lead to some unevenness in the distributions.
Another interesting point to me that Oppenheimer makes is how hard it is to actually replace a population once it is established. To fundamentally change a population you would need a pandemic or genocide followed by another mass migration, not simply a Viking or Saxon incursion.
I have a question about Frisian language, or rather a sir name derivation. I have an ancestor, Jakob Miller, from Holland, who immigrated to PA in the early 1700s. Miller is a Dutch name?
His family passed on blood dyscrasia which now infects a fairly large percentage of the population. It is fairly mild and many people never even know that they have it, until they bleed out on an operating table during a routine procedure.
That is interesting and I've seen it expressed in other books.
I'm expecting Sykes book to disappoint you though.
I've read that a number of US German families named Mueller changed their name to Miller due to persecution during WW1 & 2.
The ME pop is a mixture of everybody on the planet since everybody on the planet has one time or another gone rampaging through there even before oil was discovered to have significant value.
Yes, but Jakob Miller was the name in the early 1700s. It is the name that was on his immigration records, as well.
Even Neanderthals.
NEANDERTHAL MAN MAY HAVE TALKED
"Archeologists in Israel have unearthed a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton that indicates for the first time that the primitive hominids were anatomically able to talk."
Okay. Just a thought.
Have a friend from Lebanon. I asked him once whathe was doing with blue eyes and blond hair. He said, “don’t forget, the Crusaders were here.”
The Netherlands is a mixture of Dutch, Flemings, and Frisian with Frisian being currently spoken in a small northwest portion of coastal Netherlands.
Miller does not sound like it would be an extraction of any of those but Jakob, of course, does.
It is possible that Mulder (Dutch: Miller) or Mueller (German: Miller) were changed at some time in the past.
The coastal Dutch were directly across the channel from England and were great traders. Sometimes the contact with the English caused them to Anglicize their names for business reasons.
It is also possible if they came to America on an English boat by way of England the name change could have happened there.
Another possibility is that Jakob was of English extraction whose family had immigrated to Holland sometime in the 17th century. That happened pretty frequently because of the religious wars in England at the time.
The interesting thing about this is that I found the Dutch link on the internet on a genealogy link from some town in the Netherlands. The only part of the site that was in English was the part pertaining to my ancestors. Now, I can no longer find the link.
I was trying to trace the history of this blood dyscrasia and found that I had the Miller family in my ancestry, several times. I had already come across a hand written note of my grandmother’s, saying that her paternal grandmother’s family was Dutch from Holland, but I thought that had to be wrong, until this Dutch family tree popped up.
Yes, they could have been English that emigrated to Holland because I believe that they were Calvinists. That might make sense. I guess they could have just moved there, the same way that they moved to Pennsylvania.
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