Genetic comparisons of Basques and Jews

This past week I have been really oblivious to anything that was not directly related to the Zionist criminal assault of the Freedom Flotilla. I really did not feel that almost anything else mattered. Sometimes the tragedy of History just takes all the emotional and mental space and there is not really much room for anything else, I guess you can understand that.

However some more or less interesting stuff has been published in the meantime, in particular two papers on West Eurasian autosomal genetics which have been addressed at Dienekes' Anthropology Blog. So it's time to make a brief mention of them:


Basque genetics and other Europeans

Naiara Rodríguez Ezpeleta et al. High-density SNP genotyping detects homogeneity of Spanish and French Basques, and confirms their genomic distinctiveness from other European populations. Human Genetics. Pay per view.

See: Dienekes' relevant post for abstract, some details and his very questionable opinions, as well as for some discussion among readers.




Particularly questionable is his opinion that Basques should still be genetically identical to all other Iberians, based on one paper's Fst data but ignoring a whole array of other papers. These are (at least) Bauchet 2007 (discussed here), Achili 2007 (discussed here), Tian 2009 and Athaniasiadis 2010 (discussed here).

While Iberians are not sampled and plotted, based on the data of Tian 2009, they should show up very close to French and Italians (except the unique Sardinians), slightly above the (0,0) coordinates, in the graph above. Of course, it dependends on which Iberians but I'm talking about the main cluster, not Cantabrians nor Catalans.


Jewish genetics: yet another instance of truth avoidance

G. Atzmon et al. Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. American Journal of Human Genetics, 2010. Pay per view (but should be freely accessible in six months).

See also Dienekes' relevant post.

Note: capitalized labels refer to Jewish subgroups. I strongly suspect, based on Fst distances (see second update below), that Palestinian and Bedouin labels are mistaken and should be the other way around.

It really frustrated me once again that Turks (nor Greeks nor Syrians) had been compared with. [note: see update below, this is not true after all and is quite revealing] The most logical hypothesis, based both on historical and the available genetic data, suggests that modern Jews (or most of them) are not so much descendants of historical Jews from Palestine as from a hybrid population that coalesced mainly in Asia Minor in Hellenistic and Roman times.

The above graph does not contradict this hypothesis at all, at least for the main Jewish population of Europe, Turkey and Syria. Irano-Iraqi Jews instead probably had different origins, the same that Yemeni, North African and Ethiopian Jews do as well (not studied here).

The affinity to Adigey (a NW Caucasian people) strongly suggests this, as well as the fact that they seem less Levantine than such an outsider population as are the Druzes (with Anatolian and Egyptian origins, not Levantine). Anyone familiar with European genetics would expect Greeks and Turks to pop up almost exactly where most Jews do.


Comparing with Bauchet-2007

But if you doubt my words, I suggest that you look at Bauchet 2007, which is the only paper so fare that has compared Jews (Ashkenazi) with Greeks and Armenians, resulting in almost total identity in all comparisons (k-means, PC analysis), as well as with South Italians. None of these groups are present in this analysis but they should show up pretty much where the main Jewish cluster is.


PC analysis of West Eurasians (fig. 4-A)

K-means clustering (fig. 4-B)

This paper remains to date one of the main and more clear references to understand European genetics at autosomal level and in particular to understand Basque and Jewish affinities or lack of them.

Together with other materials, some of them listed above, the case is clear:

• Basques are a distinct subgroup of Europeans, though probably akin to some North/NE Iberians and some South/SW French
• Iberians are also a distinct subgroup to the exclusion of Basques, even if they overlap at times (but not more than they overlap with Eastern Mediterraneans)
• Jews seem impossible to take apart from other Eastern Mediterraneans (Greeks, Armenians, South Italians, Adigey) but they seem somewhat distinct from Palestinians, meaning they probably coalesced in Anatolia. The fact that Zionist researchers systematically avoid comparing with Turks, Greeks, etc. probably means that they know this is true but want to hide it.

If you still doubt of the distinctiveness of Basques in relation to Iberians, I would recommend to look at this other PC graph from Achilli 2007, even if it is about mtDNA, where the case is very clear even with a very small Basque sample in an ocean of other European and many different Iberian samples. Iberians do look quite diverse anyhow but none of them really clusters with Basques:

Update: Jewish genetic affinity with Turks and Cypriots revealed in the supplementary material.

Someone has sent me a copy of Atzmon's paper and I must correct my previous statement that no Turks were sampled. In fact there is a small sample of Turks and Cypriots which cluster very closely with the main Jewish group (Euro-Turco-Syrian Jews):


I can't tell at the moment if the subgroup that clusters most closely are Turks or Cypriots or a bit of each but that is all what is in the ESE control group. There are also a couple of NW Europeans who also cluster very tightly and are most likely descendant of recently assimilated Jews (maybe in the time of the Holocaust, when some families found that such was their only hope of survival).


Update: Fst distances

Table 1 is pretty interesting, even if it lacks the Turkish/Cypriot sample, in particular the Fst distances. In it, it seems quite obvious that Iranian and, to a lesser extent, Iraqi Jews are different populations from the main Jewish cluster of this study, that I will call hereafter Western Jews (incl. Turkish, Greek, Syrian, Italian and Ashkenazi subgroups). The most representative subgroup of this "Western Jewry" of Hellenistic-Roman origins are probably Turkish Jews (labeled TUR in the study), followed closely by Greek Jews (GRK) and then Syrian, Ashkenazi and Italian Jews.

In order to simplify, I averaged Fst distances within this group, resulting in the following pairwise comparisons with other populations (bold type):

North Italian - 0.006 (0.004) [0.010]
Palestinians - 0.008 (0.005)
French - 0.009 (0.007) [0.014]
Druze - 0.009 (0.007) [0.009]
Iraqi Jews (IRQ) - 0.010 (0.009) [0.010]
Adygei - 0.010 (0.008) [0.012]
Sardinian - 0.012 (0.010) [0.017]
Bedouin - 0.013 (0.010) [0.009]
Iranian Jews (IRN) - 0.016 (0.014) [0.017]
Basques - 0.016 (0.014) [0.021]
Russians - 0.016 (0.014) [0.021]

Figures in regular brackets (...) are Fst pairwise distances with Turkish Jews (TUR) only, while figures in square brackets [...] are distances with Palestinians.

For reference, the average Fst distance between Western Jewish populations with each other is 0.005 (0.004 of Turkish Jews with the other Western Jews on average).