Monday, November 30, 2009
Anomalous Native
American Lineages
Now Identified Also
among Micmac Indians
After posting “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the
Cherokee,” and after being interviewed on the subject by an Internet
radio show host, I was contacted by participants in the Amerindian Ancestry out of Acadia Project
who were struck by similarities in results for the two groups.
Established in
2006, the Amerindian Ancestry Out of Acadia DNA Project mission is to research
and publish the mtDNA and Y chromosome genetic test results of site
participants who descend from persons living in Nova Scotia and surrounding environs in the
17th and 18th centuries, focusing specifically upon the early population of
l'Acadie. As part of the mission, the Project develops a database of published
mtDNA and Y Chromosome test results and encourages the sharing of this
information among other similarly focused studies for the purposes of
comparison and the advancement of science and research.
According to Project Administrator Marie A. Rundquist, “We descend from both
Amerindians (mostly Mi’kmaq) and the early French settlers who arrived in Port
Royal in the 1600s, many of them single French men who married Amerindian
wives, whose families would become pioneers of the New World. Our family lines
have extended well-beyond the original boundaries of what was known to the
French as Acadia, but to our AmerIndian ancestors as Mi’kma’ki, as our
ancestors settled the outer-reaches of Nova Scotia, including Cape Breton,
Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Quebec. Our family lines
continue to extend, traversing the entire North American continent and beyond.”
She adds, “Many who
live in the United States trace their genealogies back to the first Acadian
AmerIndian immigrants who arrived in Louisiana after being deported from Nova
Scotia by the British in 1755 (in the "Grand Deportation') -- and belong
to a ‘Cajun’ community known worldwide for its food, flair, fun, and love of
all things French.
Several members belong, as it turns out, to rare haplogroups X, U, and other
"anomalous types" as compiled by me for DNA Consultants customers and
reported in the previous blog post.
Some highlights
from the study of Cherokee descendants are:
- H, the most common
European type today, is virtually absent, demonstrating lack of inflow from
recent Europeans
- J present in lines
explicitly recognized to be Cherokee
- X the signature of
a Canaanite people whose center of diffusion was the Hills of Galilee,
hypothetically correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
- U suggesting Eastern Mediterranean, specifically Greek
- K also suggesting Eastern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, hypothetically
correlating with Jews and Phoenicians
- T reflecting
Egyptian high frequencies found almost nowhere else
According to
Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, the Cumberland Gap mtDNA Project with
overlapping territory with the Cherokee and Melungeon homelands in the Southern
Appalachian Mountains also shows elevated frequencies of T. Project
administrator Roberta Estes recently published the results of a large study of
Native American Eastern Seaboard mixed populations “in relation to Sir Walter
Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke” in the online Journal
of Genetic Genealogy, 5(2):96-130, 2009. Estes is a board member of
the Melungeon Historical Society and has an introduction with links to the
study and its data on the society’s blog, titled “Where Have All the Indians Gone?”
Harvard University
professor Barry Fell in his book Saga America first published in 1980 presented
historical, epigraphic, archeological and linguistic evidence suggesting links
between Greeks and Egyptians and the Algonquian Indians of Nova
Scotia, Acadia and surrounding regions around the mouth of the St.
Lawrence Seaway, particularly the Abnaki ("White") and Micmac Indians. He
noted as early as 1976 in his previous study America B.C. that the second century CE Greek
historian Plutarch recorded “Greeks had settled among the barbarian peoples of
the Western Epeiros (continent).” Fell
inferred from Plutarch’s passage “these Greeks had intermarried
with the barbarians, had adopted thier language, but had blended their own
Greek language with it.” In an appendix, he assembled extensive
word-lists comparing Abenaki and Micmac vocabulary in the areas of navigation,
fishing, astronomy, meteorology, justice and administration, medicine, anatomy,
and economy with virtually identical terms in Ptolemaic Greek. One example is Greek ap’aktes Abenaki/Micmac ab’akt English “a distant
shore.”
Fell’s work was
continued by John H. Cooper, “Ancient Greek Cultural and Linguistic Influences
in Atlantic North America,” NEARA JOURNAL 35/2.
Acadia project’s website is: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/AcadianAmerIndian/default.aspx.
More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match
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Comments
Anonymous commented on 18-Jun-2011 02:08 PM
My mother's family has roots from one of the very early Grandmother's of Acadia (Nova Scotia) and my father's parents were born in Sweden. I had my DNA done and my autosomal DNA gives me a 98.6 % with 1.86 error ratio of being from the Orkney Islands..
I am blown away by this finding as I never heard of Orkney Islands until this week and my mother's family is theoretically French.. I can see my father's family originating from the islands as he is a Swede.. I am very interested in any discussion on this
finding.. Thank you
Frazer Campbell commented on 09-Aug-2011 08:05 AM
Hi re the entry above about Nova Scotia and Orkney. It might be that your Orcadian roots are a result of contact with the Hudson Bay Company. Around 75% of Hudson Bay employees were from Orkney, quite a few married Cree women . I am busy with a project
until October 2011 but if you want help to explore this further let me know and I'll try my best. Kind regards Frazer Campbell
Keith Gilbert commented on 24-Mar-2012 04:55 PM
I am 72 years old, my mother was a Mouton. At age 8 my maternal grandmother told me we were Jews...ours was the most un religious family you can imatine.
Keith Gilbert commented on 28-Apr-2012 06:44 PM
I am a descendant of the Mouton line...am very interested in how the Jewish migration to Nova Scotia (Acadia) happened.