Yes it's an accident. But the odds of it happening were a lot less than you might have t Clark Whelton [mailto:cwhelton@verizon.net]

Sent: April-16-16 2:32 AM
To: Gunnar Heinsohn; Milton Zysman
Subject: Ashkenazi originsf

from articles found by Frank Wallace

“All of the Ashkenazi Jews alive today can trace their roots to a group of about 330 people who lived 600 to 800 years ago. So says a new study in the journal Nature Communications. An international team of scientists sequenced the complete genomes of 128 healthy Ashkenazi Jews and compared each of those sequences with the others, as well as with with the DNA of 26 Flemish people from Belgium. Their analysis allowed them to trace the genetic roots of this population to a founding group in the Middle Ages.”

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ashkenazi-jews-dna-diseases-20140909-story.h

BBC News on line  Friday January 13, 2006

Almost half of Europe's Jews are descended from just four women who lived 1,000 years ago, a study says.

Scientists studied the mitochondrial DNA - passed from mother to daughter - of 11,000 women of Ashkenazi Jewish origin living in 67 countries.

The Ashkenazis moved from the Mid-East to Italy and then to Eastern Europe, where their population exploded in the 13th Century, the scientists say.

One of the authors said the study shows the importance of Jewish mothers.

"This I could tell you even without the paper," Dr. Doron Behar of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology told Reuters news agency.

Genetic signature

The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago but they may not have lived anywhere near each other, according to the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

However, they bequeathed genetic signatures to their descendents, which do not appear in non-Jews and are rare in Jews not of Ashkenazi origin.

The Ashkenazis are thought to have travelled from the Middle East to Italy in the first or second Centuries.

In Central and Eastern Europe, many spoke Yiddish - a form of German, mixed with Hebrew.

Ashkenazi comes from an old Hebrew word for Germany.

 Millions of Jews traced to four women - Technology ...

www.nbcnews.com/id/10827385/.../millions-jews-traced-four-women/

Millions of Jews traced to four women

Study identifies genetic signatures for 3.5 million Ashkenazi Jews

Updated: 8:10 p.m. ET Jan. 12, 2006

NEW YORK - About 3.5 million of today’s Ashkenazi Jews — 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population — are descended from just four women, a genetic study indicates.

Those women apparently lived somewhere in Europe within the last 2,000 years, but not necessarily in the same place or even the same century, said lead author Dr. Doron Behar of the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.

He did the work with Karl Skorecki of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and others.

Each woman left a genetic signature that shows up in their descendants today, he and colleagues say in a report published online by the American Journal of Human Genetics. Together, their four signatures appear in about 40 percent of Ashkenazi Jews, while being virtually absent in non-Jews and found only rarely in Jews of non-Ashkenazi origin, the researchers said.

They said the total Ashkenazi population is estimated at around 8 million people. The estimated world Jewish population is about 13 million.

Ashkenazi Jews are a group with mainly central and eastern European ancestry. Ultimately, though, they can be traced back to Jews who migrated from Israel to Italy in the first and second centuries, Behar said. Eventually this group moved to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries and expanded greatly, reaching about 10 million just before World War II, he said.

Maternal lineages traced
The study involved mitochondrial DNA, called mtDNA, which is passed only through the mother. A woman can pass her mtDNA to grandchildren only by having daughters. So mtDNA is “the perfect tool to trace maternal lineages,” Behar said Thursday in a telephone interview.

His study involved analyzing mtDNA from more than 11,000 samples representing 67 populations.

Mike Hammer, who does similar research at the University of Arizona, said he found the work tracing back to just four ancestors “quite plausible ... I think they’ve done a really good job of tackling this question.”

But he said it’s not clear the women lived in Europe.

“They may have existed in the Near East,” Hammer said. “We don’t know exactly where the four women were, but their descendants left a legacy in the population today, whereas ... other women’s descendants did not.”

Behar said the four women he referred to did inherit their genetic signatures from female ancestors who lived in the Near East. But he said he preferred to focus on these later European descendants because they were at the root of the Ashkenazi population explosion.

By the outbreak of World War II, there were some nine million, some two-thirds of whom were killed by the Nazis.

There are now some eight million people of Ashkenazi origin living around the world, the researchers say.

Some 3.5m, or 40%, of them are descended from the four women, they say.