Posted on 08/04/2011 7:57:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
According to a group of geneticists in Switzerland from iGENEA, the DNA genealogy center, as many as half of all European men and 70 percent of British men share the same DNA as the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, or King Tut.
For a film created for the Discovery Channel, scientists worked to reconstruct the DNA of the young male King, his father Akhenaten and his grandfather Amenhotep III. They discovered that King Tut had a DNA profile that belongs to a group called haplogroup R1b1a2. This group can be found in over 50 percent of European men and shows the researchers that there is a common ancestor.
This genetic profile group is also found in 70 percent of Spanish males and 60 percent of French males however, it is only present in less than one percent of men in modern-day Egyptian men.
The R1b1a2 DNA haplogroup is believed to have originated in the Black Sea region some 9500 years ago and spread to Europe with the spread of agriculture in 7000BC. Researchers are unsure as to how and when the group first came to Egypt. They believe the reasoning the R1b1a2 haplogroup is rarely found in modern-day Egypt is due partially to European immigration throughout the last 2000 years.
iGENEA plans to continue to search for more DNA lineage and are looking to discover King Tuts closest living relatives. They announced this week that they are selling a DNA service for between 139 and 399 euros and they will test the DNA of those people who are interested in seeing how related to King Tut they may be. This offer, according to Roman Scholz who is the director of iGENEA, has already gained a lot of interest.
There is an assumption that King Tut was of the same ethnicity as the Egyptians he ruled. Cleopatra and Ptolemy (despite the afro-centrists beliefs) were Greek -- after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, he installed a new Macedonian ruling class. During the period around 2000BC to 1550BC the Hyksos from (apparently) western Asia (Middle East) invaded and ruled Egypt. So the genetics of the ruling class may not be representative of the common people.
Or the dynasty had aquired a strong European strain at some point, preserved by inbreeding.
It can mean a lot of things, but that seems like one of the less likely explanations.
It could just mean that the Egyptian royal family had a strong European strain at the time, from even a rather distant ancestor.
Cavalli-Sforza has shown that for the most part genetic variation among human populations is gradual by distance, barring isolation, except where a small pre-agricultural population was replaced by a much more numerous agricultural one - because agriculture supports orders of magnitudes more people.
Once there are millions of peasants living on the land it is quite difficult to get rid of them.
Yes, but Arabic isn’t a Celtic language. That’s the problem here.
Well Tut’s dynasty lasted for quite some time. It’s possible that the people who ruled Egypt by the third dynasty were not the same as the people who ruled in the 1st and 2nd.
However, the origins of Tut and his family could be explained if they had Assyrian ancestry and Thutmose I married into the existing Egyptian royal family.
However, that still doesn’t change the enormous population dislocation of the end of the Roman Empire.
Egypt has been a crossroads for humanity for millenia. The people who live there now are not the descendants of the people who built the great civilizations of the past. The ancient Egyptians of the pre-Alexander era, were most likely traders with the Phoenicians (Carthage, Spain, Tyre and Sidon) and may have hitched a ride with them to southwestern Europe when things got heated in the wars with Babylon, Assyria and eventually Greece and Rome. When they moved out, the Arabs moved in....................
By the time of King Tut several dynasties had already risen and fallen in Egypt and so it would be hard to identify a direct lineage back to the original founders of the kingdom. A successful general could ascend to become Pharaoh by marrying the daughter of the previous one, and sometimes a son of a Pharaoh would marry his own sister to gain legitimacy. So if anything, their genetics could be a very, shall we say, unusual mix.
Tutanhkamun was one of the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (New Kingdom) in the 1300s—the 3rd dynasty was in the Old Kingdom more than 1000 years earlier.
Third Kingdom not dynasty, sigh. 3rd kingdom, 18th dynasty.
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GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Thanks Red Badger. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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Coptic however is related to Semitic tongues, and it is known that ancient Egyptian was an ancestor of modern Coptic.
So the simplest explanation of the European lineage of King Tut is that this was not representative of the Egyptian population of the time.
Ah, but Egypt was NOT really just a crossroads, not in that way.
A “crossroads” would be an entrepot, of a relatively large number of people from elsewhere passing through, and sometimes settling. But such a population in ancient times was doomed to genetic death, as urban populations could not reproduce themselves. Thats why population geneticists call them “sinks”. Egypt had several entrepots. They never seem to have represented much of the general population. Egypt had Alexandria, but Egypt wasn’t Alexandria.
Egypt was a very heavily populated, intensively cultivated country, continuously so for thousands of years. It may have been the most populous of any country around the Mediterranean. Just its agricultural surplus (and surpluses were small per capita in those days) could feed most of Italy at various times.
At bad times the Egyptian population may have outnumbered everyone else for a thousand miles around.
There is no way an ancient invader could have out-bred or genetically co-opted this enormous mass of peasants. Plenty of people conquered the Egyptians, but I doubt anyone replaced them.
That was the 25th Dynasty and probably a bunch of the Middle Kingdom kings.
Really. I’ve never understood the whole “King Tut was black” thing considering there actually were more accomplished Ancient Egyptian kings who were acknowledged as black (or Nubian) by contemporaries.
Just PR, that’s all.
If you talk to high school kids about “Nubian” pharaohs, it won’t really register with them. But King Tut-—everybody knows who he is.
Same with Hannibal, He was Phoenician. But he is so well-known and so convenient for identification as an “African” leader. I mean, he even had elephants from south of the Sahara!
2018 ping.
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