Ashkenazi Jews
razib | December 9, 2009According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically…
razib | September 4, 2009Dienekes posted some abstracts of the ASHG 2009 meeting. This one is in the category of facts we assumed but weren't totally sure of:
Abraham's children in the genome era: Major Jewish Diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry
Here, we present population structure results from compiled datasets after merging with the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Population Reference Sample studies, which consisted of 146 non-Jewish Middle Easterners (Druze, Bedouin and Palestinian), 30 northern Africans (Mozabite from Algeria), 1547 Europeans, and…