Will have to post to you later. I first have to have my lawyer go over all of your Discussion Guidelines and my post to make sure that I am in complete compliance.
Is there a single group anywhere that hasn't been called the Lost Tribes or otherwise Jewish by some nutcase (*cough* *Joe* *cough*)?
Oh, I might be violating the "guidelines"...
Saved it to read later. Quite interesting.
In Africa, there are many similarities between Bantu customs and Jewish ones also.
We always think that prior to airplanes no one traveled. And we think prior to TV and radio ideas did not spread.
DNA studies can detect if there is a genetic link (a recent study showed a genetic link in all cohens, a name used for the priestly hereditary class). However, an alternative is that Jewish settlers or travelers intermarried but kept their faith and customs, and that the good ideas and customs were copied by others in the area. After hundreds of years, the customs evolved, and some of the original knowledge was lost, but a core was kept alive because it spoke to people's hearts.
So although I am leery of the "lost tribe" scenerio, I am open to the possibility that there is indeed a link between Jewish settlers and these customs.
Here is a follow up on my comments about Jewish customs in Africa, from the London Guardian. He makes the same point as I made (middle of the article):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,926038,00.html Written in the genes
The study of DNA allows us to unravel history, but it also tells us that we can forge our own future
Johnjoe McFadden
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian
Roots in the past are often used to claim a place in the present - from royal genealogies to Saddam Hussein's autographed bricks in the reconstructed palace of Nebuchadnezzar. So when, 50 years ago, Watson and Crick discovered the double helix it was not long before it was seized upon as a new tool to uncover our history - for DNA is not just the genetic code of our present, but a key to unlocking the past.
Rebecca Cann, of the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the first to use DNA to uncover the past. In 1987 she examined the mitochondrial genes we inherit from our mothers and showed that our female line can be traced back to a single woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago, a "mitochondrial Eve". Fossil evidence for modern humans goes back at least 500,000 years so it seems that humanity went through a severe bottleneck when this Eve was alive - it remains a mystery why of all the females who inhabited the globe at that time, she was the only one to leave modern descendants.
DNA fingerprinting has since been used to resolve many other contentious issues - most notably those concerning the origin of culture and national identity. Early prehistorians tended to imagine waves of invaders who displaced the indigenous populations to erect new cultures. Modern prehistorians, using DNA evidence, see a more complex picture.
In 1997, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, plotted gene frequency patterns across Europe and the near east in the Neolithic period, and found that they bore a striking similarity to the spread of agriculture. Neolithic farmers travelled with both their crops and their genes to eventually reach the British Isles some 5,000 years ago.
Later migrations coincided with the expansion of the Indo-European languages, including Latin, German, Sanskrit and English. Linguists have long sought a homeland for the Indo-Europeans. The genetic data favours an origin on the Russian steppes with a group of nomadic farmers known as the Kurgan who domesticated the horse and rode out to invade India and Europe. Studies of Irish Y-chromosomes indicate that the British Isles represents the western edge of that migration.
The displacement of Romano-British culture by Anglo-Saxon has been variously considered to mark a mass invasion or a more peaceful cultural takeover by a small military elite. Mark Thomas at University College London examined Y-chromosomes from across central England, Wales, Denmark, Norway and Friesland, the Anglo-Saxons' home.
Central England and Friesland Y-chromosomes were indistinguishable and distinct from their Welsh counterparts. The genetic data supports the invasion hypothesis with either elimination or displacement of the native Celts from central England. However, the spread of genes and languages do not always coincide. The Lemba are a tribe of Bantu-speaking black Africans who believe they are descended from Jews. They practise semitic traditions, such as circumcision and the keeping of the Sabbath. Thompson's laboratory discovered that in their Y-chromosomes was a genetic marker found only among Jews. The Lemba tradition that a high priest named Buba led them out of Judaea may indeed be based on a real event.
But there is a danger in seeing gene migrations as the source of culture and national identity. The Jewish gene in the Lemba tribe is found in only about 10% of the men, yet the whole tribe practices Jewish traditions. Similarly, although Kurgan genes may have spread westward from an Indo-European homeland, the Kurgan swapped lots of genes with the indigenous populations along the way. By the time they reached the British Isles, their genetic inheritance was heavily diluted, though the language they spoke remained thoroughly Indo-European.
The differences between populations are nearly always just a matter of the varying proportions of a few (probably unimportant) genes. Germans, Celts, Latins, Jews, Polynesians, Africans, Iraqis and Americans are all blends of genes with only about one DNA base in a hundred that separates any one of us from our common ancestor. Genetically speaking, there is little to distinguish one race from another. Cavalli-Sforza's studies have led him to hypothesise that the invention of modern language was the spark that ignited human expansion. Perhaps what set Cann's Eve apart was that her people invented language. Language allowed a new form of heredity - cultural inheritance - whose letters were not written in our genes.
So although our ancestors left us their DNA, they also left us with language that allowed us to transmit a culture that is independent of our genes. That shared skill of communication - a way of settling differences with words rather than violence - is unique to mankind and as important to us today as it was to our earliest ancestors. Watson and Crick's discovery allows us to unravel a bloody past but it also tells us that we can forge our own future.
· Johnjoe McFadden is professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey and author of Quantum Evolution (HarperCollins)
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